Suppose that 30 years ago, your government adopted a plan that, unbeknownst to everyone, works in theory but not in practice.
Thirty years pass, and today we have practical evidence that it doesn’t work. But the planning theorists, who still hold sway, claim the plan doesn’t work because it was never implemented properly.
Such a plan is embedded in the political theory of Neoliberalism, which promotes the glories of small government in countries, states, and communities.
A neoliberal future assures us that heavy social lifting, delivered to the benefit of all, will in future be performed not by government but by some strangely imagined branch of free enterprise capitalism — one that puts society’s interests ahead of its own.
This neoliberal bright future would seem to be always coming, but never quite arriving. The perpetual explanation? Governments remain stubbornly too big and too interfering.
And so, neoliberalism has become a study in excuse-making. Its true glory may never be revealed until interfering government is reduced to a sewage plant and a post office outlet selling commemorative stamps.
Upon this never-never-land foundation, what can we we expect from essential long range community planning based on stubbornly held neoliberal principles?
In Los Angeles, California? A fiasco.
At least that’s how one opinion, expressed in considerable detail, evaluates a vital attribute of a community’s future health: its approach to housing. The article is worth a read by anyone who lives in countries, states, or communities still snowed under by neoliberal thought.
Read more in CityWatch: A Fiasco Foretold – LA’s 2021-2029 Housing Element
