New York City has examples of both how to do planning, AND how not to do planning.

Good planning included planning the street layout of Manhattan, which included leaving room for Central Park as you say. North of Lower Manhattan, the rest of Manhattan Island was laid out in an easy-to-navigate rectangular grid, with Central Park as its center. That’s why it’s easier to find your way around NYC than around Boston, whose twisted streets with illogical names are a legendary nightmare to navigate around. I agree with you that private transactions could not have produced this. Zoning laws are another example of how we interfere with the free market to prevent social chaos.

Bad planning involved deliberate attempts by NYC to drive already successful private infrastructure operators out of business. Case in point: The subway system.

For 30 years, NYC had successful privately owned and operated rapid transit: The Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) which built the first subway line in New York; and the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit Company (BMT) which ran subway lines in Brooklyn, with connections to Manhattan.

The City of New York embarked on a deliberate attempt to destroy private transit, so that the City could get the revenues from subway riders instead. They did it EXACTLY the same way you liberals now plan to destroy private health insurance–by creating a “public option”. In this case, the “public option” was the Independent Subway System (the IND). The City deliberately built many IND lines within a couple of blocks of the IRT and BMT, to draw riders away from those lines. (Take a look at a subway map of NY sometime.) The City then passed ordinances forbidding the IRT and BMT to build any more lines elsewhere, or to raise fares to compensate for the loss of ridership to the IND. This made it impossible for the IRT and BMT to compete with the IND. Eventually, the IRT and BMT went out of business, and the City took over those lines. Now New York has only a public (“single-payer”) transit system, with IND lines only a couple of blocks away from IRT and BMT lines, which is wasteful. Did this improve service? No. If anything, subway service got worse, as it was now a legal monopoly and there was no other competitive alternative.

They did the same thing with the private bus lines–drove them out of business and then took them over. Remember “The Honeymooners”? In the 1950s, Ralph Kramden was a bus driver for a private bus company. Now there are no more private bus lines.

City planning ahead of time to provide for future growth, as the street layout was, is a good thing. Zoning laws are also a good thing for that reason.

City planning driven by greed or ideology, as in the case of the subway system where liberals like you insisted that private subway lines were “wasteful,” is not.

Exactly.

Consider Central Park in New York. The free market would not have produced Central Park. Yet thanks to Central Park, life in New York is very different for millions of people who rely on that huge urban oasis on a regular basis for their refuge and sanity. It probably contributes to the vibrancy and livability of New York in a thousand different unquantifiable ways.

Left to the free market, during the next real estate boom in the city the call would go out for the city to cut taxes and make up the revenue loss by selling off portions of the park … over time it would shrink to a series of postage stamps surrounded by massive buildings, like the parks you find in lower and upper Manhattan.

There are those of us who see a long-term strategy to the whole privatization movement – to defund government enough so that it cannot perform the essential services we build governments to provide, and then force tax-strapped governments to sell off public assets to large corporations – a decade or so ago it was power plants, these days it’s our highway system, next will be water supply systems.

A critical part of that strategy is “tort reform”. As you note, as government is stripped of authority to regulate (something which has happened on a de-facto basis over the last 30 years as regulatory enforcement has been gutted both through budget cuts and through administrations uninterested in enforcement actions) the fall-back is the legal system. Tort reform is the essential tool for the corporatist, as politicians can often be bought off, but the legal system often cannot.

But the housing issue does remain. The best way we conservatives could reduce the influence of ACORN and left-wing influence generally, would be to propose real solutions to the social problems we face in this country. Not to just wave our hands about a magical “free market” that is a gross oversimplification in an organized city. A city has a location, infrastructure, zoning laws, and a culture that determines what types of people are going to live there. Is the city a playground for the rich? Does it offer blue-collar jobs to the poor? Is it relatively isolated? Is it a cosmopolitian mecca for tourists? What types of industry does it have? Smokestack? High-tech? Tourism? Finance?

A city just doesn’t spring up out of zillions of free market transactions. Every city was built for a reason, and had a mission in life, if you look at its history closely enough. City planning was a vital function in every city.

When I lived in Portsmouth Rhode Island, I saw some of that. At the time, Portsmouth had no city sewer system. (I don’t know if it does now.) All the shopping malls, big corporations, and housing developments had their own private sewage–giant septic tanks for each. I guess we can imagine that access roads from such developments to the main arteries could be privately owned too.

But more importantly, there would be no zoning laws either. In a totally free market, a company could site a polluting factory or a toxic waste dump right next to a housing development. True, those homeowners could go to court to block the company from such projects near their homes. But that would cause far more litigation. It might get to the point that just about everybody would be suing all their neighbors.

Banks that refused to lend to the riskier borrowers could be sure to count on ACORN “volunteers”, though these were more intelligent than the ones registering voters, showing up at hearings involving said banks merger or expansion. Once there ACORN could provide documentation showing the banks lack of financial understanding in lending $400,000 dollars to someone whose only means of support was child support and unemployment. All of which were now considered valid forms of income thanks to, wait for it, the Dems rewrite of CRA in the 90s.
OH, no did I just tie the Dems to ACORN.

This is really a fine attempt at trying to redefine the arguement.
First the Dems are tied to ACRON. Obama is ACORN. At every turn, as you point out, the Dems take every opportunity to support ACORN. So YES the Dems are tied to ACORN without any effort at all from Republican.
Ask for a rebate on that political science degree.
And Bachmann’s amendment would have barred organizations that are under investigation from serving. OHHHH, that is sooooo bad. ACORN is not mentioned by name nor should be for there are many public or private organization which should be monitored.

But then, according to BlankHead and ottoBS, ACORN has never been convicted of vote fraud… they never do anything wrong.

Surely you can provide a link to ACORN staff being convicted of vote fraud? I’ve been Googling in search of this, but I cannot find what you’re referring to.

Funny enough, I have spoken of ACORN doing something wrong. Not criminal, but wrong. Clearly they were sloppy in their training and instructions to the contractors they used to collect voter registrations, and they should have had penalties in place for registrations rejected by the state to disincentivize contractors adding fake names to the rolls.

“Let the market take care of it” … this is a platitude, but no one really wants to make it happen. Meaning, the government is already deeply embedded in the housing market.

Examples of direct government intervention are the housing tax credit and mortgage interest deduction.

But there are other, more indirect government interventions; most local jurisdictions craft zoning laws (which explicitly intervene in the marketplace) to encourage higher housing density in certain areas, and low density in others.

Developers in particular, often ask for higher densities; the cities aren’t required to give it to them, but often do in exchange for low income units, or “in lieu” fees towards public housing. Developers also are fond of asking for government infrastructure- roads, freeways, sewer and water projects- that provide service to their housing projects that otherwise would not be feasible. When a new road is built out to an outlying suburb, it is an example of an indirect government subsidy for the housing there.

In other words, no one – not private developers, not homeowners, not banks, not construction companies…no one wants to get the government out of the housing market, and “let the marketplace take care of it”.

So I guess my question is, why the hostility to this? If private developers (not exactly known as pinko libtards) see the benfit to government interventions in the marketplace, what are your objections?

Don’t get me wrong- the marriage of government and private industry often creates horrible results- and there have been some awful train wrecks in housing policy- but overall, how would a pure, pristine “free market” in housing even work?