Don's Tuesday Column

      THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News   1/28/2014

What’s so bad about rezoning a few acres?

Tehama County Supervisor for District 3, Dennis Garton, will appear before the Tehama County Tea Party Patriots tonight, at the Westside Grange, 6 PM. Given the controversial agenda item involving rezoning a 40-acre parcel at Baker and Plymire, attendees will have an opportunity to get a more detailed explanation for whatever decision the Board makes on the issue.

One never knows how exercised to get over such issues as land use, rezoning and changes in population density. As the news article by Rich Greene in Saturday’s Daily News explained, 36.85 acres of currently rural land is and has been “listed as residential in the county’s General Plan since the 1980s and stayed that way in the 2009 update. Right now it’s just a theoretical rezone, (Planning Director Sean) Moore said.” Moreover, “the rezone was simply being proposed so the county’s General Plan Housing Element could comply with state regulations and that there were no plans in the work to build anything at the location.”

That certainly sounds reasonable enough, as far as it goes. I suspect that given interconnected levels of local, state and federal government, together with the tendency in recent decades for mandates to flow from higher to lower levels, such mild subterfuges (going through the motions to appear to comply with housing regulations with no intention of ever actually building said units) are par for the course.

However, were such a potential project—36.85 acres “at a minimum density of 16 units per acre” that could house nearly 1,200 or more people—“in the work” for what was pasture across from my home on Saint Mary’s Avenue decades ago, I would not have been complacent; I’d have been darn mad. Then there is the predictable influx of low income or subsidized tenants and ancillary problems that rarely confine themselves to the property boundaries. One of my earliest experiences as a crime victim involved being robbed at knifepoint in a Chicago low income, high-rise project, so I’m not unfamiliar with the problems.

Some folks mention Agenda 21 and its intention to encourage, even force, people into ever-denser housing concentrations, primarily of urban-centered nature, for the questionable goal of minimizing the use of supposedly limited resources for housing and transportation. It’s a real, although greatly misguided, agenda antithetical to core American values of private property and freedom to self-direct our lives. One could easily ascribe such ulterior motives to the potential development, at least on paper, for the Baker Road rezoning. Similarly, impact fees, such as have been proposed by air quality officials for residential, commercial and warehouse/factory developments, have the inherent purpose of discouraging new construction, theoretically conserving resources and, critical to the agenda, limiting supposed climate-warming gases. All wrong-headed.

Our local supervisors and planning officials may have no such motives in their decisions and votes but someone up the regulatory food chain, even including the Obama administration, does. Even now, in places as far apart as Westchester County, New York, and our own Bay Area, Obama’s Housing and Urban Development Department is slowly but inexorably moving to impose (liberals always gravitate there, don’t they) “regionalism.”

The short version goes like this: Free people with the means to do so have migrated out of the urban unpleasantness of cities to surrounding areas with more space and less crime. People making such decisions, in their own self-interest, have created relatively more affluent, certainly safer and more civil, suburbs and “ex-urbs” (larger population centers independent of major cities) that, coincidentally, have far fewer low-income and minority residents.

You see, free people naturally gravitate to, and surround themselves with, those who share their social, moral, economic and civic values. President Obama and his supposedly enlightened, but certainly ideologically fanatical, housing overlords see all of that as “disparate impact” racism and income discrimination. Their delivered wisdom and mandated solution to such fabricated problems is to condition receipt of those indispensable federal housing dollars, and development and road approval, on the creation of high-density, mixed-income “infill” projects among the more affluent areas outside of cities.

The result is poor and minority relocation, together with inherent crime, drugs, gangs, broken families and property deterioration, right next to you, your family and neighbors. It is not, however, a case of racial discrimination. There are suburbs in the south, around Atlanta, for instance, where well-to-do African-American populations have fled poverty-, crime- and drug-infested cities to create black middle-class islands of civility. White, rural counties all across America have plenty of drugs and a violence-ridden underclass without minorities because the problems stemming from welfare, illegitimacy and social deterioration are no respecter of color.

So, I don’t like it one bit when populations are artificially made more dense for ideologically suspect reasons; I like it even less that such a potentially lifestyle-changing decision is forced on local governments by far away bureaucracies unaccountable to the people having to live under said rules and dictates.

Note: When the High School Board was elected, with at least 3 candidates, including Barbara McGiver, owing their seats at least in part to support and campaign material bought and paid for by teachers unions—I suggested there might be a pay back opportunity. Doing the union’s bidding and firing Ms. Escobar proved my suspicions were on the money—corrupt money.