[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.