Mother Jones frets that moving “poor people to the suburbs is bad for the environment.” After all, it’s pretty meaningless if all these millennials moving to desirable inner-city neighborhoods to live low-impact lifestyles are merely forcing poor people to move to the suburbs where they will have to waste energy by driving a lot and heating their large homes.
The solution, the magazine suggests, is eliminating urban zoning that limit heights and densities. “Why are all the buildings [in Washington DC] merely six or 10 stories tall? Why not 40, when the prices indicate that the demand is there?” After all, polls of poor people show that “They would rather live in the projects than in a shelter.”
How generous of Mother Jones to wish that all poor people could live in the projects! But did anyone ask the poor if they would rather live in three-bedroom, single-family homes than in the project? The Antiplanner is all in favor of ridding the cities of zoning, but zoning also must be eliminated from suburban and rural areas. That way people can choose how they want to live based on the real costs, not on the artificially inflated costs found in places like Washington DC.
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As I’ve said before, no one complained about urban sprawl when wealthy people started moving to the suburbs in the early nineteenth century. No one complained about urban sprawl when middle-class (college-educated) families started moving to the suburbs in the late nineteenth century. It was only when working-class people started moving to the suburbs in the mid-twentieth century that urban sprawl became an issue. Then answer then was to house them in government-built, high-rising “projects” in the cities. Just because a few millennials think that urban life is attractive doesn’t make that solution any more compassionate today than it was sixty-five years ago.
Territorial stigma has always been a concern regardless of where you live. Speakers of less favored languages and cultural identities, it’s far worse in Europe. Conservatives are routinely blamed for not caring about people, especially immigrants, but others say just the opposite. It’s the concept of the liberal vision on how the world should be rather than real life human beings. You’d be hard pressed to show how blacks, whites ore any other person is affected by liberal policies as the problems tend to worsen. They’re for helping people who are disadvantaged and will go through any means to alleviate disadvantage where as the conservative approach is to eliminate disadvantage. The liberals wanna help the poor…while they’re poor. The conservatives want them to stop being poor. Rush Limbaugh (not my favorite person mind you) said it so well “The Democratic Party needs a permanent underclass” they need a certain level of poverty, a level of unskilled, uneducated, hopeless people to need the government as a means of support…….but in a normal economy, as people escape the bonds of poverty and climb up the economic ladder, they discover they don’t need the democrats and they vote in different ways.
Who wants to live around poor people? Seriously?
When I lived in NE PDX, the trash across the street rode ATVs (you read that right) around the neighborhood at all hours. They were visibly intoxicated in public. They yelled and screamed a lot. They let an alcoholic friend live in his pickup in front their rented slum house, and their friend would wake up at 2 AM and rev his engine for an hour. He would go through our trash and the neighbors’ trash and not bother picking up any trash he dropped. The poor trashy kids, instead of walking a block or two to the neighborhood park, would kick soccer balls down the length of five or six houses, often hitting cars.
Who wants to live around people like this?
The Antiplanner is all in favor of ridding the cities of zoning, but zoning also must be eliminated from suburban and rural areas.
Your employer tried that already, and it failed miserably. Surely he’s not going to give ‘er a whirl again?
DS
The liberal millennials have very short (or no) memories.
It has only been in the last 10-15 years that the massive housing projects in places like St. Louis and many other cities were torn down. Many of these projects had nicknames like Beirut or Gaza because the level of violence and the standard of living was equal to lawless third world countries.
Let’s start this disaster all over again? Even the current administration would not do something that outrageous.
I don’t think the problem itself is zoning overall. The problem is that zoning and the urban planning profession have essentially joined forces to make people capitulate to the whims of some very naive people. At the rise of America’s urban growth (1870s to the 1920’s) residential, commercial and industrial spaces were closely knitted together, they shared the same architecture. But it was the horrors of the industrial city landscape personified by Upton Sinclair novel “The Jungle” that turned cities into less desired places. So zoning was a component to otherwise local governments to separate the three. So zoning was meant for aesthetic improvement but it was later planning that entrenched zoning for socio-economic or racial reasons to keep certain people out. Today urban planning is a profession, composed mostly of failed architects; if they cant design a building worth appreciating, the solution is to design the entire cadre of buildings to strain out competition. They can design an entire town with a fine tooth comb and on paper they appear wonderful but realized doesn’t work out so well.
