Tag Archives: conspiracy theories

The fear that people will be trapped in 15 minute cities

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Online actors are suggesting leaders want to limit people to living in 15 minute cities:

Photo by Plato Terentev on Pexels.com

“Never have there been proposals for restrictions — on the contrary, this is a new opportunity: more choice, more services, more desire to thrive in one’s neighbourhood,” he said.

“Since the start of 2023, the concept of the 15-minute city has been subject to conspiracy theories, produced and shared by people already well known for spreading disinformation about Covid, the climate, vaccines and politics,” he said…

Particular claims debunked by AFP Fact Check in recent weeks have targeted the English city of Oxford and Edmonton, Canada. Claims surfaced in various languages, including English, French and Portuguese.

“You can’t leave a 15-minute city whenever you please … The city walls or restrictions or zones or whatever you want to call them won’t be used to keep others out, they’ll be used to lock everyone in,” says one man in a video viewed more than 59,000 times on Facebook, commenting on the Edmonton plan…

Supporters of 15-minute cities include the worldwide C40 cities alliance plus the United Nations and the World Economic Forum -– targets of numerous false claims that are subject to frequent fact-checks.

Would these particular fears about denser communities fit under long-running fears that a globalist structure wants to restrict the everyday lives and freedoms of workers? One way to control people is to restrict geographic mobility. Doing so would increase population densities and limit what people could access.

These fears likely find a stronger foothold in the United States where frontier and suburban motifs are strong. Americans like suburbs, in part, because they are able to have private property, can drive where and when they choose, and have closer connections to local government. Denser areas do not appeal to many Americans.

Shadowy McMansion owners

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A letter to the editor in the New York Times suggests McMansions owned by shell companies are a big problem:

Your article on shell companies and real estate highlights a phenomenon not unique to ultra-wealthy areas of Los Angeles. Real estate purchases using the cover of limited liability companies are a significant issue in the San Gabriel Valley in eastern Los Angeles County, where McMansions owned by L.L.C.s sit empty as middle-class home buyers are priced out, unable to compete against those flush with foreign money from unknown and undisclosed sources.

New York, San Francisco, London and Vancouver are also experiencing this influx. In the United States, real estate brokers and agents are not required to comply with customer due diligence and know your customer mandates that banks and many non-bank institutions must follow.

This kind of argument makes McMansions seem even worse then they are typically depicted: they are owned by shadowy wealthy people who don’t care about the normal resident who just needs somewhere to live. The problem with this letter is that it doesn’t provide good data on how many homes actually fall into this category. Wealthy, culturally significant cities like the ones listed above – LA, NYC, San Francisco, London, Vancouver – do attract foreign investors (particularly Chinese investors recently in Vancouver and the LA area) but major cities tend to like this: it keeps new capital flowing into local coffers and it fuels the high-end construction industry (see Miami or London or New York).

In contrast, it is pretty clear that most major American cities don’t really want to talk about affordable housing and/or aren’t willing to do much about it. Affordable housing is needed in many major cities, particularly those along the coasts. Part of the reason McMansions exist in the first place is that Americans were willing to move further out from the city to buy a bigger house (and this has to with state policies and residential preferences to avoid urban life and non-whites). The resources that it takes to construct McMansions in the suburbs could be harnessed to build smaller urban units or at least denser suburban units (see these recent ideas to use the materials from McMansions or to subdivide McMansions into multiple units) but few governments want to mess with the single-family home market and few builders or developers want to limit their profits.

Interstate highways are not intended to be military airfields in times of crisis

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This story about a plane landing on a North Carolina highway reminded me of a myth about the U.S. Interstate system: the idea that they could be used by military aircraft in times of crisis.

Numerous folks swear Interstate highways in the United States must be designed so that one mile in every five is perfectly straight and flat. According to this whispered bit of facetious lore, if the U.S. ever comes under attack, those straight, flat stretches will be used as landing strips.

Belief in this crazy idea should fail anyone’s logic test. It makes no sense to render inoperable the Interstate highway system during times of domestic crisis — moving troops and supplies on the ground would be too important an activity to curtail just to land planes. The U.S. is riddled with any number of small, private airfields that could be pressed into service if the need arose, with that need being dependent on some foreign power having first knocked out an almost uncountable number of major airports plus those airstrips on military bases, not to mention the American fleet of aircraft carriers. Folks who commit to believing this crazy notion of highways doubling by design as airstrips are letting the romance of a “cool fact” blind them to what their common sense should be blinking at them in bright neon letters.

Richard Weingroff, information liaison specialist for the Federal Highway Administration’s Office of Infrastructure and the FHA’s unofficial historian, says the closest any of this came to touching base with reality was in 1944, when Congress briefly considered the possibility of including funding for emergency landing strips in the Federal Highway-Aid Act (the law that authorized designation of a “National System of Interstate Highways”). At no point was the idea kited of using highways or other roads to land planes on; the proposed landing strips would have been built alongside major highways, with the highways serving to handle ground transportation access to and from these strips. The proposal was quickly dropped, and no more was ever heard of it. (A few countries do use some of their roads as military air strips, however.)

Some references to the one-mile-in-five assertion claim it’s part of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. This piece of legislation committed the federal government to build what became the 42,800-mile Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, which makes it the logical item to cite concerning regulations about how the interstate highway system was to be laid out. The act did not, however, contain any “one-in-five” requirement, nor did it even suggest the use of stretches of the interstate system as emergency landing strips. The one-out-of-five rule was not part of any later legislation either.

This myth could be countered without suggesting that this is such a crazy idea. Small, private airfields would not likely have the length for modern jets nor be able to stand the weight of larger aircraft, particularly bombers. Additionally, the federal government spent large sums of money on interstate highways; wouldn’t they have wanted to get more out of their outlay?

Another way to counter this myth would be to make a larger argument that yes, Americans considered driving so important that the government was willing to subsidize the construction of interstates. In other words, the highways are more about our love for and reliance on cars and trucks than a nefarious Eisenhowerian plan benefiting the military-industrial complex.

The Federal Highway Administration has an official myth-busting page. Here is their answer to two questions of whether interstates were built with defense purposes in mind:

President Eisenhower supported the Interstate System because he wanted a way of evacuating cities if the United States was attacked by an atomic bomb.

President Eisenhower’s support was based largely on civilian needs—support for economic development, improved highway safety, and congestion relief, as well as reduction of motor vehicle-related lawsuits.  He understood the military value of the Interstate System, as well as its use in evacuations, but they were only part of the reason for his support.

Defense was the primary reason for the Interstate System.

The primary justifications for the Interstate System were civilian in nature.  In the midst of the Cold War, the Department of Defense supported the Interstate System and Congress added the words “and Defense” to its official name in 1956 (“National System of Interstate and Defense Highways”).  However, the program was so popular for its civilian benefits that the legislation would have passed even if defense had not been a factor.

Interesting that the federal government hosts such a page…