IT’S COMING: A PROGRESSIVE UTOPIAN “MASTER PLAN”:  A Wall Street Journal oped reveals how Minneapolis-St.Paul’s 30-year master plan is a liberal/progressive utopian vision:

Here in the Twin Cities, a handful of unelected bureaucrats are gearing up to impose their vision of the ideal society on the nearly three million residents of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro region. According to the urban planners on the city’s Metropolitan Council, far too many people live in single family homes, have neighbors with similar incomes and skin color, and contribute to climate change by driving to work. They intend to change all that with a 30-year master plan called “Thrive MSP 2040.” . . .

Thrive MSP 2040 is part of a nationwide movement called “regionalism.” Regional planning of infrastructure is important, of course. But regionalism, as an ideology, is about shifting power away from local elected officials and re-engineering society on behalf of “equity” and “sustainability.” According to regionalist guru David Rusk, author of the book “Cities Without Suburbs,” federal programs that promote regionalism should strive to produce “racially and economically integrated and environmentally sustainable regions.” . . .

The council has provided few details, beyond noting that it will emphasize construction of low-income housing in “higher-income areas.” But the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development—the source of the $5 million planning grant used to fund the racial mapping—says that mapping is intended, in part, to identify suburban land-use and zoning practices that allegedly deny opportunity and create “barriers” for low-income and minority people. Under its forthcoming “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” rule, HUD will provide communities with “nationally uniform data” of what it views as an appropriate racial, ethnic and economic mix. Local governments will have to “take meaningful actions” to further the goals identified.

 So basically, the progressive master planners are already planning to change your neighborhood and force it to be just like every other neighborhood.  They want to “spread the wealth around,” not just with taxes, but with housing as well.

 The UC-Berkeley Group for Architecture and Planning has developed it’s own master plan for its utopian “NanoCity,” a new city designed around the concepts of “sustainability” (driven by global warming climate change, of course) “equity” and “inclusion.”  Sounds basically like a commune to me, and so long as I’m not forced to live there, I’m happy to let them live as they wish.  The MSP master plan seems more nefarious to me, as it would use government dollars to  “equalize” existing neighborhoods and force changes based on global warming climate change.  People really should get more involved in these local planning exercises.