Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The same folks voting for these laws have always hated poor people and immigrant families. In the DC suburbs where I grew up, there is tons of coded racist language around extended-family living situations (because hispanic immigrants disproportionately tend to have extended family living with them). They say “we want to preserve the character of the neighborhood” but what they mean is that they don’t like the idea of living near lower-income families who might try to afford to live in their neighborhood by having relatives share the expense. They don’t like apartments for the same reason: apartment complexes are one of the few ways in which lower-income people can afford to live in a wealthy school district. (In the snotty DC suburb where I grew up, people mocked folks who lived in the few apartment complexes in the area. Only after I grew up did I realize that these were perfectly nice, normal apartment complexes.)

There is nothing that brings out peoples’ racist character like housing and schools (check out city-data or the various forums for folks with kids in D.C.-area public schools).

It is easy to assume it's about race, but I think it's more a class issue. They would be doing the same thing if it were poor white people I would imagine.

Took the words right out of my mouth. Assuming this is a race issue is basically meaningless political grandstanding. It's a class issue, and the issue is universal. Rich don't want to live around middle class, middle class don't want to live around the poor, and the poor don't want homeless people living in their front yard. Humans are simply tribal, and want to be with members of their tribe.

Landlords want to make money, and as the parent pointed out, low income housing is clearly not a priority in the area.

People are tribal about race and culture too, not just class. Redlining laws were aimed at minorities that could afford to live in the white neighborhoods they were moving into. We've made that illegal now, so people look for other ways to achieve the same effect.

To be fair, if I owned a home in silicon Valley, it would presumably be most of my net worth, not to mention a significant shift in housing prices could bankrupt me. I would likely vote to artificially limit supply in the interest of self preservation.

The argument that X group "want to make money" and therefore will never discriminate is provably false. Restaurant owners (and hotel owners, and gas station owners...) in the South refused to serve black patrons for a century after the end of slavery.

What's your explanation for that behavior, if not racism? You might argue it's because their white customers would retaliate by not patronizing their business. But that just proves that businesses will discriminate based on race, even if it's not due to the owner's racism but their white customers'.

It's probably both. If they don't want poor families moving near them, that's classist. If they more readily assume a black or hispanic family is poor than a white or asian family (as an example), that's racist.

For example, seeing a family of any race with obvious signs of poverty (large family size, rundown vehicle or none at all, shabby clothes, etc) and not wanting them to move in would be classist. But assuming a black family is poor because they don't have obvious signs of prosperity (very nice car of the right brand, very nice clothes that aren't loud, few and well-behaved children, etc) is racist if the same class heuristics aren't used to determine if an asian family isn't poor.

Although classism is its own problem, it's also very often just a more palatable presentation of racism. In particular, if your baseline class assumption about various races is different and you don't want to associate with people below a certain class, the effect will be racism.

As someone who also grew up in the suburbs of DC, I can tell you that the anxiety was explicitly around Latino families moving in--not just poor ones.

I'm honestly baffled that anytime someone on HN brings up racism in the US it's immediately countered with: "It's about class, not race." There's ample history in Jim Crow laws that white Americans discriminated explicitly by race. Specific to the region mentioned by the grandparent, Washington, DC, like much of the South, had racial covenants that made it illegal for African Americans to live in much of the city.

Of course there has been, and continues to be, very real discrimination by class. But we know that legal discrimination by race in the US existed well into living memory. Why would we immediately assume that it has stopped?

https://wamu.org/story/14/01/17/how_racial_covenants_shaped_...

s/would be/are/g

plenty of white people in the bay area that can't afford housing.

I think it becomes a race issue when majority of those displaced families are immigrants and out of those majority are Hispanic families. Yes, I agree there will always be a couple of poor white families out of 100 displaced families but it is not fair to say it is NOT a race issue and just a class issue.

Absolutely, I've seen such petty claims on HOAs generally aimed at the poor. Doesn't matter their race (usually they are white, simply because there are more white people in the US.)

