YIMBYs, Workforce Housing, and Community Land Trusts: All Means to an End to Private Property

by Kathleen Marquardt

March 23, 2024

There is a drive on to invade the sanctity of your home by forcing you to share it with illegal aliens. For decades our housing rules and regulations have been thrust on us via federal grants from Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Department of Transportation, (DOT, and other departments – all set up to reinvent government. At the same time the global elite (those who are in control of our nation and others are using non-governmental organizations (NGO) – all under the aegis of the United Nations (UN) — the American Planning Association (APA), Urban Lands Institute (ULI), and so many too numerous to list on a single page. All to push humans as well as animals and crops off urban and even suburban land, into cities. This, all while making the cities conform to Smart Growth/stack’n’pack housing, and now, 15-minute, Smart Cities. The useless eaters – anyone over 65 or handicapped – are to be relegated to “nursing homes, tucked away in tiny rooms and fed any and all drugs of choice so they might sojourn off this mortal coil prematurely.

It wasn’t that long ago when owners of single-family homes were forbidden to build a mother-in-law unit – no matter how large their property was. Now, thanks to our federal government, unconstitutionally, bringing in millions of illegals we are suddenly pressed to build those and more. And they are finding new, unique ways to find housing for them — Pushing the public to give them rooms in their homes;, taking over hotels, urging others to build pod homes in their backyards. (It is going to be interesting when the original homeowner decides to sell and learns that he may own his house structure and maybe 4 or 5 feet of land around it, but the rest belongs to the squatters (no, there are no laws on this yet, but you can bet your sweet bippie it, or something worse, will come down from those same unelected, federal officials in D.C. who have been restructuring the federal government and America itself for the past almost 100 years.

I’m not going to take you back to Habitat I or II, or Agenda 21, but since the early 2000s we’ve been through “visioning meetings (controlled by trained facilitators to get us to say the words they want to hear, “that we want – smaller homes, walkable/bikeable cities, more public transportation – and a park, library, stores, and medical services (but no churches) all close by”. i.e., Smart cities using International Building Codes (IBC) so we conform to the rest of the world.

Then Blue Lines, boundaries around the cities, designate where construction would end — rather like the Berlin Wall No construction outside that blue line. Next, we saw the stealing of rural land for so-called green energy) and CO2 pipelines — which are anything but green.

All of this was done before the floodgates were opened to any and all illegals – but especially to the dangerous, military-age men. The thieves in DC welcomed those who despise our culture and are opposed to our values, attitudes, and beliefs. If the powers that be really believe in these interlopers, why are they asking us, the middle-class people with modest-sized homes to welcome them in – they, the elites, Obama, Biden, Gates, et al have numerous huge homes. Let them set the example. In my dreams.

The scary part is that much of the public are accepting this abomination from their state and federal officials. I realize that many have been dumbed-down for decades, but it is hard to believe that this isn’t – finally — waking them up. I always believed Americans were different; that when the SHTF they would wake up – especially those in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states. Now I must accept Montana bumper stickers and license-plate holder statements were great and maybe worked while I was still living there. But today, Don’t Californicate Montana is just a meme that had meaning back in pre-internet times. I truly thought Montanans would not let themselves be so corrupted as to let the California refugees from Newsom-ville, Oregon, Washington and Hollywood erase their great values. Yet, they have, starting with electing RINOs to the highest government offices (I should say ‘more RINOs; there have always been some snakes in the grass. So, Montana, following Colorado down the sewer hole, is on-board with one of the latest property-stealing schemes of the New World Order. To wit:

From Bloomberg news: [1]

“Lawmakers in Montana’s state legislature advanced bills in April that would shake up zoning, land use and building codes, making it much easier for property owners to build new housing — and much harder for local authorities to stop them.

“A flurry of five separate “Yes In My Backyard” bills — all five sponsored by Republican legislators — are winding their way through various committees. One would require cities to permit backyard flats and other accessory dwelling units by right”.

