As Program Moves Poor to Suburbs, Tensions Follow

This reminds of the anti-singularity thesis: increasing wealth from technology enables a decline in cultural values. ( <a href="http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/antisingularity.html" rel="nofollow">http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/antisin...</a> ).<p>In 1910, inner city crime like we have today simply did not exist. Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, London - all these cities had homicide rates that today you can only find in Pleasantville suburbia. It was the age of stern Victorian values and law and order policing. People did not have the luxury of giving criminals the benefit of the doubt, nor of allowing any kind of public disorder, lest their neighborhoods turn unsafe.<p>The trouble is, law and order tactics are a blunt instrument, and they are likely to offend and hurt good people too. Today, we are generally wealthy enough that moving away from crime is a possibility for the middle and upper class. Running has become easier than coming together as a community to solve the crime program. This especially true when "coming together as a community" means navigating big city politics, and cracking down on crime can get you labeled as racist. Today, when a community suffers from high crime rates, decent folk move out. First it was moving from the inner cities to the suburbs. Now, in many cases, people are moving from the suburbs back to expensive neighborhoods in the city. High real estate prices have become a substitute for crime control.<p>I think at some point we're going to have to stop the running and figure out how to stop the ongoing warfare in our cities. Allowing the crime is not doing anyone any good. Inner city men have astounding deaths from homicide. And the middle class is spending ever increasing portions of their income on housing. Everyone loses.

Who is killing slightly controversial comments here? What's wrong with the following dead comment?<p><i>They have tried this extensively. Inner city block grants, subsidizing business, etc.<p>The idea that you can 'fix' another person's neighborhood is equally as racist as the policies that caused blacks to concentrate in those neighborhoods in the first place (they were chased out of the countryside in the KKK era and left with few alternatives to the city). What if the government started offering grants to 'fix' your neighborhood? How demeaning that is, and how absurd! As though subsidized bike shops and coffee shops are going to pressure crack dealers to go away.<p>As for the police patrols and condemned properties, do you think that there is a functioning local government in these areas? Look at DC and Detroit! The local city government is so corrupt that they can't even provide basic services, or basic levels of non corrupt policing, much less an effective attempt at crime reduction. On my way to work in DC a few years ago I would see the same police officer asleep under the same overpass every single day. This was right next to the highway, so maybe 2000 people would see him every morning, and yet he would sleep away, sometimes with his face pressed on the drivers side window. Do you think a bagel shop can fix that!?</i>

I've been thinking about the whether opposite kind of program would work. These programs try to take the "good" poor people out of bad neighborhoods, making those neighborhoods even worse off. Why not do the opposite: subsidize and protect large "good" businesses and educational institutions that operate in poor neighborhoods. Provide the businesses with security in the form of dedicated, deputized, police-trained security guards and increased uniformed police patrols. Hire locals to work on demolition of condemned properties in their neighborhoods.<p>I don't have any concrete ideas for how it would work but it seems like there's some way to do it.

If anyone wants a really good (non-fiction) book on stuff like this, check out The World We Created at Hamilton High. It's about a wealthy suburban school that gets integrated in the 60s. Scribd isn't displaying the document properly, but here is link to chapter one:<p><a href="http://www.alexkrupp.com/Hamilton1.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.alexkrupp.com/Hamilton1.pdf</a>

<i>“I know it sounds horrible, but they’re scary. I’m sorry,” said Ms. Reynolds, who like her two friends said she was conflicted about her newfound fear of black youths. “Sometimes I question myself, and I think, Would I feel this way if they were Mexican or white?”</i><p>Nice tidy quote there. "Typical white person." Yep, when the government terrorizes your neighborhood, and animalistic thugs threaten your very life, the first impulse of polite people is to feel guilt, and question their own motivations. Let's see how this happens:<p>1. You have a nice neighborhood, and suddenly there's a spike in the black population. If you've seen this happen, you know that going from 0 percent to 5 percent can result in an <i>astonishing</i> increase in the frequency of ugly attitudes, bad behavior, noise, and general violence.<p>2. The "racists" move out. They are attacked as "racists" and everyone agrees that they are "racists". However, they get out in time before housing prices collapse...<p>3. As the population shifts, serious crime is high enough that, racist or not, everybody who can get out, including middle-class blacks, gets out.<p>4. Property values drop to next to nothing. The neighborhood is basically a spread-out inner city.<p>5. Eventually, given the super-cheap houses, adventurous young men and homosexuals (ie, people who don't have to worry about their wives being raped) move in and clean up the place. Gays are great because "ganstas" don't want any association with them. Gentrification occurs...<p>6. The poor and violent people are still poor and violent, and so the government tries to "fix" them by introducing them into a new nice neighborhood.<p>The upshot is that there is constant churn in the real estate market. Continual soft ethnic cleansing from city to suburb to city moves literally 100s of billions of dollars of houses. It's a great marketing program.<p>There was some black writer who suggested that the <i>real</i> problem with the black community was the move from southern farms to the cities. Rural blacks simply don't have the same problems, and never have...

To me, this article is muddle-headed. It begins with a discussion on the movement of poor from the inner cities into the suburbs and then pivots to begin framing the discussion as one of race instead of poverty. Add in a few outspoken activists, and I'm not sure you have much of anything useful here.<p>It's a simple question, really. Are the chronic problems that people face _mostly_ a part of their own beliefs and lifestyles or is _mostly_ it something to do with luck, location, harassment, or policy? I'd entertain arguments on both sides of the issue, but this article implies the answer has something to do with race and policy. That seems to presume the to know the answer to the discussion before it even begins. (It's also lazy reporting and close to editorializing, but that's a comment for another day)<p>If you want to have a discussion about segregation and integration of various races into various neighborhoods, that'd be a cool story too. But that's not what this was either, unfortunately.<p>As for startup potential, the article obliquely mentions that foreclosure rates are associated with violent crime. I've also heard there's a close correlation with density of liquor stores and crime. I wonder if all of this crime data could be assimilated into a useful service? Perhaps something than runs on your phone? (hint, hint)