[tristor]

> "neighborhood character" (read: keep out them poors).

As somebody who has spent a lot of money to live in a high-value area, not because of an investment in the property, but to avoid having my family exposed to inappropriate behaviors, yes let's keep out of the poors.

Affordable housing doesn't mean it needs to be in the same gated community as expensive housing, or in the same condo building. Economic segregation is not a net societal ill, in fact it's the primary driver for many people to increase their fortunes (myself included) so they can escape the crime and blight that comes from lower class people.

My reply might seem incredibly classist, because it is. I don't want my children exposed to public drug usage, petty crime, violence, and other ills that perpetuate any place where the people reside who lack the mental stability, intelligence, or self-control to hold down a professional job. I don't want them seeing this behavior, and I don't want them being pulled into dangerous situations because of the people who are in the community around them. I pay a lot to ensure that doesn't happen, including the choice of school and where we live.

I say all this as someone who grew up in a poor family in a bad area and spent my entire life escaping and staying out so I can raise a family in a better circumstance.

[TulliusCicero]

> Economic segregation is not a net societal ill, in fact it's the primary driver for many people to increase their fortunes (myself included) so they can escape the crime and blight that comes from lower class people.

Thank you for admitting what so many NIMBYs won't: that they're pro-segregation.

And let's be clear, calling it economic segregation isn't an exaggeration. The zoning that the US typically has is a form of gated community living enforced by the government. It's designed to separate where people live by class, and people like this poster are entirely for it.

Also:

> Economic segregation is not a net societal ill

It is, actually, because it tends to limit social mobility.

People having enormous advantages or disadvantages because of their starting social class is less than great for society. Obviously we can't really eliminate all of that sort of thing, but we definitely don't want the government explicitly pursuing policies to encourage social stratification.

[tristor]

Let's be clear, many folks in this country are perfectly happy to make the world more equal by dragging others down rather than lifting others up. If there's no way to escape the ills of humanity, it means you're stuck in a situation where the next generation cannot be assured of a better life. The aspiration of the American Dream is very much about escaping all the antisocial behaviors which dominate the lower class and having a prosperous life where you can raise a family that has a better life than you yourself had.

It's segregation by dollars, not by any immutable characteristic, and I do not see that as morally wrong in any way.

I will not sacrifice my children on the altar of economic mobility. I dragged myself out of poverty to make a better life for my family, and others can do the same. The US has some of the highest economic mobility of any society in the world, partly because we segregate based on dollars rather than on immutable characteristics.

If that makes me a NIMBY, so be it.

[TulliusCicero]

> Let's be clear, many folks in this country are perfectly happy to make the world more equal by dragging others down rather than lifting others up.

Yes, we can see that here. It's unfortunate that you've taken that position.

> It's segregation by dollars

The government intentionally separating people by socioeconomic class for something as fundamental as where you live -- which also controls which school your kids go to -- is fundamentally wrong.

And the biggest reason why some schools are so shit is precisely because of economic segregation. Concentrating the most impoverished means concentrating people with the most social problems too.

[tristor]

> Yes, we can see that here. It's unfortunate that you've taken that position.

I am not taking that position at all. I don't know what your position is, but you've implied in your replies to me that you /do/ take this position, however.

Forcing my kids to go to school with lower class children is not going to make the world a better place, it's going to force my children to be exposed to violence, drug use, promiscuity, and reduce their relative aspirations. When I was growing up, the school I went to had almost nobody from its graduating class that made it out and built a decent living. Many folks scrape by working menial retail and service jobs well into their 40s, and consider that a win because they weren't part of the much larger cohort that ended up dead, in jail, or in other dire circumstances which was the expected outcome in the community I came from. Those folks who scrape by considered themselves successful because they're alive, without any felony convictions or addictions to hard drugs, the bar of their relative aspirations is significantly lowered by the circumstances they grew up around.

I didn't drag myself out of that situation in order to see my children put back into it, because you think that averaging out the results of the students is an improvement by dragging down my kids to make up for the difference. I struggled to ensure I could build a family that had a better life than I did, and I don't see anything problematic about that at all. Taking that away on some spurious beliefs that this will enrich the lives of the very same people who are actively engaging in antisocial behaviors is ludicrous, and it's exactly the type of authoritarian leftist nonsense that Americans by-and-large reject wholesale that has helped make this the country with the greatest social and economic mobility and the highest levels of overall prosperity.

[MisterTea]

> Thank you for admitting what so many NIMBYs won't: that they're pro-segregation.

Yeah lets go around accusing people of being segregationists because they worked hard to make a better life. Jerk.

[TulliusCicero]

You seem to be very confused. The person I responded to literally called their own position segregation:

> Economic segregation is not a net societal ill

They also said their position was classist:

> My reply might seem incredibly classist, because it is.

Maybe the real jerk is the person who didn't read the replies and threw out insults anyway?

In any case, it is literally segregation, just by economics instead of by race. Why am I a jerk for accurately labeling something? If you call people in favor of separate schools by race pro-segregation, does that make you a jerk for "accusing people of being segregationists"?

[MisterTea]

This isn't some racist ideology we're talking about. My overall takeaway from the GP isn't that they are in favor of IMPOSING segregation but that people naturally self segregate according to social strata which influences behavior.

