Two American think-tankers were recently in Vancouver, telling us how we can do a better job of planning our city.
Among their most precious brain farts:
UCLA's Matthew Kahn suggested that encouraging the resortification of Vancouver should not be seen as a bad thing - we could become more like San Francisco, 'an attractive downtown that is largely a home to the upper middle class'.
More absurdly, the Cato Institute's Randall O'Toole recommended that we ought to try to be more like Houston (one of the worst US cities, by several measures), by imitating its free-market approach to development.
As a means of combating Vancouver's soaring housing prices, he suggests that local government should get out of the way, by opening up the agricultural land reserve to more urban sprawl, or permitting development up the sides of the local mountains, and into our watersheds.
Fortunately for us, it would appear that the market fundamentalists have arrived too late on the scene to undo the damage done by our 'communist' ways - most of our planners (and to their credit, business leaders) seem to be well indoctrinated in the ways of smart growth.
As might be expected, it's difficult to argue with success - in our next post, we'll take a look at how Vancouver is influencing other cities in North America.
These so called "think tanks" are such scary organizations. They try and give the illusion of academic objectivity but they are really driven by ideology and funded by groups looking to promote their political goals.
It would come as no surprise to anyone to know that one of the financial contributors to the Cato Institute over the years is ExxonMobil.
Other Cato Institute "causes" include the privatization of Social Security and, surprise, surprise, arguing that Global Warming is not caused by humans.
Why do we give these people a forum? They are not intellectuals - they are just bought hacks.
Posted by: Junius | Monday, June 25, 2007 at 05:17 PM