In many Democrat areas, they are attempting to force multi-family housing in areas that are typically single family in suburban and rural areas, because single family housing is raaaaacist and bad for ‘climate change’. The Nation wants to take it even further
If you need more evidence that climate = communism… https://t.co/MMMnTHHFF4
— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) December 26, 2019
From the screed
This fall, California residents awakened to a new reality of inconvenience and terror. In early October, the utility companies Pacific Gas and Electric, San Diego Gas and Electric, and Southern California Edison all announced precautionary power shutoffs for thousands of customers, prompted by especially hot, dry conditions and forecasts for strong winds.
This is all based on the fires in California, and the author spends a lot of time on them, building up to
But few are discussing one key aspect of California’s crisis: Yes, climate change intensifies the fires—but the ways in which we plan and develop our cities makes them even more destructive. The growth of urban regions in the second half of the 20th century has been dominated by economic development, aspirations of home ownership, and belief in the importance of private property. Cities and towns have expanded in increasingly disperse fashion, fueled by cheap energy. Infrastructure has been built, deregulated, and privatized, extending services in more and more tenuous and fragile ways. Our ideas about what success, comfort, home, and family should look like are so ingrained, it’s hard for us to see how they could be reinforcing the very conditions that put us at such grave risk.
To engage with these challenges, we need to do more than upgrade the powerlines or stage a public takeover of the utility companies. We need to rethink the ideologies that govern how we plan and build our homes.
From the early years of this continent-wide republic, federal policies such as the Homestead Act of 1862 rewarded private home ownership and pioneering activities such as making individual claims on land. Programs such as the “Better Homes in America†campaign in the 1920s attempted to make private property ownership a moral issue in addition to a financial one, linking home ownership with upstanding citizenship and family values, as a presumed bulwark against communist class collectivity.
And to prove that it’s not a bulwark they want to take away private home ownership. OK. Of course, the author has to include private home ownership as raaaaacist, hatred of the poor and people of color, single family homes being Bad, inequity, etc
The valorizing of homeownership and property rights results not only in increased exposure to climate-change-fueled fires, but also in our inadequate responses to them.
Good grief. Anyhow, this keeps going and going and going
In California, that would mean more than moving away from fire-prone areas. It would require planners, designers, and community members to consider planning for fire alongside issues of health and accessibility, social services, physical beauty, and other aspects of environmental sustainability and climate protection. “Defensible space†could mean protecting more than an individual structure; it could scale up to protect a neighborhood, or better yet, an entire district. At the same time, such zones of defense could be designed to address other aspects of climate change mitigation and adaptation: They could include green infrastructure for water infiltration and “soft†flood protection, as well as ecological linkages, such as drought-resistant, non-fire-fueling vegetation to protect biodiversity and lessen urban heat islands. These “green†zones could be planned around community centers and libraries, public institutions that have already become important places of refuge and mobilization in times of disaster.
Oh, your Betters will plan everything for you, and you’ll live in an urban commune.
Even with the threats of climate change and rampant fire looming, the ideals of the American dream that have been instilled for more than 150 years will be difficult to dispel. Those ideals have blinded us to other possibilities. Given the scope and scale of the climate crisis, it is shocking that we are being presented with so few serious, comprehensive alternatives for how to live. We need another kind of escape route—away from our ideologies of ownership and property, and toward more collective, healthy, and just cities.
Nope, nope, don’t say this is communism/Marxism/Socialism/Progressivism/Etc.
