Increased resident participation in planning produces extreme wealth segregation [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Increased resident participation in planning produces extreme wealth segregation [pdf]

its.ucla.edu

The findings confirm what people who talk about urban planning say, but it never seems to trickle into the wider world. You still hear people say that we have to restrict growth to keep costs down, widen highways to reduce traffic, etc. even though those ideas are thoroughly discredited.

It's incredibly disheartening.

What made me extremely disheartened in my neighbors was joining Nextdoor.com and seeing what the majority of my neighbors thought was "bad" for our neighborhood. They literally complained about loud birds in the morning and tried to organize a protest against a stop sign due to fears of "increased urbanization." Also lord forbid you sit in your car while Mexican, very suspicious circumstances!! Turns out it was just dudes eating lunch in their truck between jobs. This is in the Bay Area Peninsula.

>This is in the Bay Area Peninsula.

Or any other wealthy area.

>Also lord forbid you sit in your car while Mexican, very suspicious circumstances!!

Only on weekends, the help doesn't come on weekends...

Try the city-data.com Baltimore or Chicago forums. Really interesting insight into how racist peoples' thinking becomes when issues of neighborhood and kids' school come into the picture.

Nextdoor is much the same in Seattle; not as asinine in my area, but... heh... yeah. It generally represents the distillation of NIMBYism.

Yeah. I was actually shocked that they were bothering to try and organize a protest against a stop sign- at an intersection where there are always accidents from people not merging correctly! - of all things. Unhappily for them, the stop sign was ultimately installed.

Wonder how effective that turned out to be in preventig accidents. I don't drive so I really have no clue but a stop sign seems like something that wouldn't influence me much - then again that's mostly why I don't want to learn how to drive :)

Do you not know that you're required by law to come to a complete stop before a stop sign? It's legally not up to you how much a stop sign "influences" you.

From what I've seen when I pay attention to someone driving it seems more of a judgment call - but then again I don't usually pay attention because I find driving boring.

It obviously sets the rules so you can assign blame easier but is it really effective as a prevention tool ?

> it seems more of a judgment call

Ummmm maybe things are different where you live, but I certainly hope whoever drives you around doesn't drive near where I live. Here it's definitely not a "judgment call" and people will be quite angry if you ignore stop signs.

If you've ever observed drivers, you will have noticed that stop signs and traffic safety laws in general don't influence any of them much.

The Washington, DC, neighborhood Hawthorne (a triangle along the city line with Maryland, running east from Rock Creek Park) for a while had many signs reading "no sidewalks in Hawthorne." Among the arguments against sidewalks was that they would attract crime. I don't know how many criminals are willing to commit felonies but not to walk in the street.

And yes, our neighborhood (not Hawthorne) listserve now and then has stuff about "African American male walking down the alley." This usually brings on a quick email storm, since a fair bit of the listserve is AA. Then everyone calms down for a few weeks.

> we have to restrict growth to keep costs down

This one always confuses me and cracks me up,classic correlation vs causation thing. Prices aren't going up because of new apartments, new apartments are going up because of rising prices. That people can't understand that drives me crazy.

I think it's both. Many people want to live in a dense neighborhood (hence urbanization), and if you restrict growth, you make your area unattractive to those people.

Yes, you get less people but the prices go up even more because "restrict growth" is the same as "reduce future supply"

Supply obviously decreases, but my point is that demand decreases so much that prices fall.

It is disheartening, but not surprising. Zoning officials and others in city government don't just bow out when contraindicated by evidence. Instead they just arrange for new research with what they hope will be different results.

They keep coming with excuses because they keep being asked for excuses.

You can't force people who don't want to live with the poor to live with the poor. Or, at least, nothing good will ever come out of it.

Ever heard about things like contempt and hatred? Humans are quite capable of ridding themselves of unwanted relationships.

We are all about voluntary relationships in our love lives and social lives. Not so much with the government. :)

>>> Such restrictions do not appear to lead directly to the concentration of poverty but rather to the concentration of affluence, a finding which adds important nuance to the way in which exclusionary zoning techniques isolate the poor.

Is it any great surprise that wealthier people are also more mobile?

>> Cities that have more separate regulatory oversight mechanisms are more segregated.

I wonder how much time the author has spent in zoning meetings. These days nearly everything requires some sort of rezoning, variance or special permit. So it's all about developers with the savvy to get such things from whatever board/counsel is in charge. Developers are only interested in high-value/high-profit developments. So what gets built is expensive. It's no great social mystery.

