50 years ago, United States declared a “War on Poverty”.
For much of the last 30 years, the State of Minnesota has been actively pursuing a top-down housing policy, aggressively trying to jiggle the “mix” of housing found in communities that grew up organically over the course of a century and a half.
And for almost 20 years, the cities have been extremely aggressively squeezing out private market “low income housing”, while “investing” heavily in public low income housing.
In schools in the Twin Cities crummier neighborhoods have been terrible for nobody knows how long.
What do all of these things have in common, besides being functions of the cultural left?
The attempt to use politics to solve social problems.
So it’s perhaps ironic that Myron Orfield, the patron Saint of the dismal, discredited political “art” of “urban planning”, comes perilously close to blaming the right thing – politics – for once in one of his studies.
He’s it cited in the MinnPost::
Specifically, Orfield and his co-authors from the institute — Will Stancil, Thomas Luce and Eric Myott — blame policies and practices that redirected affordable housing programs from mostly white suburbs back to segregated neighborhoods in Minneapolis, St. Paul and first-tier suburbs such as Brooklyn Center and Richfield.
“You can build affordable housing in poor neighborhoods,” he said during an interview this week, “you just shouldn’t build all of it [there].”
Absolutely not. Why, you “should” build low income housing in West Bloomington, and Southwest Edina, and North Oaks, and Kenwood!
Except since the policy is entirely driven by politics, the people with political clout decide how the policy will be implemented. And the people in those DFL-addled areas have decided that poverty is just too hard on their property values.
In the meantime – driven by the same sorts of policies that the likes of Orfield have been peddling to cities for close to a generation – Minneapolis and St. Paul have been making it virtually impossible to be a successful private market landlord in either city. Meaning “affordable housing” is almost exclusively provided by the government – at two or three times its market value.
The DFL takes the likes of Myron Orfield very seriously (except, of course, for putting “affordable housing” next door to their leadership’s homes). The next paragraph explains why I don’t:
The study also repeats an argument Orfield has put forward before: that charter schools re-create school segregation by creating institutions that are too often mostly black or, increasingly, mostly white. “I don’t think the public schools in segregated neighborhoods have been doing very well for a long time,” he said in an interview this week. “I think they’re bad schools. I don’t defend them at all. But the sad thing is, the charters are worse.”
The difference – and it takes someone as highly educated as Myron Orfield to miss it – is this: charter schools are voluntary. They are a free market (well, free-market-ish) response to the rot and decay in our school systems. Unlike the wretched inner-city public schools, nobody forces anybody to go to them. They succeed or fail on their own merits – unlike, again, public schools.
Perhaps poor parents know something that highly educated experts like Orfield don’t; that forcing kids to be proxies for their adults “discussion on race” may make academics like Orfield feel good, but it does nothing for their children’s futures.
The War on Poverty is going about as well as the War on Drugs. Should we surrender on that, too?
Everyone does not begin life equally on every level, and even if they have a great beginning, children make bad decisions, parents make bad decisions, and while there is an equal chance to win at life afforded by our country, it may take quite a while for some folks to work through obstacles to get to the starting line, much less be in the race. Some people work hard and use food shelves and other community resources, and state resources to keep their innocent children healthy while they work it out.
I, don’t begrudge them a dime. Not a cent.
I found the MinnPost post to be interesting in that Orfield on one hand approves of choice of housing and building affordable housing all over and then disapproves of the choice in school. Choice in both housing and education seem to be stepping stones towards great prosperity.
