Your not even willing to examine your unfounded prejudices. But hey you said you’d be ok with a Hispanic living in your neighborhood so here’s your Nobel prize.
It doesn’t matter if your motivation for fighting development is because you don’t want to live next to black people or because you want to host a birthing center for elk. Both have the same effect, higher housing costs, which means poor people have fewer options and worse living conditions.
If you want elk in your yard, go move an hour or more outside of town, where there’s no demand for dense housing. But if there’s demand for dense housing where you live, and zoning is preventing it from being built, that means that zoning restrictions are preventing minorities from moving into your neighborhood. Is elk in your yard where you are now worth supporting segregation? Maybe it is, for you. But if so, then your actions show that opposing racist policies is less important to you than having elk in your yard.
This really is about values. What are your values? What is more important to you than fighting racism and segregation? Maybe elk in your yard is more important to you. Not even elk in your yard in general, though – elk in your specific current yard. A future yard could have elk while not aiding and abetting segregation.
Hopefully these are not your values, though.
I live in a suburban community in the mid-South. The community was a golf course until around 2005, and it’s been gradually built up with a variety of housing. The community has about 16 apartment buildings with 24-36 apartments each, and about 350 single family homes and townhouses. The designs vary and the single family homes and townhouses are often mixed together on the same street.
I don’t KNOW the racial balance of my neighborhood, I can only guess based on Facebook, community meeting and the people I see out and about. My best guess is that it’s about 60% white, 30% black and 20% other minority.
It’s a great neighborhood, I feel completely safe and it’s a desirable place to live. I do not feel that the presence of higher density housing a couple of streets over harms my quality of life at all.
There is an undeveloped parcel near my home, on the hill above my low lying street. We have joked that we hope they put in single family homes instead of an apartment building but that has nothing to do with the neighborhood density or the perceived “quality” of the neighbors. It’s a privacy concern based on geography, we joke about the “Hedonia View Condo Towers”. If it is an apartment building, we hope it’s a simple low rent 2 or 3 story building and not some high-priced 10 story glass and steel luxury building. Because privacy.
I don’t know what else to add, but my experience makes me feel the objections to higher density housing in neighborhoods of single family homes is misplaced. I don’t have kids but my neighbors feel the schools are fine, not some UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE ghetto dystopian fantasy. Don’t knock it until you try it.
Not surprising from the hacks at NPR, that article is misleading. It starts with Illinois which has the worst funding disparity in the country and pretends that it is indicative of the rest of the country. Then they talk about Alabama which has 55% of its spending from the state and 10% from the federal government and only 34% from local governments. Then they try to pretend overall spending has been going down by ignoring the $40 billion a year the federal government.
Doesn’t speak well of the school system. 
Here’s another article, this one from the WaPo. You’re not going to like it any better, but it’s certainly not cherrypicking states:
Overwhelmingly white school districts received $23 billion more than predominantly nonwhite school districts in state and local funding in 2016, despite serving roughly the same number of children, a new report finds.
The funding gap is largely the result of the reliance on property taxes as a primary source of funding for schools. Communities in overwhelmingly white areas tend to be wealthier, and school districts’ ability to raise money depends on the value of local property and the ability of residents to pay higher taxes.
And while state budgets gave heavily nonwhite districts slightly more money per student than they gave overwhelmingly white districts, in many states it was not enough to erase the local gaps.
[Bolding is, of course, mine.]
This is an excellent article, and the interactive map that shows funding per student for every school district in the country is enlightening. As an Army brat growing up, I attended schools all over the country (including schools in California, Texas, Tennessee, and Illinois), and my son attended schools growing up where we now live in Connecticut.
From my experience, the quality of education I received back in the 1970s and '80s and that my son received in the 2000s and 2010s largely tracks with the school funding indicated in the NPR report…with one major exception: school funding where we lived in California seems to have plummeted since I went to school there in the late '70s.
This is borne out by news articles such as this:
One the other hand, the high school that I attended in one of the suburbs on the North Shore of Chicago was excellent in the 1980s, and its funding today would seem to indicate that not much has changed.
Similarly, the schools that my son attended here in Connecticut generally seemed to have had adequate funding, though from personal experience I know that they have struggled as well, especially during the last recession.
And then you have the schools I attended for a short time in Texas and Tennessee. They were terrible then, and unsurprisingly, their funding is far below the national average even today.
One thing that I am aware of from my cousins and other family members who grew up and went to schools in Texas and other southern states is that those families who have the means to do so generally send their children to private schools. I believe this is one reason why there is little incentive to improve the funding for the public schools in those parts of the country.
