As far as mixed-income developments go, I don’t know how things are in fair New York City, but here in Minneapolis the way it works is this: find one of the few remaining public housing projects, especially if it’s a really nice one that isn’t just a couple of towers. Evict as many people as possible under false pretences. Declare that you will be replacing the project with a “mixed income development” that will contain a large proportion of low-income housing. Evict everyone else. Bulldoze everything. Have lots of construction delays and kickbacks and corruption charges, so that everyone who was evicted has left town, found somewhere else, or become homeless. Build a “mixed income development” with maybe 5% low-income housing.

Minneapolis has lost lots and lots of low income housing through repeats of this process. It’s crap. “Mixed development” means nothing unless it’s really designed to house as many people as need to be housed.

One of the reasons this society rewards home ownership as it does is because homeownership is skewed towards white and middle class people. Things are different in Europe–hell, things are different in Singapore! And honestly, this country wouldn’t have so much of a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” attitude if there were more white people on the bottom of the heap (to mix a metaphor). It’s not enough to say that class trumps race, any more than it trumps gender. Class, race, and gender intersect/co-mingle/reinforce.

What is going on is an intensified divide between the rich and poor. It’s racist in two ways. The bulk of wealth is in ‘white’ hands. The racism in the poor is still virulent, and the key element is white racism. In the long long run as people mix it more or less unity occurs as long as the state doesn’t stoke racist divisions. No one can take that for granted because the U.S. is not above making anyone the demon.

Over all step by step a very deep class divide is being constructed in the U.S. The chief way to maintain it is racism. It is in the interest of those with bottom to unite with higher layers if some sort of principled structure can be built upon those rotten racist or sexist ideologies.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor

Renters will always experience inherent instability in housing. If prices go up, you can get priced out. If prices were to go down, you could find a bigger, cheaper place. Unfortunately, rent hardly ever goes down in cities. Sucks, I know. But that’s only one way in which our society distributes heavy rewards to those who own the property they live on. In other words, these people are targeted not because they are poor or black, but because they do not own their homes.

For homeowners who struggle to pay rising property taxes, I have a simple solution: allow people to defer their property taxes until they sell their home. If a retiree bought their home for $50,000 decades ago, and it’s now worth $750,000, they’d be paying some wicked property taxes each year. However, when the home is sold (when they die or move away), they stand to pocket several hundred thousand dollars, so they’d be able to pay the taxes easily. There’s no reason the government couldn’t wait a few years to get its tax money.

I understand the racial tensions around gentrification, but I wonder if the “we need our own neighborhood” mentality is outdated. For some un-gentrified neighborhoods, the lack of white people means the city can get away with allowing conditions to be awful. It also means people grow up knowing only the ghetto, and don’t get a clear sense of what it means to live in the larger society. Consequently, they don’t have a vision for any kind of life other than poverty and violence. This is certainly not the case for everyone in these neighborhoods, but it is a large-scale phenomenon, and gentrification can reduce it.

The current trend is toward mixed-income, or economically integrated, land use. For example, there is a huge housing development going up near me, consisting of market-priced homes, purchase-assistance homes, and public housing. They’re all the same; the only difference is who gets to live there. It’s replacing an enormous public housing project, which had become dilapidated and crime-ridden. I’m sure most of the market-priced homes will be purchased by white people, and this will lead to gentrification, but I think most people would be better off in an economically mixed neighborhood than an all-poor neighborhood.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts, either here or on my post.