Quote:
Originally Posted by MAC123
"acknowledge the crime/homeless/mismanagement issues that make inner cities undesirable"
Crime - A variety of things here. Crime is often a result of poverty, which can be reduced by making things less expensive and making jobs easier to get to. This does both. But crime is a very complex thing and can't be fixed by any single silver bullet.
Homelessness - This especially can be helped with this. It's real simple. More (better, mixed use) places to live = lower prices for those places as they have far more competition. Lower prices = less homelessness. ^Same thing with crime though, no one single silver bullet.
Mismanagement issues - Could you be more vague please?
"He even equates suburban living with racism, as if black/brown people are leaving Chicago to move to the suburbs because they're racist. Really?"
No he doesn't. You pulled that out of your ass. He said that the people who made the laws (the ones that make areas exclusively SFH's. And the ones that prevented colored people from buying houses in the suburbs) were racist, which they were. He explained this pretty well, I don't have the faintest clue how you got that mixed up unless you specifically wanted it to be mixed up..
Dude statistics are very easy to twist. And just because you have a low or lower chance of something happening to you, doesn't mean it can't happen to you.
"Also, almost all of your links don't work" Dang it. Ughhhhhhhhhh. That's so annoying.
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Crime is often a result of poverty, but that doesn't excuse ignoring it. It actually causes it worsen. Crime goes up > those with $$$ leave the city > the city council now has less to spend on policing in social programs/policing/welfare > crime goes up > more of those with $$$ leave the city > the city council now has even less to spend on policing in social programs/policing/welfare > crime goes up, etc. Rinse and repeat. I thought we'd all learned after the 1970s death spiral that letting crime to fester will destroy the city.
Homelessness is not simply a housing issue. In fact, it's not even primarily a housing issue. It's largely a mental illness + drug addiction issue. As long as the city continues talking about it as if all of the homeless just magically got evicted when rents topped $2,000, it tells me just how serious they are about the problem.
Mismanagement = the high taxes relative to public services, the fact you're paying for parks you often can't use because they've been 'claimed' by the homeless, the fact that mass transit is so bad I'd rather walk 20 minutes than enter the metro just to wait 20 minutes anyway, the crumbling schools even though housing prices are $750k on average, the fact that poverty never seems to decline even as the city shoves millions and millions into non-profits who seem to just pilfer it all and come back next year. I'm sure people would be more willing to contribute to the city if the funds were properly used.
As for zoning, his logic is easy-to-follow: those who made SFH home laws (in the 50s/60s, etc.) were racist. Yet those laws still exist across much of suburbia. The implication is that suburbs that don't remove those restrictions are perpetuating systemic racism and culpable themselves. It's not a radical argument, it's a common argument made these days:
https://www.vox.com/22252625/america...les-how-to-fix
I tend to agree with this person: ""Calling my neighbors who are all wealthy, white homeowners racist is not helpful because as soon as you call a white person racist they kind of shut down and don’t really engage anymore,” he said. It will also “generally incite a quiet backlash at the ballot box,” which harms the effort to eradicate exclusionary zoning."
Suburban living is not my preference. But I can see why people would choose it. Instead of asking why people would live in such a morally-bankrupt suburban hellscape, the question should be: why can't our cities become as desirable as those in Europe or Asia, where urban living is in high demand?
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