Isn't it plausible that it's neither race nor class, and people just want their property values to keep climbing? I assume people like it when their property appreciates in value, but maybe that incentive is nullified by increased property taxes?

Tax doesn't keep up with the value increase due to prop 13.

So there is another possible motive besides racism or classism?

As someone who did not grow up in the US I can assure you that housing policies to avoid overcrowding (the hallmark of urban poverty) have existed for a very long time in places with no racial or foreign immigration issues.

I don’t doubt that in the South such ideas were co-opted by advocates of the racial status-quo. But it’s not helpful to project that notion onto other places, even if they are in the US.

Anti-development mindset may exist everywhere, but in the U.S. (in the north as well as the south), there is a special link bewteen housing policies and racism compared to America's European counterparts.

For example, suburbanization due to cars happened in the U.S. as well as Europe. But if you look at large Western European cities (London, Rome, Munich, Hamburg, Madrid, Paris), their populations have been stable or growing since 1950, despite suburbanization. But if you look at major U.S. cities (Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Pittsburgh, Detroit, etc.) you see a very different pattern. They lost a quarter to a half of their population in just a few decades, even as the surrounding metro areas kept growing. That was the result of white flight--race-driven mass migration. Today, Philadelphia is majority black and low income, while the surrounding suburbs are predominantly white and much higher income. That's the exact opposite of say Paris, where lower-income folks live in the suburbs not the city.

It's hard to look at America's history of racism in housing and urban development policy and not think that it carries through to present day. For example, the U.S. has much stronger opposition to public transport than Europe. Might it be because public transport inherently allows integration and mixing, something that people in a racially-heterogeneous society find more threatening?

Of course the specifics of US housing policies incorporated the racism of the time but my point is that many such policies also exist in countries where such racial tensions have never existed. So there are clearly many good non-racist reasons for such policies to exist and that shouldn’t be dismissed.

Likewise it’s counter-productive to view US history purely through the lens of racism, important as it may be. White flight occurred during a post-war boom of new housing, new roads, especially the new interstate highways, and newly wealthy post-WWII economy full of qualified GI-bill graduates. The baby boom still remains the highest rate of births the US has seen, and all those families needed housing. Developers built the suburbs in response to those factors. The modern family had their own house, their own garden, a clean, quiet street, fresh air. The modern man drove his own clean, personal, car to work in the city on one of the new highways. Meanwhile automobile/tire/gas companies were literally buying up city street car services and closing them down to force cities to replace them with busses (which they could sell them). Similar stories happened in cities all over the world during this period of post-war economic expansion. But the story you tell above gives racism the sole credit for what happened and that’s not even remotely accurate.

Was racism a factor? Absolutely. “Redlining” by banks prevented black families from buying a house in the suburbs. In some cases realtors engaged in “blockbusting” so that they could sell all of the houses in a neighbourhood.

Race is a huge and important factor in American history and politics but the narrative you give above is really not representative of what happened.

Likewise your description of Europe is misleading. Many European cities lost their industrial base and never recovered, one only needs to look at the North of England to find ample examples (Birmingham, the UK’s heavily industrial “second city” had its peak in 1951). Meanwhile the suburbs boomed.

Your list of major US cities excludes LA, the 2nd largest, which has boomed.

I'm not saying racism is, for example, the only cause for suburbanization. However, it's not fair to lump it together with a bunch of other factors. It's a uniquely important factor that had effects that distinguish the U.S. from culturally-similar industrialized countries.

Your example proves it: cars enabled people to have "their own house, their own garden, a clean, quiet street" in Western Europe too. Western Europe had a baby boom too. But U.S. cities lost 25-50% of their population, while Western European cities continued to grow steadily that whole time. U.S. cities today remain inverted compared to European ones--many are low income and majority-minority even though the surrounding suburbs are prosperous.

You need something to explain that disparity. And it can't be things like automobiles or the desire to live on a quiet street, because that existed contemporaneously in Europe too.

