In part one of a three-part series, Rick Perlstein exposes how the federal government's ideologically-motivated project to promote homeownership in America has become badly derailed.
"Most years, President Bush has celebrated June - National Homeownership Month - with a splashy speech. Not this year. This year, he stayed as far from the topic as he could get... What went wrong?
First, a demonstration of the sheer size of the political bet the Republicans placed on exhorting as many Americans as possible to own their own homes. Exhibit A: the March, 2005 special issue on the 'Ownership Society' of the magazine of the American Enterprise Institute, of the conservative movement's flagship think tanks. There are, lead author James Glassman wrote, three aims of Bush's dreamed-of Owernship Society: to 'reform' Social Security, to 'boost the economy by cutting taxes on dividends,' and 'to make home buying easier.'
The only author to raise any sort of caveat - that home prices are skyrocketing out of control - is the neoconservative geographer Joel Kotkin. He blamed, you guessed it, liberals: 'Environmental regulations and other growth-constraining factors have inflated housing prices.'
As we'll see in the next post, that's absurd."
FULL STORY: The Foreclosing of America (Part 1 Of 3)
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Cincinnati Seeks to Repurpose Its Unused Subway Tunnel
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New Jersey Agrivoltaic Project Combines Solar Energy With Farming
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Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
Planning for Universal Design
Learn the tools for implementing Universal Design in planning regulations.
Placer County
Mayors' Institute on City Design
City of Sunnyvale
HUDs Office of Policy Development and Research
Mpact (formerly Rail~Volution)
Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP), the Department of City and Regional Planning (CRP)
Lehigh Valley Planning Commission
City of Portland, ME
Baton Rouge Area Foundation