Yes it's quite amusing where I live. The local planning board wants "affordable housing" as a component of everything, but they are so micromanaging and require so many repeated applications and presentations (often which are sent back with comments like "windows need to be bigger"). Thus we have large, expensive developments because anything "affordable" would never meet all the criteria on appearance, building materials, etc., and the only developers who can get anything approved are ones with enough wealth to fund the team and the time needed to navigate this process.

I am not sure how I feel about this. Now that I have a family and children, I want to live in an area where my neighbors are at the same socioeconomic level. I don't want my neighbor to be way richer or way poorer than we are. I don't see how that is bad, wrong or racist!!!

Empathy and humility are two benefits of living next to neighbors who are way richer or poorer.

Here's where I'm glad I'm anonymous here, so this can't be construed as bragging but rather adding a different viewpoint: I live in a neighborhood (married with kid) where my income is x4 that of my neighborhood (and I'm making less than the national average salary for a sr. software developer). It's humbling and drives me to find ways to care for those around me.

Hear hear!

I live not far from a really, really run-down part of town, with a grocery store that seems to attract the most downtrodden of society.

I love shopping there, even though everyone I know has sworn it off, because of how it always reminds me: a lot of people have it much worse off than me, but they are still human and worthy of compassion and respect.

I'll shop there even after I've sold my business and have enough pocket money to share, because I never want to lose touch with the non-shiny, fat, missing-limbs, dirt-poor, you name it, humanity that everyone else wants to forget about as quickly as possible.

Stop and think of it not in terms or whether it reflects badly on you but on the consequences for society. There is nothing good that can be said for creating enclaves of poverty.

Sure there is. We are often told that inequality is a bad thing. We are also often told that this effect is local, not global. I.e., people complain about rising within-country inequality and barely talk about falling global inequality.

By keeping the rich away from the poor we can avoid the harms of inequality. We can have poor neighborhoods, rich neighborhoods, etc, each of which has negligible inequality.

This is either very good sarcasm or...

... or a more or less rational response demonstrating that the challenge by the previous commenter "nothing good to say" can be met by a sufficiently twisted mind.

Not to mention, the grandparent's suggestion has the side-benefit of more-or-less being global reality already.

I'm following the premises of inequality mongers and deriving logically a conclusion that disagrees with their mood affiliation.

Do you disagree with the premise that local inequality is worse than global?

As a parent, you have an obligation to provide your child with the best, safest, environment that you are reasonably able to provide. More upscale neighborhoods generally have better schools, activities, opportunities, and so forth. It is absolute madness to disregard this solely because of some vague, unknown societal effects hypothesized in a policy paper.

And rightly so. But are poor people not allowed or entitled to have the same level of safety and benefits for their family like everyone else, or is it ok to associate and tar an entire socioeconomic group with crime and drugs as some seem to do and leave them to their fate? How is this an egalitarian, equal or democratic society that discriminates against kids even before they are born?

Poor people have no choice but to live with it while the more resourceful can afford to isolate and protect themselves but that's not an equal society or one that aspires to be one. No one can advocate that one should not try to get the best for themselves and their children but the if the bare basics of education, healthcare and safety are reliant on socio economic background that there is little incentive for those in power who are always from a privileged socioeconomic background to actually provide meaningful equality beyond posturing.

I think there is a danger of an exclusionary way of thinking that encourages ghettos and the kind of entitled thinking often seen here itself on hacker news that presumes in spite of all these disadvantages somehow all these children should compete fairly and succeed with their more privileged counterparts and if they don't and get stuck in a cycle of poverty they only have themselves to blame.

This kind of thinking leads to a bigoted society, and you then can't complain when you or your children are similarly excluded by those from a higher social-economic background in neighborhoods and other aspects of life, when not possible legally by financial or social means. This doesn't produce an enlightened and egalitarian society, you reap what you sow.

> As a parent, you have an obligation to provide your child with the best, safest, environment that you are reasonably able to provide.

Ah, see, I'm not a parent, so who knows, my perspective may well change when I am, but if you asked me what a parent's job is, that is not the first thing I would say. I think I would instead say something hand-wavy about raising valuable, high functioning, members of adult society. Certainly, safety is a prerequisite to making it into adult society, but it seems like quite a lot of the stuff parents do to try to provide their child with "the best, safest, environment that they are reasonably able to provide" is counter to the main goal of raising good people. Keeping kids segregated from "those people" (whoever that happens to be in the parents' view) is a perfect example.

Society benefits and so do you from socioeconomic ally integrated neighborhoods. You get cooks and shops staffed. You get people who dine out etc. It takes a village can also be it takes a neighborhood.

