The Trust-Funder Economy III 
By Martin Harris

If you were able (subjunctive contrary to fact) to learn the IQ’s of the Golden Dome Folks, I believe you’d find that all of them, with maybe one exception whom I won’t name here, are solidly on the right (above-average) side of the Bell Curve for intelligence distribution. We already know that, as a solid gentry-left majority, they are very comfortably situated on the left side of the curve for political ideology. It’s their above-average intelligence which I find the more interesting, because it strongly suggests that these folks are pretty-near mistake-proof, and that what has happened in Vermont, in such governance realms as land use regulation, development management, and taxation, is what they have wanted to see happen, not something which has happened because they weren’t bright enough to foresee and prevent it.

Case in point: gentrification. That’s a noun which emerged in the 1960"s, when the Beautiful People began moving into then-slummy Georgetown, in the District of Columbia, and turned it into their version of a residential Camelot, upon the accession of one of their own, John F. Kennedy, to the presidency. Their adventure in private-sector urban renewal was different from the governmental type, wherein properties deemed "deteriorating" or "dilapidated" according to an elaborate point-scoring method were considered suitable for acquisition by government, with owner co-operation or not, for re-development into something a lot more socially and economically superior. Government-sponsored Urban Renewal depended and still depends –ask the New London evictees– heavily on the use of Eminent Domain to get unwilling owners out; private-sector gentrification accomplishes the same ends but does it entirely with the power of the purse, offering owners buy-out sums they, mostly, can’t refuse. Those few who hang on through the gentrification that goes on around them soon find themselves forced out by the rising cost of staying as taxes rise in response to the new pattern of property values, as well as the new galaxy of fees and regulations brought in by the newcomers at the same time that the old galaxy of small-scale providers of goods and services is forced out for the same reasons.

What happened in Georgetown (urban gentrification) and similar places like Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill, Cincinnati’s Germantown, and even little villages like Connecticut’s Kent, also happened in the outskirts of Washington in the form of rural gentrification as the higher-income folks seeking a few horsey acres from which to commute into D.C. daily found it easy to buy out the relatively less-wealthy long-term land-owners in such marginal farming areas as Virginia’s Fairfax County used to be before the urbanites moved in, en masse.

Rural gentrification also showed its economic power in northern New England: all three States, once solidly conservative, frugal, minimal-governance places with a popular culture of little spending and less talking, are now solidly "Blue" with soaring levels of taxation and regulation, a parallel pattern in property values, and a resulting departure of the less-well-endowed locals in response to the decline in both economic and social factors as the gentrification pattern proceeds. Except for the fact that the houses are a lot farther apart, what has happened in Maine, Vermont, and most recently New Hampshire is indistinguishable from what happened in Georgetown. There, it was at the time openly referred to as a socio-economic revolution: using more recent international language, it might be called a ‘cleansing’. Basic principle: if you have the wherewithal to buy in and raise the cost of living, the locals won’t be able to stay.

Thus, I’d argue, the gentry-left crocodile tears now being shed (while the cameras are rolling, that is) over the rising cost of housing and related "affordability" questions in Vermont are as vapid as those voiced four decades back in Georgetown; in historical actuality, the Beautiful People then moving in to surroundings they openly considered too good for the then-present locals couldn’t wait to see the last of them leave. A minor difference: in Georgetown the locals couldn’t exercise their pesky no-votes on local matters, while in Vermont they still can. All the more reason to raise their costs and send ‘em elsewhere.
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights