Article Review: The Ideal Communist City

A review of the article "The Ideal Communist City" - Free marketers need to stop defending oppressive monopoly power.

Published on Spiked Online
by Joel Kotkin, March 4, 2022

Never have we read a more definitive article on the overreaches of the “new urbanism” anti-suburbia movement. The “new urbanism” of 2022 is simply the revival of an old scheme. Some may have thought we were exaggerating when we compared the extreme form of the movement to the housing policies of the Bolshevik era. The Ideal Communist City does just that and with justification.

"Victoria Fierce of the YIMBY pro-density lobby in California, for example, favours increasing urban density in part because it ‘promotes collectivism’. In some senses, the approach of some YIMBYs reflects the planning orthodoxy seen in the late Soviet Union. In the 1950s, Alexei Gutnov published The Ideal Communist City, which, while acknowledging the appeal of suburbia, rejected it as unsuitable for a society that prioritises equality and social control”, the article states.

This aligns with our assessment that libertarians who support centralized zoning policies have now actually joined with a movement whose original intent was to promote collectivism.

It states that libertarians have aligned themselves with “...monopoly capital, anti-suburban zealots and the tech oligarchy – which are systematically undermining the popular rationale for market capitalism.”

Governor Sununu and every New Hampshire legislator, including the senators who secreted the three-time failed Housing Appeals Board bill (SB 306) into the budget should educate themselves on how they have promulgated an attack on the middle class by stifling home ownership.

Bills that have been filed to support the governor’s plan to force towns to build more high density are part of this collectivist idea and should be defeated. The Housing appeals Board should be repealed by passing HB 1216 because it doesn’t help the poor, it doesn’t necessarily lower housing prices, and it discourages individual homeownership. It promotes the worst kind of crony capitalism and has already done untold damage to the state of New Hampshire.

“Indeed, studies in Vancouver, Canada and several other locations have linked densification with higher land prices and diminished housing affordability. California already has the highest urban density of any US state and suffers from some of the highest rental and housing costs in the country. The densification agenda is already being implemented in places like California, with policies aimed at destroying single-family home ownership at a time when the market has shifted even more towards suburbia.”

The HAB is a perfect example of regionialism which is a mainstay of communism. (Regionalism = fewer people in control of more people thus less representation)

“Nowhere is the disconnect between libertarianism and its traditional base of small-property owners more obvious than in housing. In their zeal, sometimes justified, to end the worst zoning abuses, the libertarians have allied themselves with two forces, monopoly capital and social engineers (also known as city planners), whose goal is not to expand the blessings of ownership, but to squelch it for all but a few. Their end game is to leave most people stuck in small apartments.”

“Libertarians have served as fellow travellers and allies to the hyperactive, oligarch-funded YIMBY (‘Yes in My Backyard’) movement.”

Cato fellow Randal O’Toole notes that libertarians are now “...working hand-in-hand with left-wing groups seeking ‘to force Californians to live in ways in which they didn’t want to live'".

If towns want urbanism and the aspects of walkable communities the author of the article concludes that these communities should be privately developed and towns should be left to choose for themselves. We could not agree more.

Referenced articles and books:

Looking Back at the Ideal Communist City

"The Ideal Communist City” - Free PDF Document 176 Pages

How CATO Sold Out California Property Owners

The Dystopian Future of Housing
Affluent progressives want us all to live in tiny, cramped apartments. And if you object, they’ll call you racist.

Thus, what is billed as a saintly progressive effort to ‘provide affordable housing’ is also a giveaway to developers rushing to build ’em cheap and stack ’em high on land that was, until recently, off-limits to them, because it was zoned for low-density residential living.

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With grateful thanks to author Joel Kotkin who is a spiked columnist, the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His latest book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, is out now. For Audible account owners it is included free.