L.A. Times schizo on “smart growth”

Even as people pour into Los Angeles, the L.A. Times can’t make up its mind on what to do on where the people should go.

An editorial begins like a Daily Worker 1930s editorial paean to Soviet central planning:

SMART GROWTH, we want so badly to believe in you. You were centrally planned by the greatest minds of our time, conceived in an atmosphere of collective purpose and self-criticism, built to the greenest specifications and fired by a bold vision: victory over the individual will and the creation of a new citizenry for a new century.

“Smart growth” essentially coerces less housing development and forces people into mass transit. But then the editorial adds:

If only you would work.

Well, why say that about something that can’t work? It’s like wishing you could get blitzed every day without getting a hangover and blowing out your liver.

The editorial then explains that L.A.’s smart growth plans, which depend on mass transit, hardly have increased mass-transit ridership at all. It concludes with another lament, that “transit-oriented development” still has…

the potential to attract the kind of residents who seek a traditional walking-around urban experience. Reducing the rate of congestion growth will require a vast array of policy solutions and options for residents, and smart growth may be part of that.

We still want to believe.

“[R]educing the rate of congestion growth will require a vast array of policy solutions and options”??? What does that mean? Can’t these people write in plain Spanish? Their paper just ran a story about how the state’s population will increase from 37 million today to 60,000,000 in 2050. Where’s everybody supposed to live, Timesies? How about if they move into your mansions?

Their last sentence, “We still want to believe,” echoes the signature line from a product of the local entertainment industry, “The X-Files,” and meant believing in space aliens who are coming here to colonize and enslave humans.

Going by this editorial, it’s evidence the malevolent ET’s have taken over the Times.

(For more info on “smart growth” — really more dumb government controls — check out this column by my former colleague Steven Greenhut and his great book, “Abuse of Power: How the Government Misuses Eminent Domain.” And the Cato Institute just came out with a new study, “Debunking Portland: The City that Doesn’t Work,” ripping to shreds the supposed “benefits” of “smart growth” in its showcase city.)