The praise showered on the Mayor and councilors for their decision to prohibit the demolition of the current building on 105 Wellington St. is a curious departure from the critical stance Mary O’Grady usually takes with the hubris of city hall (“Vote to Retain 105 Wellington”, Feb 26). Apparently, the “needs of the community” do not include a respect for property rights, due process and the right of free trade.
What kind of community can we expect where individual property owners are tools of central planning, and the use and disposal of their land is determined by civil engineering graduates with no personal stake in maximizing its productive capacity? Let’s freely concede that a large body of land use planning and regulation already severely restrict how a person can use or dispose of what is rightfully his or hers. In the drive to rezone a property because of its age or history we see a natural progression towards a kind of back door expropriation on any pretense a person can come up with.
We also see what is wrong with the central planning perspective, one that is less concerned with what people do and how they live their lives, and more concerned with what appointed experts and consultants decide they must do, whether they like it or not. Instead of small mixed use communities with their own residential and commercial cores, we are given segregated regions; one for shopping, one for working, etc. The natural and organic growth of cities is replaced with synthetic management by an army of bureaucrats acting on behalf of a coalition of developers, consultants and other special interest groups.
