With this post, you demonstrate the problem. People in the inner city are thugs and welfare recipients. I would guess this attitude comes from you lack of interaction with people who aren’t exactlylike you.
The petroleum is there. As long as it exists, and with it the capability to do so much for humanity, people are going to use it. That’s just reality. We could scrap every car in America tomorrow and it wouldn’t matter. China and India would make up for it in a couple years.
Cars are cheap if you are doing it right. If someone wants to buy an expensive car who are you to know better than them what’s a good way to spend their money. The fact that the vast majority of people spend more than the bare minimum to get a car with desirable features proves that they aren’t too expensive.
Cars raise revenue through gas taxes, tolls and registration fees. This pays for the DMV and road construction.
The Navy would have to patrol the seas for trade even if there were no cars.
You are really reaching here.
It’s much better for kids to grow up in the suburbs than in the city. Everyone understands this which is why they move there. You disagree, and that’s fine. But don’t pretend that you know better than everyone else what’s best for their kids. Plus, as has been pointed out there are plenty of suburbs that are walkable, especially for children.
Is this a joke? Of course you can still go for a walk in the suburb. I usually drive somewhere to go walking first. This is great because then every walk is different. Sure, maybe you can’t walk to buy milk, but that’s a feature, not a bug. Who wants to have to walk just to buy something? I’d much rather stock up with my car and then drive to a mountain to go on a hike.
On the contrary, it’s multiculturalism that’s the problem. It has proven to be a failure. Look at France.
Says you. The vast majority of people want to be among their own kind. What’s the point of working hard in school, getting a good job and obeying the law if you have to then live among people who didn’t do these things?
You think you know what’s best for everyone, but you are mostly just flat out wrong in your assumptions.
Brain Glutton replied to the above dispassionately; I cannot. But to respond with what I am thinking might get me in trouble…So I will just say that I unequivocally reject this mindset in the strongest possible terms. Just, ugh.
I do take comfort though that those who believe like me are on the rise while those who think like you are increasingly in the minority.
We’ve already had plenty of cites in this thread that crime is higher in the inner cities. Do you seriously need a cite that there are more welfare recipients?
Your assumption about me is wrong, BTW. I’ve lived in the downtown area, suburbs, and rural in my life.
I guess that’s why the suburbs have just about all emptied out, then, right?
Global warming is a problem. So is petroleum depletion. It makes no difference that people like a car-dependent lifestyle, it is simply part of the problem if they do (it is also part of the problem that people who don’t like it still have to have it). I’m sure junkies like their heroin, but that does not mean it is not a problem.
I’m saying they’ve fallen prey to some ill-advised groupthink. From a parent’s POV the suburbs are good for kids because they’re perceived as safer than the city. Maybe so, but safety isn’t everything; George Bailey grew up better because he could walk everywhere in Bedford Falls. Otherwise, people seem to move to the 'burbs to start their families just because of a general widespread cultural assumption that that’s what you do, you’re not really middle-class if you don’t and everybody wants to be middle-class. I’m not just asspulling that, right now I’m in the middle of James Leowen’s Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, which is mainly about residential segregation by race but also covers the general sociology of post-WWII American suburbanization. Will post some relevant excerpts later.
Well, I won’t go by home prices as such, as I haven’t shopped for real estate in forever. What I mean is that a complete neighborhood should include as residents some of each of the following, and therefore should include housing that meets both their budget and their needs:
- Poor people. They should not have to live next door to other poor people. Everything you might find objectionable about them comes from growing up in a monocultural poverty environment where they learn socially dysfunctional habits. If they live in an upper-income burb they might at least find work as servants, nannies, gardeners, without having to commute. And their kids will go to school with higher-income people and, therefore, grow up more middle-class in outlook. Perhaps some of these people are given over to crime – but, if so, they’re a lot less dangerous in the burbs. There will not be so many of them in a given burb and the police know who and where they are. If a kid snatches a purse in the inner city, he can immediately fade into the background, just one more face in the projects.
- Working-poor and working-class people. Same reasons, with less urgency.
- Middle-class people, since that’s the whole point of suburbia.
- Rich people. If you’re rich, isn’t it better to show off your mansion where it isn’t surrounded only by other mansions? And you can be a highly valued member of the community, giving big to all local fundraising drives and stuff.
- Young singles, perennial singles, elderly people – anyone who, regardless of class background or whatever, is at a stage in life or lives a lifestyle where buying a house designed for a family would be pointless even if possible. They need apartments. There’s no good reason why they shouldn’t be able to find them in the burbs – except that most burbs were designed without apartments and local zoning codes might actually prohibit them.
The trend is reversing as I have demonstrated with multiple cites; but more specifically, I am talking here about the change in political voting behavior. The attitudes like Bone’s are disproportionately held by older white men who make up a smaller and smaller percentage of the electorate with each passing cycle.
I would like a cite that welfare recipients live in the city at a rate higher than their percentage of the population. Most welfare recipients are white and live in red state America, and when I think of welfare recipients I picture more Apalachia than the city.
