Make Government a Citizen's Servant Again

The other day I read in a local newspaper that Columbia Heights (CH) doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. The question implied that Columbia Heights must physically change but that the citizens don't know what to change Columbia Heights into. As an example, when the city tears down a citizens home to create change, the citizen doesn't seem to know what should take their home's place. The article suggested that the Citizens of Columbia Heights are clueless about the need for Big Government to step in and create the perfect utopia for its new citizens (not you) to live in.

Citizens of CH presently mostly live with out the benefit of housing associations and their absolute guiding rules. That is why big government has been subsidizing development with housing associations. For the less well to do, big government provides government built, government run and government controlled housing. All of this is being done to remove stress from adult (old enough to show personal responsibility and to understand individual Liberty) citizens as they mature and live their lives.

All our new Metropolitan Commission inspired development looks the same. The City of Brooklyn Center rejected a development that would have rivaled the Mall of America as a tourist attraction. Brooklyn Center made the Hmong developer come back with architectural drawings that were the same as all the other new development. The new development stresses retail, office and residential property. Since manufacturing property has low property values, they also have low property taxes. Cities don't want good paying manufacturing jobs, just an increase in citizen control, uniformity between all parts of the Metro, higher city property tax revenue, no mom and pop stores just the big boxes, and of course money for friends (developers and bonders) of the city council. A certain unsecured unwritten loan from a city council member to a developer for a $250,000 illustrates this developer friendship.

What happens in the big government redevelopment process? Residential property, especially affordable rental property, shoots up in property value. This increases taxes on the affordable rental property which has a dramatic effect in raising apartment rents. In stead of keeping the Hispanics and African Americans in the neighborhood, the new development and the areas around the development change over to white professionals (gentrification). These new people want the poor to live where they can't be seen.

The poor communities are forced to break up their social structure when they move. Being less able to help each other, poorer residents become more dependent on big government services with all the strings that are attached. The strings make big government social programs almost impossible to break away from. The big government workers who work for big government social programs become enablers to poor citizens on big government welfare programs.

Only a very small group of big government fans benefit from this system. Many of them can be found hanging around city hall.

If you are tired of big government pushing you around, join a group that wants to permanently downsize big government. Part of this will be done by protecting citizens from big government by changing the City of Columbia Heights' Charter, or other city charters. The rest of the down sizing will be through an organization made up of citizens and small local businesses for small is beautiful government. While big government support groups have big government dollars, the big government groups are small so they do not have the votes to stay in power when small government is beautiful citizens fight back. The statute of Liberty has boots, so lets get those boots working for small is beautiful government.

Contact Bob Odden at SmallGovIsBeautifulCH@hotmail.com to join a group to keep the City of Columbia Heights City Council (or other cities) confined to a much smaller container.