Right. If by “those people” you mean people of a certain race and not poor people or other groups of people not specifically connected by race. And when you find those people, go call them racist.
You don’t have to go to the suburbs. You go to higher income areas. That could be suburbs, it could be private schools. Anywhere that self selects for higher income will do it. But some suburbs have the other side benefits of those other factors. And once you get the ball rolling in a certain area, it becomes more expensive/desirable to live there, and it perpetuates it self. This is a feature, not a bug.
Yes, there are racists in this world. Acknowledged. They also live in cities and pretty much everywhere. Calling wide swathes of people racist for wanting to live in a certain environment is pretty fucktarded, though.
It sounds like **Bump **is talking about income based choices. You are the one making it about race. That’s my interpretation - **Bump **can speak for himself.
Sorta relevant…but liberal activist Matt Damon is sending his kids to private school-which oddly conflicts with his professed love of public schools. I wonder why he advocates public schools for HIS kids, but public for everybody else.
Presumably, Matt likes city life…which is why he lives in a suburban community.
Odd that!
I’m not a “liberal” in the classic sense, but you may be referring to anti urban sprawl campaigns, which in my view should be focused on preventing human overpopulation and constant economic expansion aka “growthism.” Efforts to control urban sprawl merely with building restrictions are superficial since they ignore the root cause of population pressure.
Once one understands that the world is finite (still not clear to many) it should be evident that people can’t keep expanding to mythical greener pastures, and should live sustainably on the acreage that’s already developed. This will require the end of perpetual “economic growth” but that’s got to be a good thing on a finite planet.
I’m also greatly concerned about a new type of suburban sprawl in the form of giant wind turbines purporting to be “green” but occupying huge swaths of rural land and inflicting their looming presence, annoying sounds and shadow flicker on the landscape. In a perfect world, 400 foot wind turbines would be confined to city limits in places where their power is needed most. Due to the geography of wind patterns, they have become suburb-enablers, often hundreds of miles from the suburbs themselves.
Good point about overpopulation as the root cause, but cities that at least try to restrict sprawl (like Portland, Oregon) are keeping the landscape-wrecking effects at bay as much as possible until such a time when growth might cease altogether. Why do nothing at all when something can be done?
The downside can be more traffic congestion, but I see that as a price to pay for discouraging runaway growth, which inevitably leads to more congestion and perpetual, mindless road construction. Adding and widening freeways can only go so far, as evidenced by places like Los Angeles.
The rest of the chapter describes how blacks were frozen out of the suburbanization, except for a very few prewar black-majority suburbs. There were restrictive deed covenants against selling suburban homes to blacks, real-estate agents who simply would not sell blacks homes in white neighborhoods, and for decades the Federal Housing Administration fiercely discouraged mixed-race neighborhoods by various means. Jews were also frozen out, to a lesser degree. None were allowed in Levittown even though Levitt was Jewish.
Of course, as has already been mentioned in this thread, middle-class employment is so insecure these days, and moving so often necessary, that nobody can be sure of putting down roots even in a given state. And, if putting down roots is your intention, you should not be concerned with your home’s market value anyway – you’re not planning to sell it, and if the value goes down, maybe your property taxes go down too.
I think they regard ghetto blacks the same way white Americans used to regard all blacks (and some still do). It’s about class, not race, relating to the same concerns noted above (property values, unsavory neighbors, etc.). And, perhaps the black suburban middle class even has some extra status anxiety compared to whites – “It took our family six generations to get out here, don’t you come in and screw it up for us now!”
But, in the next chapter, “Underlying Causes,” Leowen, through a whole lot of statistical analysis, demonstrates that class could not account for the whiteness of most suburbs, because the disparity remains even if class/income is corrected for. “Rich whites have been much more suburban than rich blacks; poor whites have been much more suburban than poor blacks.”
I know! Incoherent post featuring a few jumbled facts tied together with a strawman to imply liberal hypocrisy but without any actual argument or relevance to the discussion at hand - what’s not to like about that?
For the record, I’m in favor of good public schools but I send my kid to a private school because it was the best option for her and we can (barely, painfully) afford it. It’s a win-win - one less child in the overcrowded public system means a better student-teacher ratio in the public school AND a better student-teacher ratio for my kid. It’s the same argument I make for the UK healthcare system - I love the NHS but if you want special treatment you can pay for private. Nobody’s forcing anyone to do anything. Seriously - why do you hate the free market, ralph124c?
What’s it matter what color they are? They could be all white and it doesn’t matter a whit for the purposes of the argument at hand. The argument’s about not wanting to subsidize poverty and have my children learn values and behaviors I don’t agree with in school (by poor classmates), not about race. It’s unfortunate that race and socioeconomic class are so tightly linked in the US, but saying you don’t like one DOES NOT mean you’re automatically saying you don’t like the other.
A comment inspired by something I heard in the car just a bit ago, some architects being interviewed -
The issue is less city vs suburb or exurb even than it is how much a community can function as a village. A village allows and fosters social interaction and the development of community; it is accessible and often more walkable. Some suburbs function that way, some do not. Some are built not with the people, but with the cars in mind. The people just need to adapt. Some cities consist of many overlapping villages, be they at the scale of a single high rise or a neighborhood, some do not. In some isolation within a crowd is the norm.
I cannot speak for liberals or even all who are just slightly left of center (as I percieve myself) but I do see the lack of a community properly scaled for human interaction and connection as a cause of concern, wherever that shows up.
