IGX

Today, what seems harder to fathom than the erasure of entire high-rise neighborhoods is that they were ever erected in the first place. For years the projects had stood as monuments to a bygone effort to provide affordable housing for the poor and working-class, the reflection of a belief in a deeper social contract. And although that effort had by most accounts failed, the problems represented by the likes of Cabrini-Green persist, and nothing remotely adequate has been built to replace what has been demolished.

http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/0083897

Pfffft, propaganda

Kennels for niggers.

basically

Trying to bring Brit style block aparment to American poor.

One of the things the Clinton administration got right was realizing that concentrating the urban poor into centralized public housing doesn't actually help them.

News Flash: it's not the architecture, it's the people.

In the late '60's I was amazed to see that even post-riot, Watts was not a shithole.

johno wrote:News Flash: it's not the architecture, it's the people.

It's more compressing all the people into one place. Take your poor folks and have them live next to the middle class and good behavior rubs off.

Grandpa's Spells wrote:

johno wrote:News Flash: it's not the architecture, it's the people.

It's more compressing all the people into one place. Take your poor folks and have them live next to the middle class and good behavior rubs off.

This. Mostly.

There's fairly good evidence on this because economists convinced the government to conduct policy experiments, randomly assigning people to stay put or use vouchers to move out of the ghetto. IIRC, the best evidence suggested moving out of the ghetto led to improvements in the mental health of adults, schooling outcomes for some children, and some reduction in criminal behavior among children. There was also hope of improved employment outcomes and reduced welfare use, but that didn't appear to happen.

Tom Wolfe called it 40 years ago.

Going downtown to mau-mau the bureaucrats got to be the routine practice in San Francisco. The poverty program encouraged you to go in for mau-mauing. They wouldn't have known what to do without it. The bureaucrats at City Hall and in the Office of Economic Opportunity talked "ghetto" all the time, but they didn't known any more about what was going on in the Western Addition, Hunters Point, Potrero Hill, the Mission, Chinatown, or south of Market Street than they did about Zanzibar. They didn't know where to look. They didn't even know who to ask. So what could they do? Well ... they used the Ethnic Catering Service ... right ... They sat back and waited for you to come rolling in with your certified angry militants, your guaranteed frustrated ghetto youth, looking like a bunch of wild men. Then you had your test confrontation. If you were outrageous enough, if you could shake up the bureaucrats so bad that their eyes froze into iceballs and their mouths twisted up into smiles of sheer physical panic, into shit-eating grins, so to speak--then they knew you were the real goods. They knew you were the right studs to give the poverty grants and community organizing jobs to. Otherwise they wouldn't know.

http://teageegeepea.tripod.com/maumau.html

Grandpa's Spells wrote:

johno wrote:News Flash: it's not the architecture, it's the people.

It's more compressing all the people into one place. Take your poor folks and have them live next to the middle class and good behavior rubs off.

I flew into LaGuardia Monday morning and could clearly see that high rise ghetto projects were pretty close as the crow flies to what looked like it might be high rise middle class housing. As to whose behavior rubs off on whom, I'll leave to others but I was surprised by the closeness of proximity.

DARTH wrote:Trying to bring Brit style block aparment to American poor.

Yeah because the council flat neighborhoods are just peachy places to live and work.

Grandpa's Spells wrote:Take your poor folks and have them live next to the middle class and good behavior rubs off.

People don't learn skills by osmosis, Steve. They learn by doing. I'd like to see the Stats that supports your claim.

These folks with Rent Subsidies get checks from the Man to live "next to Middle Class" people.

A regular Middle Class person knows that they have to deliver the goods or they don't stay Middle class. Soft skills that keep folks middle class. Working a task to completion. Keeping your word to your boss. Making customers happy. Not taking your boss's bad day as "disrespect" and "stepping to" them. Taking some courses or getting a degree. The humility that these fuck heads sometimes don't get because "the System" is against them.

I lived alongside of Welfare Recipients for years. You get a woman who wants the best for her kids, she'll bear down and do it. I worked alongside of some former welfare recipients who have great attitudes and work ethics.

You get some shitbag who lives off of the fat of land? She or he doesn't give a fuck. Giving them a place in the 'Burbs just gives them a nice pad and easier pickings.


Only thing that makes sense to me, Steve, is that Welfare attitudes can take you down. Try and work a straight job while living next to Welfare recipients. If their partying doesn't keep you up at night their petty theft makes you consider some criminal acts of your own. Except that their attitudes are disgusting, like cattle. Fuck 'em and their poverty pimps.