[throwaway_4ever]

It seems to me a huge bank like Bank of America is well-capitalized to start a huge investment project into a troubled area of a city that will:

1. provide wealth to it's residents 2. fix crime and blight 3. help alleviate housing affordability crisis

Right now, a troubled area might have housing wealth be 1/4 of a nearby affluent area. But generally, this is simply because of crime and bad schools due to the cycle of poverty. If you're able to quickly alleviate the crime and poverty, suddenly that troubled area is basically as desirable for housing as the rest of the area.

Now, usually, this "gentrification" process has happened slower, over decades, and without the corresponding wealth accrual of its current residents. So it doesn't work out for the current residents and the clash between people is much harsher.

But what if all the wealth that was created when a $300k East Oakland home becomes $1m, was equally shared between investment and residents? Could you pay people (give them some type of community job) and/or make sure everyone has housing equity, to break that cycle, stop the crime, so that everyone wins?

It feels doable if tackled on a large scale, what am I missing?

[tarakat]

> But generally, this is simply because of crime and bad schools due to the cycle of poverty.

What makes the schools bad, if they receive on-average marginally higher per-pupil funding than mostly-white schools [1]?

[1] on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15 - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724... - I can't find a source now, but the average per-pupil funding is around $20,000, so a difference of $200 is negligible.

If you're surprised that the funding is almost the same, despite schools being funded by property taxes, which are much higher in whiter neighborhoods, that's because you were hoodwinked by the media. Schools are funded by local property taxes and state taxes, with the latter distributed to even-out the funding. For some mysterious reason, the latter funding source receives much less coverage than the former.

[_-david-_]

When schools have increased funding it doesn't magically solve the problems. You will still have high crime levels, gang problems, lower attendance, less educated parents, less likely to have a stay at home parent, less money for tutoring, less stable housing, less likely to have 2 parents in the household, etc.

Don't get me wrong, money does play an impact, but only when the families have it. When families are wealthier their kids do better even if their school is getting less funding than some of these schools in poor areas.

[throwaway_4ever]

I'm not really talking about just handing out more money to schools, nor debating whether schools received less funding. The school problem comes from both not valuing education and people who have had a rougher go at life that the problem keeps perpetuating in their children. (dad in jail, mom on drugs, mom working 2 jobs so has no time and the children just hang with other older children, etc.). Feel free to send your kid to that school if you think it's just as fair a shot at life.

[tarakat]

Those sound like problems with the pupils, not the school. This is not semantics - it affects how to solve the problem, and informs what consequences various solutions may have.

[IshKebab]

You're missing the fact that gentrification is caused by the movement of people, and that always takes a very long time. Crime goes down in gentrified areas because the criminals can't afford to live there anymore.

[hotpotamus]

What you're missing is that those are typically functions of a government, which Bank of America is not.

[throwaway_4ever]

This is "hacker" news, since when is an appropriate answer "that's now how it's usually done."

[hotpotamus]

Eh, the whole Omnicorp takes over the Detroit police department to clean up the slums thing isn't all that new - it was the plot of Robocop after all.

[throwaway_4ever]

How is that similar? I'm not talking about anything with PD. Simply incentivizing troubled areas with wealth for simply not doing the things that makes their assets worth so much less. There is absolutely a non-zero amount of people, who if given steady income, would not be committing crimes of poverty. That income can come from the housing wealth generation. It's just a matter of where on the range of 1 - 100% can those issues be stopped with adequate wealth.

[hotpotamus]

I'd also note that the we haven't figured out the whole nearly invincible cyborg cop aspect yet either, so that's a fairly significant difference too.

Mostly I assume that if Bank of America thought they could make money doing what you say, then they'd probably be doing it already. If they'd lose money on it, then there's no way they'd do it. That's one of the ways that American companies are just refreshingly simple.

On another note - I really don't understand what housing wealth is supposed to do for people. My house has increased in value around 200% in the last decade. And? Sure I've got more money on paper, but what am I supposed to do? Sell it and live in my car? (I think I could pull off van life maybe.) All that's happened is I have to pay ever more in property taxes.