Tomorrow is Town Meeting Day in Peterborough and one of the hot items is Article 15. That is part and parcel of the kerfuffle that’s going on in town as the movement known as New Urbanism is taking hold – a function of the Progressive movement that, simply put, is to “rack’em and stack’em” in a central locations so as to limit “urban sprawl” and save “open green spaces”. Again, I heard then during their Candidates Night and I just shook my head in wonderment. Really, a small village of about 6400 or so people is going to be worried about this? I did get a rather sour look from Kate Coon (the local head honcho of the League of Women Voters Peterborough Plus that put on the Candidate Night) when I mentioned that “sprawl” was a “thing” in their small village that has a “town center” of about 4 blocks..
It has bothered me ever since – no, not the sour look (I get that from my dog all day long when I refuse to give her a dog treat – phases me not a whit) but the idea that Peterborough had a “sprawl” problem. I kept on thinking about that with “I oughta google map it” to make sure that I was right about that 4 block area. Well, guess what?
I was wrong. It looks like about 6 blocks (charitably speaking, see above). Now, compared to most town centers, that’s still not all that expansive and it certainly wouldn’t meet my definition of a place that has a such a problem. So I zoomed upward to get a larger context – and guess what:
First – LOOK AT ALL THAT GREEN SPACE!!!!
So, I’m still puzzled – why do they want such small lots in “town” when there isn’t all that much “in town” in the first place? Peterborough is hardly large at all to be claiming “urban” status in the first place. Heck, it isn’t even large enough to be comparable to any kind of neighborhood in an actual urban area.
<shaking head here> – about the only way that “sprawl” would be the operative word is ONLY that it is part of the Progressive personality type – ALL rural / suburban (even if one has to put on a literal blindfold, spin 260, and then unilaterally declare “I see sprawl all around me!!!”) areas must be killed off because GREEN!
Even if all one sees around this town center IS green.
This is yet another case where Progressives HAVE to mandate a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. All in the value system that:
- They have to conform, at all times, to the Progressive mantra whether it fits or not
- A constant and irritating belief that all they have to say that a problem exists when even a satellite eye says that no problem exists.
It shall be interesting to see how Article 15 turns out. After all, when it comes to “affordable housing” (which is the underlying issue here), I can’t WAIT to see how they ignore the basic Economics Law of Supply and Demand.
Or use the Force of Government and screw things up even more.