The Environmental Protection Hustle

by Bernard J. Frieden

Book Overview

No one likes ticky-tacky houses spread all over the landscape and invading the suburbs, least of all the people who already live there. But are environmentalists and suburbanites right when they... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 026206068X
• ISBN13: 9780262060684
• Release Date: January 1979
• Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Prescient in 1979 and still compelling today

If you have ever wondered why you have to live further and further from where you work in order to find affordable and yet still pleasant housing for you and your family, this prescient book will tell you why. This book was written 30 years ago and for the most part accurately forecast how eco-fiend hysterics reshaped our cities and gave rise to a whole new exurban America. The author focuses mainly upon California in general and Northern California in particular, but his analysis applies to the whole nation. And he saw it coming, 10 years before the phenomenon really began to manifest itself in Northern California. It is no accident that the "every swamp is sacred" movement to stop Bay swamp filling in the 1960's, followed by an "every hill is sacred" movement to stop Bay Area hillside terracing in the 1980's, have led to people who work in San Jose and Concord, yet live as far away as Modesto. Ironically, the same "environmentalists" who decry auto dependent cities in America, have, through their misguided land use policies, have made the automobile all that much more necessary. And meanwhile they are blocking road improvements in so many cities, which will only push people even further into "exurb" developments and make them that much more auto dependent.