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Ian Winthorpe III posted:The United States differs from Germany in that the discussion and reality of housing cannot be separated from the formers racial politics. White liberals especially have seen the lifestyle that middle class urban living in Europe can offer and 50 years of white flight to the suburbs is fast reversing. Soaring prices in DC, the closure of schools in Chicago and stop and frisk in NYC are policies that push poor blacks out of desirable locations to make way for white middle class gentrification. Even South Central LA is in the first stages of this while San Francisco was ahead of the game to the extent that now the White middle classes are being pushed out by the super rich. In other news, it's interesting to note that so-called "affordable housing", even in reliably liberal Democratic strongholds like NYC, isn't what you'd think it is. People paying top dollar to live in a glitzy new building don't want to run into poors in the elevator. So the city allows the developer to build "poor doors", or separate entrances for the subsidized rent set. More interestingly, however, is the qualification process to obtain the affordable housing in the first place. The city contracts this out to a private service to conduct a lottery, but you have to apply. And to apply, you have to pass a background check, a credit check, and jump through numerous hoops in your application, which will be denied for petty reasons such as using Express Mail instead of Priority Mail. So instead of a destitute family, you end up with lots of people working low-pay high-status jobs like assistant professors at NYU, city employees, journalists, etc. taking those apartments. Still, with all the development going on, you end up with a glut of these apartments, and the city ends up raising the maximum income to qualify. Mind you, it doesn't remove those other roadblocks, it's just that now associate professors and newspaper editors can qualify as well.
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Oct 16, 2014 15:51
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 21:17 |
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