You also get crime. That's probably the biggest factor pushing middle class people away from poor neighborhoods. Nevermind that the innocent poor people stuck in those neighborhoods have to suffer the crime.

That sounds like it's mostly the result of a lack of law enforcement, and a lack of good social programs. Crime can be addressed.

It's not just poor people who commit crime.

Why does having a family make you not want to have neighbors who are way richer or poorer than you are?

Me, I just want to have good neighbors. Both rich and poor people can be good neighbors.

Probably he doesn't want his kids to do drugs and crime and get shitty grades. Or be the victim of crime

That's unfair. Not all rich people are criminals.

Also not all rich people are druggies.

Now that I have family and children, I find it important that my children have contact with people in different socioecenomic situations, so they understand that not everybody lives like us.

I'm very glad that one of the best friends of my oldest son is Moroccan, and another is half Japanese, although his school is still remarkable white for this neighbourhood (perhaps Montessori schools appeal more to white, educated or affluent people?).

Of course in the end, I don't want anyone to be way richer or poorer than we are, but as long as that's the reality we live in, I'd like my children to be aware of that.

sorry for the late response but stupid HN doesn't notify me when i get a response. I will bitch about this until they implement it :)

You guys bring up a ton of great points. I do want my kids to be aware of other "classes" not to grow up in a bubble but I don't have to live next to a poor neighbor for them to understand poverty and care about the poor.

I grew up middle class most of my life and I have a lot of empathy (I think/hope) mostly because my parents taught me that. I remember when I didn't finish my food as a kid my dad would say "there are children starving in Ethiopia and you want to throw half your plate away" (no offense, i grew up in Egypt as a kid and there was a famine in Ethiopia at the time). Or when a button on a shirt falls off, my mom would fix it instead of just throwing away the entire shirt like many people in the USA would do (I assume). Or collecting money for a struggling family in our church... These are all small examples but they helped me understand that not everyone had it as good/bad as we did.

My point is, you can teach your kid empathy and compassion. Take them to feed the homeless, have them donate money to the poor. make sandwiches for a shelter. etc. etc...

Correlation =/= causation. High-end housing located within poorer neighborhoods is priced lower because home-buyers value those units less than the same house located within richer neighborhoods.

As a thought exercise, create 100 towns with different distributions between wealthy and poor areas and price the homes in your head. The random distributions are related to what the article would describe as "resident participation".

I love this sort of non-intuitive research.

My neighborhood built a fancy public-funded park last year. It's amazing and all, but it cost an absolute fortune to build, especially when considering the park two blocks down! It's completely unbelievable that so much time and energy went into this park. Hell, once the park was finished, a two million dollar house was built right next to it. Go figure. It's completely feel-good civics and it seems to be getting harder and hard to explain why things like this are very bad for communities overall.

Silly anecdote - at the opening of the park's construction, there was a giant pile of puke on the sidewalk where the park's staff put a tent. When walking past them, my dog tries to eat the puke, the head of staff comes up to me and makes a comment about how he's probably just eating a brownie. Disregarding the chocolate nonchalance, she was completely oblivious to the giant vomit stain two feet aware from her until I corrected her. Talk about not seeing the trees from the forest.

The communist underpinnings of this study are laughable. The author is attempting to assert that the quality of life of people in the nicer areas of town would be enhanced by mixing in lower socio-economic groups. That's funny... none of the people in the nicer areas believe a shred of that, else they'd move to the other areas of town. Beyond that, the author's solution to this imagined problem is to dismantle the things that make the nice part of town the nice part of town. Perhaps we should get rid of nice hotels and restaurants, while we're at it.

Wealth is not a resource, it's an indicator. It's directly related to a person's integrity, drive, ingenuity, intelligence, education, and physical capabilities. There are people that have genuinely been kicked in the teeth by life, but we have never lived in an era of greater opportunity in the US.

So why is Houston so economically segregated?

Very valid comment. It is quite segregated (goo.gl/MbPC5N).

After a bit of research, it seems that maybe Houston does have something like zoning after all. Apparently, there are lot size restrictions, density restrictions, buffering ordinances, and private "deed restrictions" which limit the types of business that can be in a neighborhood.

From an article about Houston: "Instead, it’s the communities with the time, resources and political clout that essentially have the power to restrict development within their borders. That pushes it to other areas without a meaningful discussion of the citywide implications.

The result: as Houston becomes more dense, not all places will change equally. “We’re coming up with rules to make Houston liberalized in terms of density and development … but giving particular neighborhoods tools to opt out,” Festa said."

http://goo.gl/cTMO2d

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