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The Seattle City Council approved over 100 amendments its long-running plan to start upzoning more than 24 neighborhoods in the city.

A few years ago, my wife and I were on a cruise and got off the ship in a French port city. We were walking around the port and into the main part of the city, and I found it to be incredibly depressing. It looked like what so many other European cities look like — nobody has private property, nobody has a yard.

There is just a public square where the children can play, but they don’t have a place of their own. Very few people own their apartments. And I knew that that city was what the powers that be around here want Seattle to become.

This isn’t just a conspiracy theory, this is actually the vision of Socialists, who disproportionately have control in Seattle. Upzoning is just the beginning of it.ÌýThere is a plan in the United Nations called . Some of the key elements of Agenda 21 are no private property ownership; more density; no private transportation — it’s replaced by public transport, bicycling, and walking; and no individual yards.

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It makes me very sad to realize that this upzoning measure is the vision for Seattle.

Even though my childhood was not exactly idyllic, I grew up in the best of Seattle. My friends had yards where we could play whiffle ball, and we could go play basketball in the alleys between the houses of Ballard with a basketball rim bought at a thrift shop and nailed to a piece of plywood. My friends’ houses were big enough to play games indoors.

The current vision for Seattle is to tear down that single-family housing and get more and more 12-, 14-unit apartments, as many as we can, all to get more tax dollars. That is the reason for all of this up-zoning. The more people we pack in, the more people we have to tax. We’ll get away from private ownership; the ownership of property will be concentrated among the very wealthy who can build these apartments. It’s all designed to move to this European model of no yards, and no private land ownership.

Why is this? Of all the things that make a free land free, the absolute bedrock of a free republic is private property rights. The more you stack people up and convince them to vote for every tax increase, the bigger and bigger of government you have. That is the stated goal of at least one city council member, who is making all of her decisions based on the Socialist group controlling her, in gross violation of her oath of office.

That’s the goal. Let’s be like Europe. We’ll stack buildings as high as we can and pack people in as densely as we can. We’ll get away from kids having yards.ÌýWe’ll have public spaces where people will be forced together. You want to sit in your own backyard and read a book? No, you won’t be able to do that. You can do it in your 600-square-foot apartment.

It’s really depressing, and it’s a dark, dark future, because our city council is leading us down a ruinous path.