[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.