The New School Nazis: It's Your Actions that Define You

Urban Colonialism: “Smart Growth” and Rural Gentrification

"Smart" (or smart growth) zoning in rural areas leads to rural gentrification. By directing growth toward existing town centers, and boosting local amenities, these policies attract affluent urban migrants. This influx drives up local property values and displaces long-time residents.

By consolidating development into walkable, attractive "smart growth" village centers and preserving open space; it increases the appeal and overall desirability of the area.

Smart zoning creates dynamics that inherently shift a rural area's socioeconomic fabric.

The rise in remote work and "workcations" allows higher-income urbanites to relocate to or buy second homes in rural amenity-rich areas.

Increased competition for limited housing stock drives up real estate prices and rental rates, making it difficult for the local rural workforce and lower-income residents to afford to stay.

This creates an exclusionary zoning that effectively drives up housing costs and restrict marginalized groups from rural communities, and exacerbates socioeconomic segregation.

Agricultural zoning that restricts land use primarily to industrial farming functions is also a form of exclusionary zoning. By legally prohibiting non-agricultural development—it locks out other demographics, inflates land costs, and naturally excludes people who rely on traditional mixed-use rural communities.

When tailored to promote industrial farming (such as CAFOs—Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations), this zoning shifts from a preservation tool to one that actively bars community diversification.

Prohibitive use zoning codes that restrict land to "exclusive agricultural use" outlaw everyday commercial services, limiting local job opportunities and essential amenities for non-farming populations.

Existing residents in these rural communities face "down-zoning" which decreases the development potential of their property. As land is consolidated for large-scale agricultural operations, long-term locals are often forced to sell and move elsewhere.

Promoting large-scale industrial farming requires severing land rights from local inhabitants.

Land-use planning and zoning that explicitly eliminates existing community uses to enforce corporate or industrial farming operates by structurally displacing the existing non-farming rural community.

In Lansing, NY, rural stereotyping is used as a policy determinant: and we are now categorized as being unworthy to decide our own future. A leak from the Zoning Advisory Committee confirms this: “I agree that the folks in northern Lansing seem to get a raw deal. We treat them like Native Americans on a reservation. Not really competent to manage their own affairs.”

The Town’s “Urban Colonialism” policies of “Smart Growth” exploit the rural community in an arc of using and displacing: the county’s elite are proud to leave their mark on the town, making it their own, and reinventing the community for their sole benefit. That’s the kind of “smart” growth they believe in.

Tompkins County is a university run county; where public debate and meaningful participation are actively discouraged—and public ignorance and disempowerment are the preferred tools of policy makers.