Romney a smart growth-er

“Romney’s liberal heresies on health care, gay rights, and abortion are well established. Less well known is that, as governor of Massachusetts, he was a smart-growth acolyte.”

The New Republic reports,

He hinted at this predilection during the campaign in 2002. “Smart growth, or purposeful planning, is a concept that will be in the governor’s office if I’m elected,” he said. After winning, he created a new “Office for Commonwealth Development” to oversee the transportation, environment, and housing departments—and named as its chief Douglas Foy. It was a brash decision for a business-oriented politician: Foy was the head of the state’s Conservation Law Foundation and an ardent environmentalist who often commuted 20 miles by bike. “He was the bane of the business and development community,” Benjamin Fierro, the lobbyist for the state homebuilders’ association, told me. “My clients were very concerned about that.”

Romney and Foy wasted little time in putting smart-growth policies to work. The state, they declared, would take a “fix-it-first” approach to highway spending—repairing existing roads instead of building new ones. They also pledged to cut the number of SUVs in the state fleet. In addition, the state put out a new highway-design manual intended to make towns more pedestrian-friendly, with narrower streets designed for slower driving speeds. “It was all really woolly, totally green, new-urbanist stuff—and it was state policy,” says Anthony Flint, who covered land-use issues for The Boston Globe and went on to join Foy’s office in 2005. The biggest move came in 2004, when Romney signed legislation, dubbed Chapter 40R, providing funds to towns and cities that agreed to allow more high-density, multi-family housing. “It was fundamentally anti-sprawl. It was saying that the days of having a developer buy a Christmas tree farm and throw up a bunch of single-family homes on half-acre lots were over,” Flint recalls. “It was a real awakening.”

As Steve Milloy describes in Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, “smart growth” is the green plan to reduce your standard of living in terms of where you live and work, where and when you can drive and more.

Read TNR’s “Urban Oufitter: Mitt Romney vs. Cars”.

4 thoughts on “Romney a smart growth-er”

  1. “Smart Growth”. “Sustainable Development”. These are code words for U.N. Agenda 21. (Uh, oh, someone let one of the crazies out.)

    At risk from Agenda 21;

    – Private Property ownership
    – Single-Family homes
    – Private car ownership and individual travel choices
    – Privately owned farms

    The Agenda 21 plan openly targets private property. For over thirty-five years the UN has made their stance very clear on the issue of individuals owning land;

    “Land… cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes. The provision of decent dwellings and healthy conditions for the people can only be achieved if land is used in the interest of society as a whole.”

    Source: United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat I),Vancouver, BC, May 31 – June 11, 1976. Preamble to Agenda Item 10 of the Conference Report.

    As early as 1976, the UN adopted a policy relating to land use and population distribution:

    “All countries should establish as a matter of urgency a national policy on human settlements, embodying the distribution of population…over national territory. Such a policy should be devised to facilitate population redistribution to accord with the availability of resources.” (Recommendation A.1, HABITAT I, Vancouver).

    G.H.W. Bush, Clinton and Bush, Jr. were for this. Obama? Why do you think he is doing what he is doing? It has been implemented by fiat for many years now.

    A Romney presidency means nothing. So long as you do not mind living in federal human settlements.

  2. It’s sustainable communities! It’s the EPA, Agenda 21, George Soros, Van Jones …

    God, PLEASE save us from Mitt!!!

  3. Look, any of these people are better than Mr. Obama. Romney is a large government solutions politician, he just is better than Mr. Obama and the $4,000,000,000,000 deficit in the 1st 2 1/2 years of the Obama administration. ABBO. The good, the bad and the ugly. Pick your person, but let Mr. Obama go into retirement. Thank you.

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