Aitken: Agenda 2030 is Now Republican Policy?

Those legislators proposing NH housing bills under the guise of mitigating a ‘housing crisis’ have the same end goal as the United Nations – the elimination of single-family zoning.

The above article expresses a social engineering philosophy that comes straight out of the United Nations Agenda 2030 (formerly known as Agenda 21) made famous by Rosa Koire’s book “Behind the Green Mask”.

True to form, the article starts out by blaming single-family zoning as responsible for "...creating suburban sprawl and excluding Black Americans, immigrants, and low-income people from residential districts..."

This of course is patently untrue, as those of us who live in NH’s single-family neighborhoods know. Our neighborhoods are currently more diverse than some of the places we’ve lived in since 1940s when post-WW2, the US took in numbers of immigrants who regularly shared double- and triple-decker housing with other family members. Does a family suddenly lose its ‘minority’ status just because its members are successful enough to buy a larger home in a single-zoned neighborhood? The idea that zoning is racist is completely without merit.

The article goes on to mention that (leftist) “California Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed legislation that eliminated single-family zones by allowing up to four units on existing single-family residential lots.” And yet, as we’ve mentioned in other pieces we’ve written, this action has contributed to making single family homes more scarce and more expensive. California is currently the state with the highest amount of high density housing, yet this fact has not affected affordability. California is still the state with the second highest housing costs, with a median home value of $784,840. It also has one of the highest numbers of homeless and unemployed.

Repeatedly, throughout the Harvard article, the author decries single-family zoning as the boogeyman, with the clear goal of elimination. He concludes with this gem:

“Merely eliminating single-family zoning, history suggests, is unlikely to increase housing stock significantly. To unleash residential development will require peeling back layers of regulations that have accrued over the decades. That could mean reducing minimum lot sizes, relaxing overly stringent construction and site requirements, easing design reviews, and rolling back some environmental controls, including certain provisions for wetlands and open space. The political efforts necessary to reverse such entrenched practices, however, will be formidable, so the recent laws against single-family zoning are but the first steps in a long march.”

Indeed, we agree that eliminating single-family zoning is unlikely to increase housing stock significantly, at least not in the immediate future. But what the plethora of recently proposed bills will do to NH, incrementally, and eventually, will be to the detriment of the kind of neighborhoods most people aim for. The elimination of single-family zoning will not only remove the choice 70% of all home buyers make, but will only serve to line the pockets of the builders and destroy the ability of towns to control growth and taxes, while denying the vote of the very people who live in those towns.

Sign the petition.

https://www.ipetitions.com/pet...