It is far from clear whether ‘good intentions plus stupidity’ or ‘evil intentions plus intelligence’ have wrought more harm in the world. it is worth taking a moment to reflect on all of the urban planning successes and failures of the past which had serious unintended consequences: urban renewal, pedestrian malls, highway mania, single use zoning, federal housing subsidies, Section 8, public housing projects, etc. It appears that almost every urban planning approach ends up, over time, either not accomplishing the things it was touted as delivering, or brought serious negative side effects despite massive out pour of advertisement to support it. Thomas Sowell put it humorously there are 3 questions that will destroy any argument on the left. 1) At what cost 2) Compared to what 3) What hard evidence do you have.
Mother Jones frets that moving “poor people to the suburbs is bad for the environment.”
What an astoundingly ignorant statement. Put aside for the moment the fact that there is no evidence that this is true. What exactly do they mean by “moving” people to the suburbs? When poor people move to the suburbs, they do so of their volition and because it is advantageous to them to do so. Why should they not be able to enjoy what so many of us already have?
This only reinforces my impression about the deep thinkers on the Left that they view the poor as pawns, pieces on a chess board to be used as instruments of their grand designs for society. The statements about living in the projects versus a shelter are just appalling and show out of touch the writer really is.
The argument about zoning is just a non-sequitur, and betrays an understanding of economics. Dense development is a response to high land prices. The poor are not going to be living where land is extraordinarily expensive (at least not in a market economy).
It is funny how millions of dollars are spent to make a few poor people live in neighborhoods that are just a notch above poor, but never spent to make poor housing in rich neighborhoods. It doesn’t do the poor families any help to do that. It is just a 1970s planning theory that spends those millions of dollars just to cause racial and neighborhood problems.
In the West, there is a million examples of middle class whites being perfectly happy with middle class blacks and Hispanics and Asians moving into their neighborhoods. It is the clash of bad neighbor culture, not race or class, that really leads to neighborhood friction.
What an astoundingly ignorant statement.
No.
A classmate of mine did his PhD on this. The poor work multiple jobs, often across town. and are required to drive, drive, drive to get to their two or three jobs. The non-permanence of many of these jobs means a cycle of driving.
HTH
DS
“A classmate of mine did his PhD on this. The poor work multiple jobs, often across town. and are required to drive, drive, drive to get to their two or three jobs.” How many of these poor people are Hispanic and how many of them work in yard work. (Excuse me, “landscaping”.)
If we’re looking at the same article – http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/12/pushing-poor-people-suburbs-bad-environment-rich-urban-gentrification – the author is assuming that the people being forced to the suburbs already have work in the city. The author also points out that they have social networks in place. And the author seems to believe we’ve learned more about projects and can build them better than in the past.
While I disagree with some of the detailed points, I do agree that regulations are swords that cut both ways. They can do and they can do bad. That’s why we’re always talking about “unintended” consequences.
More to the point though, the Mother Jones piece is a case focusing on what the author wants to see and ignoring what they don’t. Or in the case of the family moving to the suburbs, just making stuff up. The New York Times is a 5 part series – http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/invisible-child/#/?chapt=Part 1 full of information that I not only would look at differently than the MJ writer, but at times I would argue does not say what the MJ writer says it does.
The biggest issue I have is the importance of the families existing social network. Ben Adler sees it as only being a plus. He doesn’t share with us that the girls family is deeply entrenched in the drug trade. Some of them have died in shootings, others AIDs and more worrisome both her mother and father have been in prison and have a history of substance abuse. While I would never advocate for them to simply cut all ties and leave, it would seem the best thing for this family would be to not have their existing social network in their every day lives.
High-rise buildings to warehouse the poor has been tried, and not been much of a success story.
Now the strategy is to move them out of desirable areas close to downtown employment to suburban areas that have little or no NIMBYism – often far from any employment, where they become suburban slums in the finest European tradition.
The Antiplanner wrote:
How generous of Mother Jones to wish that all poor people could live in the projects! But did anyone ask the poor if they would rather live in three-bedroom, single-family homes than in the project? The Antiplanner is all in favor of ridding the cities of zoning, but zoning also must be eliminated from suburban and rural areas. That way people can choose how they want to live based on the real costs, not on the artificially inflated costs found in places like Washington DC.
