Hacker News Reader

Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

Suburbs used to be regularly annexed into cities; in some places they still are.

This stops being the norm when desegregation occurs. Now that all races must be allowed to mix in schools, businesses and housing, whites flee to the suburbs, put up giant financial barriers in the form of zoning, and refuse to be annexed.

These days overt racial politics is now dogwhistled as concerns about crime or undesirables or culture. But that's a big heaping portion of why things are the way they are.

(This only really applies to suburbs within the same state of the main city; New Jersey, most of which is suburbs, would not face the same annexation pressure since the main cities their suburbs are part of (Philadelphia and New York) are not in their state and can't legally annex them.)

View on HN

> whites flee to the suburbs, put up giant financial barriers in the form of zoning

In terms of $/sq.ft. an urban residence in the US will almost universally be priced higher than a suburban one. There are a few exceptions to the rule (Atherton might be pricier than SF, Beverly Hills pricier than LA), but in general if you have a fixed price point in mind, suburbs will get you more space for your dollar.

However, the cheapest dwellings (yet still nice and desirable) in the cities, the condos, are actually cheaper than the cheapest SFHs in the most of the suburbs.

Concerns about crime, undesirables, or culture are real, and taxes. They are neither inherently racial nor dog whistles, but are only so because of how American history shook out along racial lines. You are inverting cause and effect here.

>how American history shook out along racial lines.

Your comment is contradictory. On the one hand you say that crime, who is undesirable, and culture ate incidental and have nothing to do with race and then in this sentence you acknowledge that American history was largely determined by race, although you use very passive language as though that "shaking out" was some benign, incidental process instead of the cruel and brutal system it was.

It's not contradictory at all. I'm saying historically past racist policies created a racially correlated class system, and I'll even say that in a great deal of regressive areas the past was very recent, say up to the 70's, but within the most recent generation, many of the issues people are concerned about are genuinely class issues, and they only appear to be race issues to the extent that race is still correlated with class.

But there is a difference between saying people are primarily motivated by race vs. primarily motivated by class but using race as a proxy vs. primarily motivated by class only. Given that these are distinct things, it's not helpful to insist on identifying everything as being secretly racist, not because it conveniently absolves anyone of responsibility but because it muddies the discussion and denies possible solutions.

What thoughts do you have on whether or not it could be both classism and racism at the same time? Or is the hypothesis that on the spectrum running between a system primarily demotivated (since it's mostly behavior to avoid certain things) by race and class alone, some parts of American society post-70s have drastically shifted towards classism (and I guess by extension, racism is no longer a factor)? Trying to think through the implication of your thought.

I would default to rasicm first, since using race as a proxy is still racist.

Some States allow cities to spread across county lines, Texas does this. Some don’t allow this a City has to be entirely within its original County and contiguous. That is how California does it, which has one city that merged with its county: San Francisco. In at least one case, there is a city that is composed of 5 entire counties: NYC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com