© 2024 Blaze Media LLC. All rights reserved.
Progressive professor: To address climate change, we must 'seriously question' private property ownership
Phil Pacheco/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Progressive professor: To address climate change, we must 'seriously question' private property ownership

He calls for co-op apartments, government housing, and a Green New Deal

To combat California wildfires allegedly caused by climate change, a writer at the progressive magazine, The Nation, is calling upon Americans to rethink the "seriously question the ideal of private homeownership."

"Yes, climate change intensifies the fires — but the ways in which we plan and develop our cities makes them even more destructive," writes Kian Goh, an assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA.

Aspirations of homeownership are "reinforcing" California wildfire conditions

The writer says that Americans' "aspirations of home ownership" and "belief in the importance of private property" could be "reinforcing" the conditions that result in wildfires.

"Our ideas about what success, comfort, home, and family should look like are so ingrained, it's hard for us to see how they could be reinforcing the very conditions that put us at such grave risk," he wrote.

Goh added that to "engage with these challenges, we need to do more than upgrade the powerlines or stage a public takeover of the utility companies." Here comes the kicker: "We need to rethink the ideologies that govern how we plan and build our homes."

What "ideologies" is Goh referencing? Economic freedom, obviously.

Rental housing, government programs, and co-op apartments

Goh's alternative to homeownership reads like a list of bad left-wing public policy ideas and economic fantasies. He writes:

There are other options, in theory: Rental housing serves many cities around the world well, although we should be wary about perpetuating the power of landlords in this country without delinking ownership from wealth creation. There has been resurgent interest in government-planned and -built public housing, including recent legislation proposed by Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders that would shore up and invigorate the federal system. The Green New Deal invokes prior eras of government intervention, lending itself to revitalized thinking about the social value of public goods. There is also the potential for new or reconstituted forms of cooperative housing. In New York City, cooperative apartment buildings have long been a norm.

He's not the first progressive whose public policy proposals to tackle climate change go well beyond the fields of science and energy.

As TheBlaze has reported, in an op-ed published last month, climate activist Greta Thunberg called for overhauling everything, including "colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression" to mitigating the rise in global temperatures.

Similarly, to curb fires in Southern California, Goh maintains that humans need "another kind of escape route — away from our ideologies of ownership and property..."

Want to leave a tip?

We answer to you. Help keep our content free of advertisers and big tech censorship by leaving a tip today.
Want to join the conversation?
Already a subscriber?