But your knee jerk idea that city residents are thug and welfare recipients is telling and I thinks speaks to why the suburbs are a problem. Of the neighbors in my neighborhood, there’s a teacher, a guy who does something with IT, a retired federal employee, a nurse, another guy who does something in tech I don’t understand, a guy who works with dept. of Homeland Security, and DC firefighter. None of them seem to be on welfare and none of them are what you would call a thug. I think you’ll find that’s true of a lot of the world if you get out there and see it, it’s not nearly as scary as TV makes it seem.
This kind of misunderstanding of the world outside the subdivision leads to all kinds of negative consequences in crafting our domestic and international policies.
ETA:
This will never happen. Nor should it.
You won’t ever see all of those groups living in the same city or town. The same neighborhood? That’s crazy.
First of all your going to have to scrap every zoning law in the country. That’s just for starters.
Here’s the fundamental thing I think you’re missing: Some people are different from other people, and that’s OK. There’s nothing wrong with people wanting to be around others that are like them. A gun totin’, moonshine making country guy might want to live out in the country among his own kind in Alabama. Just like a hipster, Macbook using bohemian might want to live in the South End in Boston.
You push those people too close together and you’ll get conflict. They don’t want the same things. It’s OK for them to be different.
Cities have had “bad” neighborhoods probably back to Ur. I doubt that urban living somehow automatically promotes egalitarianism. More likely the rich and influential will find loopholes in the laws to create de facto enclaves, while warning their children not to go amongst “those people” on the wrong side of the tracks.
What attitude? That people should stick with their own kind? I’ve got news for you. The millions of illegal immigrants that we let come in every year have no problem sticking with their own kind. “La Raza” is their movement. Literal translation: The Race.
You speak as if only white men like to stick with their own. In truth, white people are about the least likely to shamelessly prefer their own company.
It’s like this all over the world. People want to stick to their own.
I was responding to madmonk’s post, not yours. I didn’t notice it slid in there before I replied.
To the contrary, Brain Glutton’s idea is a very sound one. There was a recent program on This American Life about high schools in Chicago that see a huge percentage of their students killed, and almost a 100% gang membership rate. The key to why something like this needs to be done was found in the interview with one high school police resource officer.
He says he has come to realise that it is not realistic or even advisable for him to urge kids not to join gangs. Even if they would desperately like to have nothing to do with gangs, he said it is more dangerous for them to be unaffiliated than to be affiliated. Think about that for a second.
The critical mass is there, and the only thing I can see that will shake this up, and give good quiet nonviolent strivers a chance, is if all of these poor minorities are super widely dispersed throughout the metro. Then they will no longer feel that “to cross through this block, I need to be with a bunch of my affiliated gang mates so I don’t get killed”. Rather, the ones who would be most likely to instigate the gang violence will be shut down real quick, as BG pointed out, and everyone else can breathe a sigh of relief and just keep their heads down and live regular lives.
I’ve already told you that I’ve lived in the downtown of a city before. Continuing to insist that I’ve never even been to one makes it seem like you aren’t even reading my posts. If you want to argue against a cardboard cutout of a provincial suburbanite who never leaves home then please just do that and leave my name out of it.
This is a terrible idea. All that would accomplish is spreading gangs to the suburbs.
I know from experience. This literally happens when your idea is attempted. They have special schools in my area that used to ship troubled kids out of the city to live in the suburbs. The theory was that being around good kids would straighten them out. The opposite occurred. These gang member kids are automatically the coolest kids in the suburban schools and quickly bring violence and drugs with them.
This is forced busing all over again. Just a terrible, awful idea.
Let’s hear your solution, Debaser. Or the status quo is just fine?
ETA: It’s not the same as busing, because in this plan the kids would not go back to the gang infested slums every afternoon and spend all night there and weekends.
So essentially suburbs are bad because of global warming. I can appreciate that, though I think the cost/benefit analysis we would do against the utilization of cars would differ between us.
So you do think you know better than parents who are raising their children. They are somehow misguided, misinformed, or confused about what is better for them? I’m not sure if you’re a parent, but safety is pretty damn important. Not absolutely everything that would lead to bubble living, but it ranks up at #1 in terms of concerns for your children. You’ll be wrong more often than not if you think you know what’s better for a child than their parents.
This is complete fantasy. The only way you could do this is through force, forcing people to live where they would otherwise choose not to. If you think poor people should not have to live next to other poor people, you are also saying that non-poor people must live next to poor people. There is nothing wrong with being poor, but those who are not should not be forced to live in certain conditions if they have the means to do otherwise.
Hope that works out for you, I’ll stay here in reality. People have been self selecting to be with similarly situated people since, forever. Glad to know that human nature is changing all of the sudden. :rolleyes:
I gave a site for the link between sprawl and obesity and somewhere earlier in this thread, I and other posters linked to cites that people who live in walkable communities are fitter than people who live in car dependant sprawl.
Do you really need a cite that America’s foreign policy in the Middle East is driven by access to oil?
I need a cite that supports the idea that automobile dependent cities cause obesity, greater than other causes of obesity. Simply living in a walkable community and being overall less obese isn’t sufficient - correlation only. The obvious counter example to this would be non-obese people living in an area of suburban sprawl.
For the wars in middle east claim, there would need to be a cite that the wars in the middle east are caused by automobile dependent cities. There’s a lot of reasons, mostly shitty, why we have been fighting wars in the middle east. I’d be surprised if you can trace the cause to a suburb in bumfuck Iowa.