Carmel did not invest in anything that anchors poverty into the community. They were very careful not to overbuild section 8 housing, they aggressively police blight (i.e. people not taking care of their property), and also required homes to be made with more expensive finishes (i.e. brick instead of plastic siding), so cheap housing was simply not possible to build.
The negative side: police tail old poorly maintained cars, are very quick to move homeless out, and generally make being poor in Carmel a bad experience. The local joke is "you got pulled over for being poor in Carmel".
I read that as “they made the tough problems somebody else’s problem to solve.”
What I’m really looking for is governance that helps solve these types of problems, not pushing them away with the engineering equivalent of redefining the system boundaries.
> they made the tough problems somebody else’s problem to solve
This is true. A lot of the problems that go with poverty simply moved somewhere else.
> engineering equivalent of redefining the system boundaries
I think Brainerd's we don't invest in poverty is an interesting stance because on the surface it seems to be just pushing the problem away... but if you look a little deeper, investments in large amounts of section 8 housing attract even more poverty, lower tax rates, thus creating blight, which lowers tax rates more, which requires more subsidized housing and so on. There is a death spiral for cities, and I suspect that over-investing in poverty is one of the forces that causes it.
Is it creating more poverty or “attracting” poverty from somewhere else? If it’s the latter, it’s not increasing the global level of poverty, just the local level.
I would expect a well governed municipality to have the ability to absorb, and ideally mitigate, an increase in low-income populace. To me, raising the lower-limit of quality of life is one of the measures of a good government. I’m just not sure artificially raising it by expelling poor people, or making their life miserable so they expel themselves, is actually doing that on a larger scale. Rather it’s a bit of poverty shell game. Granted, there is a tipping point by which any system will become unstable if it absorbs too much, but again, I think a measure of good governance is the height of that threshold. The discussion about Carmel seems to indicate their threshold is low.
I mostly agree with you, but there's something to be said for keeping the poverty away from city centres, which is some of the most economically productive land per unit area. American poverty seems to congregate in cities, presumably because the cities can afford it, but that seems precisely the wrong perspective.
My hunch is that poverty concentrates in urban areas for the same reasons economic activity does: there are certain economies of scale that are enabled by population density. If you push poor people to rural areas, you’re also pushing them away from the aspects that make their life easier, like access to public transportation, grocery stores, social services, jobs etc. So we’re at the same place where we make being poor harder for the aim of making being rich easier. I think if we assume the economy serves society rather than the other way around, we come to a different conclusion.
FWIW, I don’t want this to come across as a dichotomy, but instead about where the appropriate balance point is.
Bit like how private schools out compete public schools academically. Neglecting to mention how private schools can kick out anyone who would bring down their KPIs.
Private schools don’t really “out compete”public schools at the same price points and relative home “stability”/income bracket. There are plenty of nice public schools in middle class to rich neighborhoods that easily hold their own to private schools. If you want to compare apples to apples. Most of the kids in those neighborhoods do as well as the kids going to private school.
The real problem is the pyramid of needs. In lots of blighted neighborhoods people struggle just to get by, hope they don’t get shot or mugged and can pay next month’s rent. You can shove as much money as you want into a school in that neighborhood and it’s going to underperform because the kids are worried about their next meal, parents getting high, cops harassing them, being downtrodden because they’re “poor”. How do I know? I lived it. Lost friends to it. I got out because I was the kid who aced everything that came him in math and science and honestly didn’t have to try very hard until I hit college, so I got up to a lot of the same BS other kids did.
I also had stable home life, unlike many peers, at least until 16 or so. I’m pretty sure the state still spends almost as much in $$ on the students in that district to this day as some of the richer communities, but the community has changed and I don’t think the graduation rate has changed much either, getting out of there is pretty much luck of the genetic and family draw and environment matters more than money.
At some point I romanticized poor people, but the older I get, the more I realize that "keep the poor people out" is a sound governmental policy, and gentrification is a good thing. Sure, people should have chances to improve their social status, but if you create an environment where being poor is a valid survival strategy, you will have poor people and all the problems that come with them. There's no way around this fact.
