The left has suddenly rediscovered Jane Jacobs as its hero of “diversity” and rewrites her works to fit her narrative to help rebuild the Democratic Party after its epic failure and defeat to President Donald Trump. So who is Jane Jacobs? What works did she produce? What philosophy did you propose? What knowledge can we get from his wisdom, if any?

In Jane Jacobs’ work: “Dark Age Ahead”, 2004, a couple of years before she died, she talks about how in the United States and countries with rural areas, 70-80% of the people are poor, in contrast with vibrant cities where there are fewer poor people, when those cities are designed correctly.

Unfortunately, and I realize that I do not mean to upset an old woman, just because she is older, or simply because she is a socialist, but in these statements and conclusions in her work, she mixes and matches the results with perceived causality. You see, cities suck off rural areas, they suck money, water, energy, wealth, and tax money. Cities are endless in their needs; urban transportation, low-income housing and manipulating markets to keep it running. Like our universities living in a false economy on earth.

I would discuss all the points with Jane here if she was still alive today, and I would have been to every city in the US, and I despise Agenda 21 and the socialists who want to pack people into cities, thinking it’s more efficient. Without the rural areas, the city would collapse as they require goods from everywhere to function. Sorry, but your claims are just nonsense, and if we are really looking for a philosophy on how to approach human civilization, it would be much smarter to consider the philosophy of Ayn Rand, not Jane Jacobs. Also, if we look at the urban planning in Portland OR, where she participated, it is not as viable now in hindsight. Although to her credit she predicted her downfall.

What’s the point of building great master planned cities if you can’t afford to pay for them? How about China that invested in huge cities where no one lives, with all the comforts, now falling apart, with debts and weeds growing on the sidewalks without maintenance? . Beware city planners, technocrats, and remember the Urban Plight and Urban Flight of the past, these ideas are not as novel as they claim, nor are they the answer. After reading her final paper, it seems that she inherently understood these challenges, but kept her original concepts of walkable cities, with open spaces, parks, and open areas with short blocks to create vitality. That’s not enough.

She recognizes the complexity in urban planning, but constantly returns to committee-based planning that involves everyone, yet all we get when it is done is human politics, higher costs, and therefore inaccessible developments causing need. of price controls, more spending and more people inadvertently packed like rats, and we all know what happens when we put a lot of rats together.

I find it interesting that today’s leftist political base uses their works to further their growing agenda of placing people in small living spaces like college dorms in big cities, and claiming that it is best for everyone and that in some way you will get a better quality of life. Not so, in fact, socialists and left-wing political elites are totally jaded of discussing and misinterpreting the story of Jane Jacobs, the typical left-wing pretender-intellectual elite who speaks from the background.

This work is now being used as hate speech against Donald Trump, that is the only reason his books are now popular again. It is a misinterpretation of her work, in addition, she also had a misinterpretation of the story. Besides Donald Trump knows a thing or two about city building, slum clean-up (check out Atlantic City near the casino he built), or problems with low-income housing, he should know, he built several of those great buildings. under contract with the government.

Those who rose up and elected Trump realized this and anti-Trump protesters receive propaganda paid for a political purpose organized and financed by leftist groups that have more hatred than we have seen. To hell with those who use Jacobs’ work as a starting point for their socialist views, PC versus the fabric of America. We celebrate diversity here, but ramming PC down people’s throats is not noble.

Jane Jacobs is not the mainstay of the intellect that she was pretending to be when leftists in the US try to rewrite what she said from her own rewriting of history and adapt it to their worldviews. Ayn Rand was more right than Jacobs. And cities absorb wealth and taxes from all the surrounding areas to exist, water, energy, food, everything. The UN Agenda 21 is clumsy and is causing a complete and unnecessary false promise. This is another leftist BS group, of course the left also enjoys channeling Karl Marx.

Perhaps we should allow the left to raise these arguments and then show them how their solutions have caused our problems, and they are not the solutions, AKA: “the road to hell is always paved with the highest intentions”, why even Hugo Chávez believed that he was doing the best for Venezuela, we know how it turned out. Perhaps the left needs to reread the works of Jane Jacobs more carefully before using this dead woman’s name to further its failed agendas. Think about this.

Recommended additional study:

(1) YouTube Video: “Robert Kanigel,” Eyes on the Street “: Jane Jacobs Expelled from Harvard”, on CSPAN BookTV Channel. Posted on February 1, 2017.
(2) Urban Gateway Website – Article; “The Dark Age Ahead: Understanding Jane Jacobs in the Age of Trump”
(3) World News (dot) com website – Article; “Did Jane Jacobs Predict Trump’s Rise? Always Prophetic, Her Latest Book Outlined The Coming Dark Age And How To Overcome It” by Richard Florida.
(4) YouTube video: ”
(5) Book: “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” by Jane Jacobs, 1961.