That being said, I don’t think the governments (local or federal) should have much to do with building affordable housing. The market would do just fine, especially if we got rid of some of the restrictive zoning codes. It always makes me chuckle when I hear those living in more affluent parts of the city drone on and on about their belief that they want to “help” the poor by advocating to build light rail and affordable housing next to the rail, because that will cluster them into spaces where they have the support of each other and the affordable transit option. Of course, when one would ask some of the recipients of this “help,” they would say they would rather not live in places they refer to as “ghettos” and would like to own a car. The funniest part about the more affluent neighborhoods that are so committed to helping these poor people- when private developers want to actually do something about affordability, like tear down a house on a double lot and build more housing, they cry, “Not in this neighborhood! It may make sense in some places (code for the poor neighborhoods) but not here, we have precious old housing to preserve.” But, in reality, it would be increasing the housing stock, especially in those neighborhoods where housing costs are high, that would actually create affordable housing for people, bringing them potentially closer to jobs, better schools, and opportunity. Thus, when threatened with private developers who want to develop where the market is actually in demand, these neighborhoods lobby the city council to further increase the zoning restrictions to disallow development.
I can understand protecting property rights by way of protecting property values. However, I think the private development of increasing housing stock, thereby increasing the affordability of housing in a city, would be far more beneficial to the economy and to property in general than concentrations of public housing.
In the social sciences, any neighborhood that is more than 85% of one category of people is considered segregated. Yes, they use the word ‘segregated’, and yes, they use is specifically because it has the context that it does. They want you to hear ‘segregated’ and think ‘bad’. The geographical area of a neighborhood also changes to fit the sociologists desires. Sometimes it is a school district, sometimes it is a zip code, sometimes it is contained by a completely arbitrary set of boundaries (“Powderhorn-Arts Institute”).
So, yes, the social sciences are a joke. Stalinists are drawn to sociology the ways flies are drawn to an outhouse.
Powhatan,
Can you give us a reference on what “they” use specifically in context?
Just remember after signing the civil rights bill or some say the war on pover to bill Johnson said ‘ I’ll have those n****** voting democrat for the next 200 years’
carrmelita; the problem is that these programs have created a society where far too many of these people end up using those resources their entire lives, i.e. unmarried women with multiple children by different sperm donors. These donors then only come around when the welfare checks arrive to get their cut. Government has made a mess of their related programs with wasteful and/or inefficient spending, lax controls, little follow up and very few penalties for abusers. IMO, EBT cards were another Democrat invention to actually hide the true number of recipients. i.e. all of the out of state residents that receive these benefits using a PO box as an address.
Carmelita wrote:
Powhatan,
Can you give us a reference on what “they” use specifically in context?
Try this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/11/21/why-whites-dont-understand-black-segregation/
Sociologists commonly use a value called ‘SI’, or Segregation Index, that is basically a percentage multiplied by 0.01, so SI is always a value between 0 and 1.
There is a very large industry, consisting of social ‘scientists’, that measures things like their definition of segregation and proposes remedies for it. They call it ‘de facto segregation’ because it is not segregation by law. The fact that people freely choose to live with others like them does not matter at all to them. to ‘fix’ the poor decisions that people make freely, they would impose a battery of expensive, top down, undemocratic policies. You pay for the policies, but you don’t choose what they are.
Your freedom is their enemy.
By blaming people for their own problems, bosshoss, instead of capitalism and racism, you make yourself part of the problem.
Around 1900, some academics decided that they could make a science out of managing society, the same way that businessmen had made a science out of management. There were, and are, huge epistemological problems with doing that. In business, the goal is to make money. Money is easy to measure. It’s easy to tell when you are making it or you are loosing it. But what does it mean to manage society properly? Does it mean that you eliminate anti-social behavior or tolerate it? It is a question of values, and values aren’t easy to determine.
The sociologists decided that they could determine which values are good and which are bad. Then they ran into more epistemological problems, because how can the values chosen by a relatively small group of people be the best values for a society made up of millions of people? What basis did they have for presenting their ideas as fact rather than opinion?
But make no mistake. These charlatans take themselves very seriously, and they have decided that your freedom to choose what you value and act on those values is counter to what they want to achieve. You want to spend the shekels you have earned to send your kid to the private school you believe will maximize his opportunities for success? Nope. Society would be better off if your kid went to school with problem children. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
And they call themselves ‘humanists’.