The closest thing America has to a Soviet planning bureaucracy is the California Coastal Commission. Late Sept. 7 it denied a proposal to develop 895 homes at Banning Ranch in Newport Beach.
The CCC’s acronym even resembles CCCP, the Cyrillic acronym of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
According to CCCP — er, CCC — Commissioner Mary Shallenberger, “It is clear to me from today’s testimony from the staff report, the developer and the public that we are still very far apart. The developer has made it clear they do not accept staff’s recommendation. This is a project we have to get right. We can’t get just good enough on this one.”
“Get right” means a fraction of the housing proposed, itself already a fraction of original proposals.
The developers even promised vast open spaces and cleaning up pollution.
What about property rights? Doesn’t the 14th Amendment guarantee the right to “life, liberty, and property”? And how about that 4th Amendment right, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”? Is the CCC going to pay Newport Banning Ranch hundreds of millions of dollars for denying it the use of its property?
According to the Times account, “Preservationists — mostly Newport Beach and Costa Mesa residents — held up posters depicting various wildlife and green signs with ‘Save Banning Ranch’ printed in large white letters. They cheered as they exited the Newport Beach City Council chamber.” It reminds me of the 17th Party Congress.
And what about OC’s burgeoning homeless problem? The 895 homes would have been for rich people. But they in turn would vacate smaller houses, and so on down the line, reducing the cost of all houses, making them more affordable to everybody, especially the poor. Instead, a really bad housing shortage will be made even worse.
This is what happens when property rights are violated — as they increasingly have been since fool voters, almost all of them now dead, imposed it on us with Proposition 20 way back in 1972. As in the old Soviet Union, people increasingly get squeezed into smaller and smaller housing, while the nomenklatura, the ruling elite, live it up at the expense of the rest of us.
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