We have written before about “regionalism,” the left’s stealth plan to impose equality through urban and suburban planning. Stanley Kurtz has been, to my knowledge, the leading critic of this effort.
Katherine Kersten is also on the case in a big way. In a column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, she explains how, in the Twin Cities area, the Metropolitan Council is preparing to instruct nearly 200 municipalities on what they must do to disperse poverty.
In essence, the Twin City planners will identify surburban zoning and use prectices that supposedly deny opportunity to, and create barriers for, low-income and minority people. What does this mean? The answer lies in what the Feds have required of other regional planning bodies that, like the Metropolitan Council, receive its planning funds.
It means, among other things, the building of low income housing in the middle of affluent neighborhoods. No proof of discrimination will be required to effectuate this scheme. The government deems all racial and ethnic clustering to be a violation of fair housing — a theory it is desperately trying to keep the Supreme Court from reviewing, but that’s a subject for another day.
Kersten notes that, according to the Metropolitan Council’s own study, residents of “racially concentrated areas of poverty” actually have better access to jobs, services, and amenities than do residents of “opportunity clusters”. But why let the facts stand in the way of the left’s vision of how we should live?
As Kersten concludes, the primary cause of entrenched poverty is not where people live, but how they behave. For example, in Hennepin County, the out-of-wedlock birth rate for U.S. born blacks is 84 percent. The white rate is 18 percent.
Self-destructive behavior dispersed is still self-destructive. Thus, left-wing regionalism offers no answer to poverty.
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