In America, we have a right to live where we want. Right?

As history shows, urban density is the sine qua non of the totalitarian state, because if people are packed together, they are much easier to monitor and control. Thus, it should surprise no one that there is a major, well-organized push coming from many directions to use all available tools to coerce people to live in dense urban housing.

Among university professors, government planners and mainstream pundits there is little doubt that the best city is the densest one. This notion is also supported by a wide number of politically connected developers, who see in the cramming of Americans into ever smaller spaces an opportunity for vast, often taxpayer-subsidized, profiteering.

Is this what people want? Hardly:

There are at least three major problems with the thesis that density is an unabashed good. First, and foremost, Census and survey data reveal that most people do not want to live cheek to jowl if they can avoid it. Second, most of the attractive highest-density areas also have impossibly high home prices relative to incomes and low levels of homeownership. And third, and perhaps most important, dense places tend to be regarded as poor places for raising families. In simple terms, a dense future is likely to be a largely childless one.

Let’s start with something few density advocates consider: what people want and what they would choose if they could. Roughly four in five buyers, according to a 2011 study commissioned by the National Association of Realtors, prefer a single-family home. This preference can be seen in the vastly greater construction of single-family houses in the past decade: Between 2000 and 2011, detached houses accounted for 83% of the net additions to the occupied U.S. housing stock.  The percentage of single-family homes in the total housing mix last decade was more than one-fifth higher than in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

While the noxious idea has taken root everywhere (nearly every local planning commission is infected with the pack-em-in virus), the idea did not start with the Obama administration. As author Joel Kotkin makes clear, it is ruinous for the country’s future:

Some have suggested that the Obama administration is conspiring to turn American cities into high-rise forests. But the coalition favoring forced densification — greens, planners, architects, developers, land speculators — predates Obama. They have gained strength by selling densification, however dubiously, as what planner and architect Peter Calthorpe calls “a climate change antibiotic.” Not surprisingly, there’s less self interest in promoting more effective greenhouse gas reduction policies such as boosting  work at home and lower-emissions cars.

The density agenda need to be knocked off its perch as the summum bonum of planning policy. These policies may not hurt older Americans, like me, who bought their homes decades ago, but will weigh heavily on the already hard-pressed young adult population. Unless the drive for densification is relaxed in favor of a responsible but largely market-based approach open to diverse housing options, our children can look forward to a regime of ever-higher house prices, declining opportunities for ownership and, like young people in East Asia, an environment hostile to family formation. All for a policy that, for all its progressive allure, will make more Americans more unhappy, less familial, and likely poorer.

Nice to know that the government wants to maximize unhappiness, isn’t it? (Indeed, some of these snots are arrogant enough to insist that urban density actually promotes happiness.)

In California, they have long been trying to cram this down the throats of a very unwilling public (which stupidly votes for the leftie bastards anyway thanks to well-stoked fears of so-con Republicans):

In California, the assault on the house has gained official sanction. Once the heartland of the American dream, the Golden State has begun implementing new planning laws designed to combat global warming. These draconian measures could lead to a ban on the construction of private residences, particularly on the suburban fringe. The new legislation’s goal is to cram future generations of Californians into multi-family apartment buildings, turning them from car-driving suburbanites into strap-hanging urbanistas.

That’s not what Californians want: Some 71% of adults in the state cite a preference for single-family houses. Furthermore, the vast majority of growth over the past decade has taken place not in high-density urban centers but in lower-density peripheral areas such as Riverside-San Bernardino. Yet popular preferences mean little in a state where environmental zealotry increasingly dictates how people should live their lives.

Single homes are relentlessly framed in the debate as selfish, backward, and anti-environment. The problem is, people still stubbornly persist in liking them.

So what are the government control freaks who want to tell people where to live going to do? After all, this is not yet East Germany where central planners decide who lives where. In a free market, where people live still comes down to choice limited mainly by what they can afford.

If the federal government gets its way, that is about to change. The central planners have come up with a huge new regulatory scheme to bring about what is euphemistically called “economic integration“:

…the Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed a new plan to change U.S. neighborhoods it says are racially imbalanced or are too tilted toward rich or poor, arguing the country’s housing policies have not been effective at creating the kind of integrated communities the agency had hoped for.

The proposed federal rule, called “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing,” is currently under a 60-day public comment period. Though details of how the policy would specifically work are unclear, the rule says HUD would provide states, local governments and others who receive agency money with data and a geospatial tool to look at “patterns of integration and segregation; racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty; access to education, employment, low-poverty, transportation, and environmental health.”

The piece was at least fair enough to quote from an opposing view:

the rule has also attracted criticism from those who say the policy is idealistic and unlikely to work.

Ed Pinto, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Fox News the rule was “just the latest of a series of attempts by HUD to social engineer the American people,” and cited failures of the public housing and urban renewal policies of the 1950s and 1960s, and of changes to house financing in the 1990s.

Interesting how they are playing with the word “integration” in an attempt to racialize the most rudimentary of economic principles. Houses that cost more are seen as inherently discriminatory. And not wanting to be crammed into ugly apartment complexes and packed like sardines into mass public transit will probably be officially declared a form of “racism” by social “scientists.”

By the way, when I said “huge regulatory scheme,” I was not engaged in hyperbole. Last night I slogged through the new HUD regulations, which are as long and complex as some of the bills created by Congress. Unlike legislation, though, these rules — which have the effect of law — are written by faceless unelected activists who infest the federal government. Our elected representatives will never be allowed to vote for or against them, nor will we. The only thing you are allowed to do if you don’t like it is to leave public comments. A few brave citizens have dared to do that, and most of them are irate.

This is called democracy?

Our revolutionary war was fueled by the unfairness of taxation without representation. Here we are faced with massive social engineering without representation, and while a few dozen brave citizens have so far bothered to complain, the whole process is so rotten to the core that most people know complaining is not only useless, but will probably get you put in a government enemies list.

To them, we are mere serfs to be ruled.

And above all, herded.