Don’t forget that prices in the D.C. area started to edge out of control in the 1970’s when decisions were made by elected officials to limit “sprawl” in several large suburban counties on the Maryland side of the Potomac RIver (this has also happened in area on the Virginia side, but not as much). A “culture” of opposition to suburban growth started to take place (curiously) after the notorious 1968 riots in the District of Columbia following the assassination in Memphis of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
As I’ve said before, no one complained about urban sprawl when wealthy people started moving to the suburbs in the early nineteenth century. No one complained about urban sprawl when middle-class (college-educated) families started moving to the suburbs in the late nineteenth century. It was only when working-class people started moving to the suburbs in the mid-twentieth century that urban sprawl became an issue. Then answer then was to house them in government-built, high-rising “projects” in the cities. Just because a few millennials think that urban life is attractive doesn’t make that solution any more compassionate today than it was sixty-five years ago.
I agree – and remember that much of that 19th Century and early 20th century suburban came about as the direct result of improved transportation technology, which (at the time) ran on steel wheels on steel rails in the form of electric street railways, and thanks to railroads with names like Baltimore and Ohio Railroad; Washington and Old Dominion Railway; Washington, Baltimore and Annapolis Electric Railway (WB&A). These railroads led to suburban growth that would now be denounced as “sprawl,”
Sandy Teal wrote:
It is funny how millions of dollars are spent to make a few poor people live in neighborhoods that are just a notch above poor, but never spent to make poor housing in rich neighborhoods. It doesn’t do the poor families any help to do that. It is just a 1970s planning theory that spends those millions of dollars just to cause racial and neighborhood problems.
It’s also about locating large and suburban housing projects as far from the wealthiest and most-influential parts of a jurisdiction as possible.
In my home county, the local government started importing poor people into the area (on the other side of the county from the wealthy and fashionable neighborhoods) in a bid to increase transit patronage, bad things happened. For one thing, poor people, just like others, value their mobility and many (most?) of them own private motor vehicles, in spite of the cost associated with same.
In the West, there is a million examples of middle class whites being perfectly happy with middle class blacks and Hispanics and Asians moving into their neighborhoods. It is the clash of bad neighbor culture, not race or class, that really leads to neighborhood friction.
That is absolutely correct.
You get what you pay for, and when you pay for poor people, you end up with a bumper crop of them.
Instead of subsidizing the creation of poor people, maybe we should outlaw them. (1) A high minimum wage to encourage automation. (2) No welfare. (3) Forced labor for the unemployed. (4) Free one-way tickets to somewhere else for those who won’t work.
In general poor people are poor because they lack future time orientation. They make very dumb decisions with money, labor, and lifestyle. When the Bible calls for generosity to the poor, it is speaking of widows, orphans, the diseased and maimed, and traumatized individuals we would recognize today as PTSD veterans. It was for these people that traditional pre-1960’s welfare was for. As far as the voluntarily indolent and shiftless go, it says “if anyone will not work, neither shall he eat”, and as far as the divorce epidemic and voluntary single motherhood it says “I hate divorce”.
“Now the strategy is to move them out of desirable areas close to downtown employment to suburban areas that have little or no NIMBYism – often far from any employment, where they become suburban slums in the finest European tradition.” ~C. P. Zilliacus
Every metropolitan area in the city has vastly more jobs in the suburbs than downtown. Even if you take into account the entire central city the contrast remains high. For example, in the Twin Cities, for every job in St. Paul or Minneapolis, there are more than 2 jobs in the suburbs. Housing people in the crack stacks does not improve their access too employment opportunities, it hinders it.
http://stats.metc.state.mn.us/stats/pdf/Employment_MS2010.pdf
Andrew with hate speech and superstitious Bible bullshit for the win!
For example, in the Twin Cities, for every job in St. Paul or Minneapolis, there are more than 2 jobs in the suburbs.
That doesn’t mean anything: the area of suburb is much greater than the area of the city. You need an honest comparative, such as job/km2. Don’t let the Cox’s of the world dupe you with incomplete pictures.
DS
“That doesn’t mean anything: the area of suburb is much greater than the area of the city. ”
And density of jobs doesn’t mean anything either. More people live in suburbs than urban centers, therefore it follows that there will be more total jobs in suburban areas.
And density of jobs doesn’t mean anything either
Tell that to the firms seeking agglomeration economies and QOL for their employees – they’ve been doing it wrong for years, if the italicized is correct.
DS
Yes, because quality of life (can’t you just stop being a pretentious prick and write without numerous acronyms) is determined by jobs in areas like downtown Seattle, an area that has a lack of affordable housing, a lack of green space for children and dogs (your asinine “stroller congestion” comment aside), and a high crime rate. That equates to a high “QOL”. GTFO dickhead. Move from your high QOL fifth-acre lot and then maybe I’ll listen to your bullshit.