Friday, January 10, 2020

UCLA Professor: 'We need to seriously question the ideal of private home ownership'



In a recent op-ed for The Nation, Professor Kian Goh, assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA, whose specialties include urban ecological design, spatial politics, and social mobilization in the issues of climate change and global urbanization, stated that what makes the California forest fires even worse is urban planning.

The essay's subtitle reads, "if we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership."

“Yes, climate change intensifies the fires—but the ways in which we plan and develop our cities makes them even more destructive. The growth of urban regions in the second half of the 20th century has been dominated by economic development, aspirations of homeownership, and belief in the importance of private property,” she writes.

Goh compared two ideas of thought: The American tradition of private property ownership and the collective property theories. She suggested the cause of the issue is private homeownership and advocated for "more collective" cities.

In other words, she has no understanding of how stricter respect for private property would reduce fire risk (See: Foundations of Private Property Society Theory).

It is remarkable how often socialists blame capitalism or private property for problems that emerge because of government institutions, that is, some degree of central planning, and then call for more central planning which would only intensify the problems via inefficiencies, distortion of incentives to protect property and plain old power grabs.

-RW

(via Campus Reform - HT John K)




1 comment:

  1. Libtards are commie borg. We will invent our way out of it. The only real way

    ReplyDelete