[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.