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Neurolimal posted:A lot of problems around suburbs could be solved if we dismantled the housing industry and froze property values I hope this doesn't really need to be said but these are terrible ideas. The smarter thing to do would be to rein in power of local governments and tear up zoning laws across the board. A big part of the reason developers have fled out to build endless lovely tract housing in desert scrubland is that no-one will fight them doing it. They throw up the houses, they sell the houses. Or not. The things are so cheap I wouldn't be surprised if they could eat the occasional complete failure and go build somewhere else. Try renovating a multi-building lot within a city block on the other hand and it's endless complaints from authorities with masses of power but no responsibility. There's huge amounts of money to be made in building or renovating nice modern housing in cities, and plenty of old or badly purposed lots that need fixed up. The pieces to the solution are all there, if the local governments could ever be convinced to get out of the way.
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Dec 11, 2016 14:06
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I don't think there's anything preventing good-quality schools existing in low-income, high-density, inner-city neighborhoods, either. I mean, there's a LOT of things preventing good-quality schools from existing in low-income, high-density, inner-city neighborhoods but I don't think any of them are baked in to the problem. The school won't be bad just because the people it serves are working class and live close to each other, but it's very likely to turn bad if the people it serves are unemployed, with high rates of crime and drug use. Which often occur in dumb, government-sponsored housing projects that tear apart working mixed-use neighborhoods and replace them with monolithic single-use residence tower blocks with no shops or amenities or even small industries for miles around. That's right! IT'S ME, TEAR-UP ZONING LAWS GUY! I HAD A NAME CHANGE BUT I'M BACK IN THE THREAD!
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Dec 13, 2016 14:51
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Cease to Hope posted:Yes there is. All of our metrics for "good quality schools", both statistical and anecdotal, are based on student success, and the most overwhelming predictor of student success is family income. Schools in low-income areas have to compensate for the poor diet, trauma, and lack of parental availability that go hand in hand with poverty. "Good schools" are as much a product of the well-off students who go there as the level of investment from local government. This is (part of) why American city public schools often spend so much more per student but still "fail". My point is though that there's no (or I don't believe there is any) switch for INCOME > $Xk = STUPID in human children. It is more than possible for a family with a low income to raise good students. In fact I'm pretty sure another of those predictors of student success is simply whether or not the parents read to the child growing up. So it's not being poor that makes bad schools, exactly. It's living in the sort of lovely neighborhoods that being poor necessitates that makes bad students that makes bad schools. You might think distinctions like these are niggling over details, but they're pretty important to creating a solution. If you think the solution is poverty pure and simple, and pass legislation for mincome or child benefit, or raising the minimum wage or whatever, you might be awfully confused when five years later the average income has increased 20% but the schools are still failing. I believe the schools will still be failing with richer kids because the neighborhood is rotten by design. It was built to be rotten, and due to the iron grip of petty politicians and rent-seeking overlords there's no way to make it good again. They won't let you. Want to start a dance studio for local kids? Denied. This is a residential area. Convert an empty plot to a garden grow-op? Denied. Agriculture is forbidden within city limits. Want to refurbish your own home? Denied. Can't get the planning permission. I think all those starry-eyed utopian architects were on to something when they said the physical environment affects the wellbeing of the community. That you can build spaces that create certain kinds of behavior. Unfortunately whilst they were middling anthropologists they were loving terrible architects, and the communities they created were universally awful to live in, and the awfulness was locked-in for generations by city bureaucrats. My eventual tortured point is that giving people more money won't do poo poo if they can't also have control over their environment. And control is what authorities absolutely refuse to relinquish.
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Dec 14, 2016 11:46
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Oh I'm sorry, I appear to have triggered you. Perhaps you should take a break from discussing abstract concepts with strangers. You never know when the literal shaking might start. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 14, 2016 12:39
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