Otherwise known as “Stack’em and Pack’em” – SCI wants zoning changes such that higher density living will be mandated – high rise living for all with retail on the first couple of floors, sidewalks galore, and if you like public transportation, you will be in love with your only source. The single family homes of suburbia will simply be now over-densified and remade into little urban areas and rural areas may well be eliminated so that “green space” will hem in humans into certain areas and no further. Think of it as TreeHuggers writing housing and living policies for the rest of us – freedom of choice will be regulated away. So if that happens, what happens when this happens (emphasis mine, reformatted):
7.5 quake on California fault could be disastrous — kill thousands, cost billions
The shaking from a 7.5 quake at the Puente Hills thrust fault in the center of urban Los Angeles could be so intense it would lift heavy objects in the air, could kill 3,000 to 18,000 people and cause up to $250 billion in damage. Experts say a bigger earthquake along the lesser-known fault that gave Southern California a moderate shake could do more damage to the region than the long-dreaded “Big One” from the more famous San Andreas Fault. The Puente Hills thrust fault, which brought Friday night’s magnitude-5.1 quake centered in La Habra and well over 100 aftershocks by Sunday, stretches from northern Orange County under downtown Los Angeles into Hollywood — a heavily populated swath of the Los Angeles area.
A magnitude-7.5 earthquake along that fault could prove more catastrophic than one along the San Andreas, which runs along the outskirts of metropolitan Southern California, seismologists said.
As a dyed in the wool New Englander who used to visit California fairly frequently, I was in a couple of smaller quakes – and I was not a happy camper. I intently watched the last big quake that hit the San Fran area a few years ago – an urban environment and took stock of that utter misery of people looking for friends and family – and the reactions when they were found. The devastation was something I would not wish to see again – and the cost of it went far beyond mere cost of buildings and “stuff”. And these “we know better how you should live” folks want to make that population even denser?
I guess they must value life at a much lower mark than I do. The days of centralization should be over – technologies can make us as “close” as we want over longer distances – we don’t have to be packed in to have quick interactions with others. After all, the Internet was born of the idea that centralization PBXs (telephone switches) with point to point comm links was a recipe for disaster if the Cold War ever went really hot and the idea of dispersed nodes for quick re-routing of packetized data that could “re-wire” themselves to get the message through if some nodes were knocked out has transformed our world.
Thus, if the mantra is safety, the response should be lower densification (or at the least, not higher). Fewer people in the “damage zone” means less destruction and less injury. But these Planners are environmentally driven (and I believe, an unbinding yearning for decades past where they see the bucolic scenes in their minds’ eyes not out in the meadows but jam packed sidwalks, street, buses, subways, and high-rises (er, didn’t we used to call these Planner’s first efforts “The Projects” and they turned out to be utter man-made disasters?). More and more, like lemmings in shoeboxes – that is their Dystopia for the rest of us.
These so called “Planners” have already initiated the Stack / Pack in California – so they are willing to demand that even more people live in these dangerous areas? We see the scary stories like the above of the “Danger! Danger” type all the time – and then on this coast, we get the same thing during hurricane season. Each time, the devastation levels, costs, and impacts go up and up and up and SOMETHING has to be done about the weather that causes it.
Yet, it isn’t the weather, it is the ever increasing amount of buildup of populations in those prone errors that keeps the devastation costs going up and up – and not the intensity of the storms that many would have us believe are the root cause.
And Planners would to kickstart the densification with “zoning steroids”. Sheesh…..
