Municipal planning is for the rich. It circumvents natural markets in which poor people pool resources, innovate and commute. “Planning” almost always means that housing becomes LESS affordable for poor people.
Where “planning” has been most heavy-handed, poor people live in cars or travel hundreds of miles to mow the lawns or shovel the sidewalks of elites. Witness Aspen or Estes Park, Colorado. Or Big Sky, Montana.
But the Bozeman City Council is almost as government-interventionist as that of San Francisco.
Now the booming Montana town is hiring an “affordable housing director”–whose $70,000 salary (apparently for 6 months) will be drawn from real estate developers. (This dollar amount, of course, will mean that every new real estate development in Bozeman will cost more than it did previously.)
