Comment by daft_pink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by daft_pink | Hacker News Reader

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My personal experience in Chicago is that the government had public housing projects that generated high crime rates and drove people away that ran in a ring around the city center, but otherwise were in premium locations. Then large public housing projects went out of favor and they were largely torn down and removed from 2000-2015. As the crime rates in these neighborhoods declined, suddenly the reason why people wouldn’t live in these places was removed and the intrinsic value of property so close to the city center skyrocketed.

It’s sort of like being the person who buys the really cheap used car that’s always in disrepair. The reason you got that vehicle so cheap, is because it’s dilapidated. If they had built the car to last, you wouldn’t have been able to afford it anyways. If you live in the cheapest neighborhood then it’s going to be a neighborhood that has problems. If they remove the problems then the value of the property is probably going to increase and suddenly you can’t afford it anymore.

It is worth noting those large public housing complexes were unpopular with housing professionals, advocates, planners, architects and economists when they were created.

They were not built for affordable housing so much as to break up a burgeoning Black political party and to punish neighborhoods and politicians that were bucking the dominant at the time political machine. This in combination with the interstate and UIC campus were used to first break up the existing neighborhoods and then isolate them from the surrounding middle class areas that were more aligned with the dominant political elite.

It should be fairly obvious that complexes not designed primarily for housing and populated intentionally by the marginalized would not do a good job.

There were public housing complexes in Chicago before the big projects that were mixed income and desirable for middle class families.

The Daley biography American Pharoah documents that process.

Indeed, Equal Housing Opportunity is an extremely bad idea.

I live in "Affordable Housing". The only commonality with my neighbors is the amount we pay for rent. I am unlikely to share any cultural touchpoints with my neighbors: we have disparate ethnicities, politics, religion, taste in music, vernaculars, holidays, favorite YouTube channels.

My community is managed by a social services organization dedicated to a certain ethno-linguistic group. Their employees are 100% from that group. They indeed do not discriminate among renters. Nevertheless, there is a single gang which has moved in and taken control. This gang is of a different ethnic/cultural group, different from me and different from the management. We all have a relatively peaceful coexistence, and it's rather quiet around here.

But we do not share any culture.

It used to be that when immigrants reached these United States, they would settle and coalesce around their native lands' culture. There would be an Italian neighborhood, a Slavic neighborhood, a Polish neighborhood. These communities would be (at least initially) poor, filthy, and crime-ridden, especially as seen from outside. But they enjoyed solidarity, they enjoyed unity around a common culture, and often a common religion as well. A church would pop up on the street representing them, and speaking their language, and they'd all attend there.

But solidarity in neighborhoods and forming cohesive communities is dangerous for the status quo, especially when foreign allegiances are concerned. America is a disestablishmentarian melting pot where we're supposed to be assimilated. So the best way to do that is to break up these ghetto neighborhoods and splinter all the diaspora so that we're far away from one another, no matter what, and we have no opportunity to form a cohesive community or exercise solidarity, or show up at the polls or protest in one voting bloc.

Yes indeed, Equal Housing Opportunity prevents racist White suburbs. It permits Blacks to move in wherever they please. Yet, it is an effective bulwark against the formation of any neighborhood with Black hegemony or majority.

Equal Housing also destroys and homogenizes every culture, and weakens everyone uniformly. Congratulations.

Your post has reminded me of Vimes’s Theory of Socio-economic Unfairness[0], but I can't figure out if you think that the way the system works is a good thing or more just "this is the way the world works"

[0] https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...

This is why slums are in such inhospitable places.

Ever wonder why people live in industrial waste sites, on steep hillsides, swamps, etc? It’s because if the locations weren’t so undesirable, they would have been cleared and replaced already.

Mind you, if everyone lives in the cheap neighborhood then "problem people" are diluted to the point there isn't a neighborhood-wide problem meanwhile everyone gets to pay cheap rent.

I'm dubious of this idea. Examples of locations where this dynamic exists?

Singapore is the only place I heave heard of where rich and poor live in the same public housing buildings.

Could have something to do with the extreme land scarcity. The super rich still live in private houses though.

Singapore also deals quite harshly with “problem people”.

How do you mean?

They are quite famous for using capital punishment for drug trafficking offenses:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Singap...

Usually by hanging.

Caning spoiled ex-pat brats comes to mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Michael_Fay

“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.”

That's the model Chicago converted to ("problem people" jab aside). It's fine. But the expensive areas are still expensive. It's hard to see schematically why rents would stay cheap in this model.

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