The next stage of prog left insanity is to gut yet another institution and wear its skin while demanding respect, and that institution would be the suburbs. The Democrats cunning plan is to take away the ability of communities to vote on zoning laws at the local level. The Other McCain believes that this is revenge for the refusal of the suburbs to get with the program.
This is not “reform,” it’s revenge: Democrats hate suburbia because most suburbanites vote Republican. Anyone can look at a map of the 2016 election results and figure this out. For example, Hillary Clinton got 85 percent of the vote in Baltimore, Maryland, whereas in nearby Carroll County, Trump won by 17 points. In Missouri, Hillary got 80 percent of the vote in St. Louis, but in suburban Jefferson County, Trump won by more than a 2-to-1 margin. Similar patterns could be pointed out all across the country, and Democrats have therefore embraced a policy agenda intended to punish people who live in Trump territory.
It doesn’t look like revenge to me. Rather, it appears to be a strategic move to make sure that they always win these election parades. If the cities vote Democrat, but the suburbs don’t vote Democrat, then simply get rid of the suburbs by turning them into mini versions of the ghettoized messes that cluster around the east and west coasts of America like pimples on the edge of a teenager’s scruffy attempt at a beard.
In the process you can finish up the business of destroying the once native Anglo communities. Will it work?
To find out we can look at a country where this has already been implemented. It wasn’t done so at a federal level; more at a state and local level, so the effects are not uniform but they are illustrative. The country is Australia and the state involved is Western Australia’s capital city of Perth. The city where I was born and grew up.
Perth has a population of just over 2 million. In 1971 when I was a wee lad, the population was less than 800,000. That’s quite a lot of growth in 50 odd years, and most of it has been via invasion. The metro area of Perth is 6,500 km2. The total metro area of Los Angeles is double that at 12,562 km2 but its population is 18.7 million people.
So LA has 9 times the population of Perth but only double the land area. Perth has an extraordinary number of suburbs with 250 at last count. You would think with all of that room that everyone is living in a nice large house with a big suburban back yard, but the opposite is true. About 20 years ago the planning laws began to be relaxed. Coupled with that was a drive led by bureaucrats to increase the population density in the older, traditional suburbs. This is sneaky public service speak for, lower the general standard of living for the middle class Anglos.
When I grew up, every suburban house sat on a quarter acre block of land. Critically, the main roads and public transport system was designed around this level of population density. When the breaks were taken off and people could subdivide their large blocks, up to three times in some cases, the population density increased three-fold. Unfortunately the main arterial roads were not upgraded. How could they be when there was no room. It’s somewhat of a conundrum; no room in a city of that size.
New builds in the outer suburbs, over a hundred kilometers from the city center, have no yard at all. You walk out your rear door and say hi to your back fence with the neighbor’s house there to greet you. And you’ll need to fork out a few hundred thousand for this miserable existence. But hey, you’ve got the slowest internet in the world, right?
It’s the not the suburbs that I grew up in. How do they vote? Who knows, they’re constantly changing the voting lines. At this rate, in 50 years Perth will be the longest city in the world, stretching north to south the length of the Netherlands. Amsterdam is one of the world’s busiest cities, and yet its population of 800,000 fits into an area of 219.32 km2. Yes, it’s crowded, but once you’re out you’re in farm land. Birds chirping and all that. Pretty windmills and canals. In Perth, the boxed up nightmare of the suburban dream stretches on and on in a shimmering heat haze, the streets barely protected by the scrawny gum trees that poke uselessly into the sky.
Now the authorities are trying to convince people to move to regional areas instead. Their slogan should be, ‘we’ve ruined the cities, lets go and screw up all the other places for good measure’.
So, American cousins of mine, if you want to see what hell awaits you when the Democrats get finished with your quaint little suburbs, just hop on a plane to Perth. Or not; there is a cold going around, you know. I hear that Western Australia is closed in both directions. Nobody here gets out alive.
Originally published at Pushing Rubber Downhill. You can purchase Adam’s books here.
