Westchester County in New York just settled a lawsuit charging it with not building enough subsidized housing for minorities. Announcing the settlement, HUD Deputy Secretary Ron Sims observed that studies show that zip codes can predict life expectancy and illness, according to the Wall Street Journal.
It’s time to remove zip codes as a factor in the quality of life in America, he said.
In other words, it’s the geographical plots themselves, not the behavior of the people living in them, that affect life expectancy and illness. This is a new twist on the “morality by osmosis” theory that underlies the Section 8 housing voucher program. Section 8 holds that by catapulting people who have embraced an underclass lifestyle into close proximity to people with bourgeois habits, you can magically endow those voucher recipients with the same capacity to defer gratification and exercise personal responsibility that allowed the unsubsidized homeowners to move up the housing ladder by their own efforts.
(Of course, Westchester County has no real grounds for complaint, having accepted Community Development Block Grant money, a prime federal boondoggle, in the first place.)
You couldn’t ask or a better example of secular magical thinking than this. Take a morbidly obese single-mom-junior-high-school-drop-out with six children by six different men, an IQ of 80, whose idea of a wholesome breakfast is a bag of Doritos and a can of Mountain Dew, put her in an upscale neighborhood, and overnight she’ll become a fit, healthy, educated, nutrition-conscious married woman with an IQ of 130, two overachieving children, and a seat on the local library board.
Susan: “Take a morbidly obese single-mom … on the local library board.”
It’s been done.
Oh, I’m sure it has. I was an inadvertent and unwilling party to one of these social experiments once back in the 1980s when my then-landlord decided to make our building culturally diverse. I won’t go into all the sorry details, but the saga culminated in the slaughter of a goat in the back garden. Where’s PETA when you need them?
I think there’s a Gresham’s Law of real estate: bad tenants/residents drive out good tenants/residents.
A sidelight to #1: I used to ride the bus to my job (back in the early 80’s). The route went through some pretty bleak neighborhoods, some of whose inmates would be on their way to (public) school . . . at least they were going. Anyway, the burly girls and whipcord-thin boys would bring their breakfasts on board, usually consisting of Cheetos and Jungle Juice. I found out later from a friend who worked in a vet’s office in the area that they called it the “Ghetto Breakfast.”
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the same capacity to defer gratification and exercise personal responsibility that allowed the unsubsidized homeowners to move up the housing ladder by their own efforts
Hilarious. If this is your theory of the determinants of economic success in contemporary America, I don’t think you have any stones to throw at anyone over “magical thinking”.
The economy is not a morality play.
>Chris
susan> the same capacity to defer gratification and exercise personal responsibility that allowed the unsubsidized homeowners to move up the housing ladder by their own efforts
Hilarious. If this is your theory of the determinants of economic success in contemporary America, I don’t think you have any stones to throw at anyone over “magical thinking”.
The economy is not a morality play.
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It is a ‘little’ more complicated than the simple right says it is true. The simple right has always had a hubris around its good fortuna.
But we do Not come from _blank slate_ creatures. Cause and effect is absolutely real (whether manifesting in the womb “naturally” or during the “nurture” life span of the creature) and ‘free will'[tm] is Not –along with self awareness for the most part. (Indeed our impulse to believe in free will and self awarness is bio determinism: modules naturally selected[tm] to do a job outside of this post’s scope.)
Therefore, modern liberal goals are unachievable (classical liberal goals are therefore not achievable either –take note “conservatives”).
Liberal goals might not be achievable but turning the world upside down IS; upside down ness achieved through endless hypocrisy.
Since liberalism is always about tactical acquiring of power (through utopian equality religion/demagoguery and demonization) more than an honest attempt to achieve stated “equality” goals, liberals don’t care that hypocrisy and upside down-ness occurs.
Throw in ethnic rightist wolves in liberal sheep clothing and this hypocrisy and upside down ness gets more acutely dangerous.
I’d like to add…
…And throw in the inherent problematic nature of wimmins and profundities of gender reality in general, and this hypocrisy and upside ness gets absolutely acutely dangerous.
One of the biggest goals of the left is to “redistribute” NAM (non-Asian minority) populations among the white middle class. This is a back door way of redistributing resources without directly raising taxes. Look for more of this in the future.
You’re missing the point, Chris. Those are the determinants of wealth creation. Economic success in contemporary America involves controlling and distributing wealth, not generating it. You’re right in that. But such success is sustainable only as long as enough wealth is generated in the first place. You can’t manipulate what you don’t have access to.
75% taxes in Britian for 50 years.
And strangely enough [sarc] the elites never went bearish “John Galt”.
It seems this ‘atlas shrugging’ thing (rich stop generating, causing liberalism to collapse) is an idle threat that the ‘generators’ have no intention of seeing through.
25% of a fortune is still a fortune…
It is easy to “refute” the basis of Section 8 by restating it in a parodistic or exaggerated form.
But people are affected by their neighbors and associates. A person is more likely to make a bad life choice when that choice is commonplace in his community. That was part of the “broken-window” concept in policing.
There can also be a collective reinforcing effect. It has been noted that young males in violent underclass cultures are caught in a “catch-22” situation: if they are combative and truculent, challenging any potential male rivals, they get into fights and may be killed or injured. But if they aren’t – they are viewed as weak, and are targets for abuse. Dilute the population sufficiently, and many of them cool down.
This is not to say I support “Section 8”: its usual effect is to import an underclass cadre into a lower-middle-class area, spreading the toxic behavior.
And strangely enough [sarc] the elites never went bearish “John Galt”.
Does the term “brain drain” ring a bell?
Some questions. Does this type of housing initiative also have the potential to dilute minority voting strength. If Westchester county votes liberal, and so do these newcomers, then living in closer proximity to them might be all they need to lean a little more to the right, while the newcomers are such a small minority, they make little effect. Are those is Westchester in a different state or federal congressional district from those who would be moving in? Also, how dense is Westchester? These projects could end up pretty far from the current neighborhoods.
I agree with Rich in as much as violent underclass can be even more dangerous when they hang out with one another. They tend to victimize one another because that is who is available. Unfortunately they are also more dangerous than the rest of the residents of Westchester.
Westchester County voted for Obama 63% to 35%. I guess they’re getting what they wanted.
http://www.uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/statesub.php?year=2008&fips=36119&f=0&off=0&elect=0