It is simply not true that European cities continued to grow in the manner you describe. Deindustralisation and urban decay were the defining elements of post-war Europe. The loss of industrial employers in cities led to conditions that were so bad that the post-war UK government demolished large amounts of city-center housing as “slums” and the development of an increasingly dysfunctional urban environment - Birmingham, which peaked in 1951 was the inspiration for Stanley Kubrik’s “A Clockwork Orange”.

The contemporary inversion of the core of European cities is a modern phenomenon because most European cities spent the latter half of the 20th century in a similarly impoverished situation to the US. It is gentrification and taxpayer-funded regeneration that has fixed this problem - Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the problem never occurred. So how did Europe fix it? Perhaps because Europe has better social programs and social housing and is able and willing to fund them.

As a European looking at the US I see a place that, despite its complex history, is really not so different in terms of the factors driving urban and suburban living. Its racism may be unique and distinguishing but it is not always the most important factor.

It's interesting you use Birmingham as an example. Birmingham peaked in 1951, but lost only 10% of its population by the 1980s, and is now nearly as populous as it was before. Philadelphia, a comparably-sized city, lost a quarter of its population since 1950, and never recovered. Baltimore lost 40% of its population and never recovered. D.C. lost 30% of its population and is only gradually recovering now. Chicago lost 25% of its population. Detroit lost 2/3 of its population, even while the surrounding suburbs were booming by providing the cars that made suburbanization possible. Major European cities (Munich, Rome, Madrid, London, Paris), meanwhile, grew consistently during that time.

Where is the precedent in Western Europe for a city of 1.8 million people (bigger than Munich or Barcelona) losing 65% of its population? It doesn't exist.

And unlike Birmingham, whose decline was tied to specific economic problems, the metro areas of these U.S. cities continued to do well despite staggering population losses and ghettofication in the core cities. It's not like the suburbs of Birmingham were prospering while the core city was in decline.

Europeans really don't understand the scale of the race problem in the U.S. Many Americans don't understand it--it's hard to understand until you spend some time in Philadelphia, etc., and see a place that is majority minority and disproportionately low income, surrounded by prosperous mostly white suburbs. It's a demographic trend that happened literally because white people didn't want to live next to black people, and simply left.

Your numbers aren't quite right. Birmingham lost 15% of its population between 1950 and 2000, Philadelphia lost 26% in that period. It's not hard to find other similar industrial UK cities which were harder hit. Newcastle lost 24% of its population over the same period, Liverpool lost a staggering 43%. Even in London, within the inner city where industry resided the working poor lived, e.g. Hackney, lost 22% of its population. None of these areas have recovered their former populations. This refutes your claim about London growing - it's the suburbs within greater London that have grown and it is there where the population shifted. Just as in the US, cities have shrunk while their surrounding metro areas have grown.

Having seen the desolation of the boarded up industrial sites of Philadelia and of the UK, I can say that they look pretty similar (that is to say shocking - though far more so in my youth). The general pattern of cities in the UK's industrial north is exactly the same as that seen in the US - a small, regenerated downtown, surrounded by small, low-quality dwellings occupied by low income families, surrounded by increasingly nice suburbs where everybody else lives. I'm not sure why anybody thinks this problem is unique to the US.

"The same folks voting for these laws have always hated poor people and immigrant families. "

Reminds me of people in affluent VA and MD suburbs. They are super liberal and for diversity but they will do whatever they can do to not allow anybody that's not well off or different even near their neighborhoods or schools. SV is probably the same.

> The same folks voting for these laws have always hated poor people and immigrant families.

In Cupertino I seriously doubt the residents of new construction apartments are going to be poor by any definition. A new 1-bedroom apartment would likely rent for 3600+, and a 1-bedroom condo would sell for north of a million. The new residents would likely be well educated and easily in the top 5% income bracket in the US.

Cupertino isn’t exactly “white”, Cupertino village has (had?) an American food place designed especially for Chinese people to try American food (everything else in the mall was very Chinese). I mean, they might like high housing prices, but I would say cupertino is far from anti immigrant.

Much like the Latinos in the article talking about the newcomers who are “just ruining the community.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com