What you seem to be advocating is treating the symptom rather than the root problem. It can feel myopically effective, but it isn't great governance. I think there is also a case that segregating populations on socio-economic lines creates a host of additional problems.
Regardless of whether or not it is vile, it is basic game theory. You have to play the game with the rules that exist, not the ones you wish existed.
The rule is freedom of movement across the USA, so it is obviously a losing policy for any government other than the federal government to tackle national problems and implement wealth redistribution.
Whenever there is an abhorrent state of affairs people try to justify it as natural or inevitable. They've been wrong enough times that I simply don't accept it as an excuse.
In this case what we're seeing is simply setting inequality as a goal its own right rather than as a tool to accomplish another purpose. There's nothing to admire or emulate here. Reading through the comments it's clear that this aligns with the values of a lot of the community, and they are being honest about that. If this is the case for you too then take responsibility for your vision here.
> Whenever there is an abhorrent state of affairs people try to justify it as natural or inevitable. They've been wrong enough times that I simply don't accept it as an excuse.
Just curious: who gave you the right to decide how other people's resources should be allocated?
I mean, that's what's really going on here, right? If we discard all of the melodramatic bs, it's just you trying to tell other people how to allocate their resources?
What's going to happen if they ignore you? Are they going to get passed over in the rapture or something? Is the psychological weight of their own guilt going to make them snap and go psychotic? I'm genuinely curious what the consequences are and when they'll deliver
This assumes people don’t care about the larger scale of poverty or that those regional/national poverty rates won’t have second order effects that will later impact these well-off communities.
One of the difficulties in game theory is mitigating all kinds of human biases that lead to suboptimal solutions. In this case, governments can be myopic in both time and space. There are examples in game theory where the rational choice in one context leads to worst conditions for everyone, overall.
Neighborhoods being separated by socioeconomic status is a phenomenon seen all over the world, probably for much of human history, so it seems like this is the most likely solution, absent a national wealth redistribution program (which would theoretically work due to immigration controls).
Maybe I still don't understand something, but all this sounds pretty dystopian and dehumanizing to poorer people. Lack of any safety net can't be good for society, and this makes it harder for less privileged people to ascend the social ladder. But well I guess it's good for finances of this particular city.
> Lack of any safety net can't be good for society, and this makes it harder for less privileged people to ascend the social ladder
I'm not sure about that. They were paying people $18/hr to make submarine sandwiches in Carmel in 2018. Just a 1/3 of a mile south, in North Indianapolis, the same chain was paying $12.50/hr. There is an entire world of businesses that exploit government poverty supports to get cheap labor.
> The negative side: police tail old poorly maintained cars, are very quick to move homeless out, and generally make being poor in Carmel a bad experience.
This is extremely Singapore.
A general problem for all metric-based social improvement is people gaming the metric by moving problems somewhere else.
Yeah. Me too. Does it mean, they just gentrified the entire town and only rich people live there? Or is it more like they created enough opportunities and incentives that poorly paid jobs became better paid jobs?
I can see how the latter is “not invest in poverty”. But I have doubts that the trickle down effect can be that effective. Maybe it works well in a small population?
I live near there. Carmel is now a very nice place to live, easily the nicest place to live in the State. It has very impressive walkable areas, tons of new restaurants and shops, the best schools in the state. It has become easily the most desirable place to live in the region, and good jobs have followed that.
There are a few lower cost apartment complexes, but for the most part they commute from adjacent communities because wages in low-income jobs are usually pay 15-25% better in Carmel.
Carmel did not invest in anything that anchors poverty into the community. They were very careful not to overbuild section 8 housing, they aggressively police blight (i.e. people not taking care of their property), and also required homes to be made with more expensive finishes (i.e. brick instead of plastic siding), so cheap housing was simply not possible to build.
The negative side: police tail old poorly maintained cars, are very quick to move homeless out, and generally make being poor in Carmel a bad experience. The local joke is "you got pulled over for being poor in Carmel".