The Belgian Port of Antwerp needed to expand. But Belgium has a policy that any greenfield development must be offset by set-asides of already developed land. So the residents of an entire town were forcibly evicted and their town declared a “new nature preserve.”

The buildings in the town were not leveled, and instead planners are allowing them to decay through “natural reclamation.” This has led to a lot of graffiti, which happens to be the subject of the news article that is linked to above.

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Portland in particular loves to brag that it is a European city, so don’t be surprised if the Keep-Portland-Weird crowd are the first in America to come up with a zero-net-development policy.

“California Declares War on the Suburbs,” reports Wendell Cox’s op ed in the Wall Street Journal (or at least the headline so reports). This has led to all sort of supporting commentary in the conservative blogosphere, along with articles from the left that claims Cox is full of it.

All the Antiplanner wants to know is why anyone thinks this war on the suburbs is anything new? Cox’s article referred to a proposal “to require more than one-half of the new housing in Los Angeles County and five other Southern California counties to be concentrated in dense, so-called transit villages.” But this is really nothing new.

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Have American cities stopped growing at the urban fringe? Some people think so based on a trend of one or two years during the worst recession since the Great Depression. The Antiplanner’s loyal ally, Wendell Cox, doesn’t think so.

Are Americans shifting in droves from from cars to public transit? Based on similar short-term evidence, Colorado PIRG and US PIRG think so. The Antiplanner thinks this is just wishful thinking on the part of those who don’t like suburbs or automobiles.

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