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Comment by im3w1l | Hacker News Reader

I can maybe try. What are the qualities we would want and not want in a neighbor?

A top priority I would think is we don't want someone who makes us feel unsafe, so there should be a penalty for such things as getting into fights and crime, perhaps petty crime especially.

On the other hand we do want someone that is friendly and helps take care of the commons, someone that helps clean up the street from litter and someone that arranges block parties to help people get to know each other.

There are also factors where people have strong preferences and compatibility is important, stuff like loud late night parties (it's reasonable to have neighborhoods both with and without) and communities where you have to have a perfectly manicured lawn (compare HOA).

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> What are the qualities we would want and not want in a neighbor?

Ah, but that's exactly the problem. There are a ton of places in this country where people would answer that as "people of the same race, with the same values as me".

How is wanting to live near people “with the same values as me” a problem? My kids will pick up values from the neighborhood kids. Why wouldn’t I want to live in a neighborhood where people share my values?

Heck, in my experience as a brown guy traveling in some pretty conservative parts of the country, even most of the “race” stuff boils down to “values and culture.”

True, Rosa parks had to sit at the back because of values and culture. Also George Floyd /s

> There are a ton of places in this country where people would answer that as "people of the same race, with the same values as me".

I agree about the "same values" part, but I think the "same race" part is more dubious.

I've witnessed first-hand conservative non-Hispanic white Americans getting along very well with conservative Hispanic Americans, and conservative Asian Americans – and while that is just anecdote, I'm not aware of any hard data to contradict it – most of the time, the shared outlook on political/religious/moral/etc issues ends up being much more significant than the racial/ethnic/linguistic differences. I don't have the same anecdotal experience to draw on when it comes to conservative African Americans, but I'd be surprised if it was greatly different in that case.

My impression is that in a lot of these discussions, when people say “race”, they really mean “class”: most middle class people don’t want to live right next door to the lower-lower class, and an ethnoracial majority lower-lower class person is really no more attractive a neighbour than a minority one; meanwhile, most of them (even most conservatives) would be perfectly happy to have an ethnoracial minority neighbour who is of a similar wealth, education and views/outlook/attitudes/politics/ideology/etc

The problem is that the people with power set up what data gets used in a credit score - and the people with power are the white homeowners who want HOAs to control their neighbors. When you ask "what are the qualities we would want..." you miss that the definition of "we" is why discrimination exists.

> and the people with power are the white homeowners who want HOAs to control their neighbors

While I'm sure this is fairly common, I was careful not to restrict my sibling reply to the GP to a single race. There are predominately black or hispanic communities out there (for example) with very similar preferences.

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