I am reminded of a vignette in Michael Moore’s 2015 documentary film Where to Invade Next which described schools in Finland. In Finland, schools are government-funded, and paying private tuition is illegal, which Moore says eliminates social inequities in a educational system that is considered among the best in the world.
Fumble fingers is more like it. Meant to type 10 as the last percentage
No, but it means that people like you are barking up the wrong tree bitching about racism when classism is a much more accurate description. I am comfortably classist but would prefer (and vote for it) that class wasn’t a synonym for race in this country.[quote=“puddleglum, post:22, topic:917012”]
Both have the same effect, higher housing costs, which means poor people have fewer options and worse living conditions.
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And yet there is a fixed amount of area in the country we can’t keep moving outwards. Its It’s certainly better to pack the people who want to live like cattle as dense as possible rather than sprawling them outwards so the rest of us don’t have anything. Build high rises in the bullseye and then multi family in the first ring. There is no reason to jump out and build a 10 story buildings in a town with nothing but 2 stories.
By opposing dense housing, people are creating high crime neighborhoods elsewhere. These policies are creating the problem in the first place.
Nothing will improve unless people are willing to give up their privileges and that means giving up their children’s privileges.
Until then, the middle class is feasting on the blood of its neighbors.
Disagree about it being hypocrisy; this is just a combination of two standard rhetorical tricks:
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You’re a hypocrite if you focus on X and not Y.
Nope, you can focus on one important issue at a time -
You’re a hypocrite if you don’t make an individual personal sacrifice to do the thing you want the government to do e.g. If you really believed in higher taxes you’d just donate a bunch of money to the government
Nope…putting yourself at a relative disadvantage, even to other people in a state of privilege would not at all be the same as living in a world with the legislative change that is desired. It could even be counter-productive in some cases, serving to hide a problem.
Finally IME, many friends and vlogs etc talking about the equality issues in the US, do indeed mention the legacy of redlining and segregation, and the effect it has on property taxes and school quality. So I disagree that this is something that is being ignored or swept under the carpet.
You’re right, I don’t like that one any better because it is intentionally misleading.
“In state and local funding” ignores the 40 billion dollars a year the federal government targets toward low income schools. In every state except Illinois that funding is enough to make up the entire funding gap.
Nimbyism makes it so dense housing can not be built in cities so the people are pushed out to the suburbs where nimbys there make is so dense housing can not be built which push people toward outer suburbs which push people toward rural areas. It creates a system that leads to sprawl while hurting poor people. I agree with you that labeling it racism adds nothing while clouding the actual issues. However, it should be enough that it hurts the young and poor of all races.
I can see why you’d like to believe it’s misleading, but clearly you don’t have hard evidence, nor do you understand the way federal funding works. You need to research better. I don’t know where you got that $40 billion figure, but it’s wrong. In 2018, the amount was $73 billion.
Before you start licking your chops, let me point out again that as every reliable source you can find will tell you, federal funding to low-income schools is not enough to make up the gap that local property taxes leave.
Here’s another source showing that’s the case. You can decide every source telling the truth you’d prefer not to believe is “misleading,” but it won’t help your case any.
According to Census Bureau data and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), 2015 federal contributions only accounted for roughly eight percent of school budgets nationwide. (States contributed 46 percent and local revenue contributed 45 percent.)
The 40 billion is from the Department of Education spending. It does not include Head Start and CCDBG which I consider day care and not education spending and the school lunch program which I should have included.
Neither of your cites say that federal funding is not enough to make up the difference. If you read my cite you would have seen that school funding comes from 3 sources. 46% local which provides more funding for rich districts in in 46 states and more funding for poor districts in 3 states. (Hawaii only has one district). 46% comes from state government and is provides more funding to poor districts in 27 states. 8% comes from the federal government and provides more funding to poor districts in every state except Nevada. The combination of the three sources of revenue means that the total amount of revenue going to poor districts is higher in 46 states, only the only states that have more funding for better off districts are Nevada, Wyoming, and Illinois.
Uh, there can be no difference, but that is not what I found before and studies agree that there is still a lot of inadequate funding for poor districts.
When we look at funding gaps within each state, we find a great deal of variation. While some states provide substantially more funding to their highest poverty districts, others provide substantially less. The funding gaps between high and low poverty districts look even worse when we consider that students in poverty are likely to need additional supports in order to succeed academically. In other words, simply offering equal funding isn’t enough. Moreover, some states that fund their highest poverty districts equally, or even progressively (meaning, they allocate more funding to the highest poverty districts), are still providing substantially fewer dollars to districts that serve the most students of color than to those that serve the fewest.