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.

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?