Oy, there’s more:

“The wave of legislation is the work of a diverse group of advocates from both the political left and right. The coalition behind this push is clear about its goal: Montana needs to head off a housing crisis at the pass.

“On this point advocates can agree, even if on almost every other subject, they’re worlds apart. And by joining forces, this left-right coalition cleared a political impasse that has blocked so-called housing-abundant policies, which strive to remove barriers to new construction.

“’We were able to go to mostly Republicans and talk about free markets the importance of property rights. They were able to go to folks on the left and talk about climate and social impacts’,” says Kendall Cotton, president and CEO of the Frontier Institute, a right-leaning free-market think tank. “It doesn’t break down on normal partisan lines. Advocates shouldn’t silo themselves on the normal partisan lines.”

”The YIMBY movement taking shape in Helena is unusual in the US: Few states with a Republican governor, much less with a GOP supermajority in the legislature, have advanced such sweeping efforts to promote new housing construction in cities. Some red states have seen the opposite happen: When Gainesville became the first city in Florida to end single-family-only zoning locally, state leaders threatened legal action, and local Democrats repealed the ordinance before it could take effect.”

And the Governor is fully behind it!

“The YIMBY movement taking shape in Helena is unusual in the US: Few states with a Republican governor, much less with a GOP supermajority in the legislature, have advanced such sweeping efforts to promote new housing construction in cities.”

This goes hand in glove with Workforce Housing.

Workforce housing took off from the “affordable housing” legislation in the 1940s and the Housing act of 1949. Like everything in big government, the housing legislation and regulations grew exponentially.

According to the Urban Land Institute (ULI), Workforce Housing is defined as housing affordable to households earning between 60 and 120 percent of area median income (AMI). Workforce housing targets middle-income workers which includes professions such as police officers, firefighters, teachers, health care workers, retail clerks, and the like. Households who need workforce housing may not always qualify for housing subsidized by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program or the Housing Choice Vouchers program (formerly known as Section 8), which are two major programs in place for addressing affordable housing needs. [2]

So the idea is to keep moving up the income ladder for subsidized housing until the government owns all housing as they find more and more ways to get us out of our homes.

Yep, according to them they are planning to:

♦ Create a dedicated housing trust fund
♦ Repurpose vacant land and underutilized retail space
♦ Adopt inclusionary zoning (see a prior CED blog post on the topic
♦ Create a community land trust (see a prior CED post on the topic
♦ Update land development codes to encourage development in already urbanized areas
♦ Allow single-family homeowners to build and rent out accessory dwelling units

All the things that used to be verboten. This repurposing of vacant land and underutilized retail space – isn’t that right now private property? That someone owns and might have other plans? And inclusionary zoning? We saw a lot of that about ten years ago. (what was the project John Anthony was fighting?)

And the community land trusts? Who in their right mind would buy a house on land they don’t own? “Updating land development codes to encourage development in already urbanized areas” is what has been happening recently. Squeeze in smaller dwelling units (I won’t call them houses), and remove parking spaces (to lessen mobility). And I already spoke about the “accessory dwelling units”.

These are a small sample of legislation and regulations being put into place to destroy property rights. Washington State Supreme Court Justice Richard B. Sanders wrote a “Fifth Amendment” treatise which included the following definition of property rights:

“Property in a thing consists not merely in its ownership and possession, but in the unrestricted right of use, enjoyment, and disposal. Anything which destroys any of the elements of property, to that extent, destroys the property itself. The substantial value of property lies in its use. If the right of use be denied, the value of the property is annihilated, and ownership is rendered a barren right.”

That is one of the best definitions of property rights. And that doesn’t just mean land and housing; your clothes, animals, and your body are your property. They can all be stolen from you; only your thoughts are not able to be stolen (or are they with AI? But the point is, that our government and its public/private partnership entities are assiduously going after our every property.

We must not wait a minute longer; we must stand up and say “NO! I am not going to let you destroy me, my family or America”. Remember, we are “of the people, for the people, by the people”.

E-Mail Kathleen Marquardt: koipolloi@protonmail.com

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