Seeing how the GP escaped poverty I can understand their take - they put in the effort to escape while their peers did not. Their peers stay angry and frustrated which leads to taking it out on people around them creating a dangerous and unhealthy environment. So it's hard to look back and care about them when they seemingly don't care about themselves or worse, actively make things worse for others. So of course you're going to stay far away from them and prefer they stay far the hell away from you.

[secstate]

But they don't just self segregate. The law is wielded as a weapon for economic segregation which makes the escape the GP was able to accomplish exceedingly difficult. Also, you are insinuating that they escaped by dint of personal effort alone, when I suspect they had their own luck and privileges (as did I) in finding themselves no longer living in poverty.

The biggest problem with this entire thread is that it paints a black and white picture of the situation. As though by building more housing the only possible outcome are poor people doing drugs next to my kids' school. Guess what, there's already people doing drugs next to my kids school, even in "nice" neighborhoods. This is not black and white. You don't have to pull someone down to raise others up. I'm sorry the GP (and it seems you, via defense) believe that their escape means they are better than those who could not "care about themselves" enough to better themselves. What a sad state of mind.

[tristor]

>As though by building more housing the only possible outcome are poor people doing drugs next to my kids' school. Guess what, there's already people doing drugs next to my kids school, even in "nice" neighborhoods.

Yes, that is pretty much the only outcome of putting "affordable housing" in higher class neighborhoods. Also, if there's people doing drugs next to your kid's school, you aren't in a nice neighborhood. The SF Bay Area, almost entirely, is a shit hole, and it has colored the view of a lot of people to have a defeatist attitude about what you can afford in this country and what is expected and acceptable to expose your family to. I don't live in the Bay Area and I never will, in part exactly because I refuse to expose my family to what it means to live there.

> This is not black and white.

It's pretty binary. "Affordable housing" automatically means bringing social ills, and if you are positioning it in higher class neighborhoods, you are necessarily bringing that neighborhood down, intentionally.

> You don't have to pull someone down to raise others up.

That's exactly my point, unfortunately you seem not to understand your own statement because your are advocating a position that drags down anyone who managed to make it into a decent neighborhood, in order to raise up those in "affordable housing".

I'm not saying we shouldn't build more housing, or that it shouldn't be affordable, but it definitely does not need to be in the high end neighborhoods. This entire sub-thread is a response to someone saying the only reason that people who live in high end neighborhoods don't want "affordable housing" is because it will make their property values go down in an abstract sense. Well, of course it makes abstract property values go down, because the concrete is that you go from a neighborhood where you can let your kids play in the park and walk to school to a situation where you need a bodyguard to go to the gas station.

Just be honest about your position. The drive to put "affordable housing" in nice neighborhoods is not about making more housing or making it affordable, it's about trying to punish people you see as undeserving of their wealth by forcing them to "face reality" and live in the same circumstances as poor people. It's an intentional attempt to drag people down, for the sake of dragging them down.

[tristor]

This is an accurate read of my statements. I am not trying to impose anything on anyone, but I also don't want to be imposed upon. I have worked very hard to be able to afford to live in a gated community and put my kids in private school, explicitly so my family won't be exposed to the social ills that are commonplace among the lower class. There is absolutely no reason why "affordable housing" needs to go in my neighborhood, and it's not about "property values" in the abstract like the comment I replied to, it's about the property values in the more concrete sense of what it means to move to a neighborhood and the be able to afford to live in a place that gets you away from poor people problems.

I think most of the people replying to me have never been truly poor and they have no concept of what that actually means. They've never been woken up at 2AM by a blood curdling scream and a thunk as their neighbor beats their wife to death in a drunken rage. They've never seen a dead body bloated in the sun at the bus stop they have to stand at to get home from school. They've never watched the lights go out in someone's eyes as the OD on the sidewalk. The prettiest girl at their high school didn't start stripping before graduation to pay for the drug habit her mom got her started on. 3 out of the 5 people in their school friends group didn't end up dead before they were 22 years old.

My family will never experience any of these things, because I busted my ass to make sure they never experience any of those things. Imposing the horrors (some self-inflicted, some not) of the lower class on my family to position "affordable housing" in my neighborhood is a violent act, and one which any decent person will contest. If that makes me a NIMBY, then so be it, but I don't want "affordable housing" anywhere near me. I've been in "affordable housing", I know what happens there, and it's not what some ivory tower academic thinks happens there. You don't learn about this stuff in a whitepaper, you learn about it from experience, and those are experiences I won't let my family have.

Also, the word "segregation" is not inherently a bad word, and it doesn't automatically mean anything about anyone's immutable characteristics. Economics are not immutable. I'm a dropout from a town that had documentaries made about it due to how bad its drug problem is and I am in the top 2% of Americans economically now. Economic mobility in the US far exceeds that in the rest of the world, which does not in any way excuse our problems or say that we shouldn't fix them, but dragging down those who struggle and succeed is not how we get there.

[MisterTea]

I am glad I read right. My mother escaped poverty and a bad neighborhood so she told me enough stories for me to understand. I have co workers and friends who all busted ass to escape the projects and ghettos they grew up in. None of them look back on those neighborhoods and people fondly.

[HDThoreaun]

What do you mean accuse? OP said themselves that they are pro segregation. " Economic segregation is not a net societal ill"

[nativeit]

It doesn’t seem incredibly classist. It is incredibly classist. I hate to be the bearer of more bad news, but there are all sorts of other -isms that are necessarily involved in class discrimination. Thanks for wearing your cursed opinions on your sleeve anyway.