In the first study referenced I’m quite certain that a huge lurking variable is the concienciousness and executive function of the parents on a big 5 personality test. If youre poor and you move from a poor neighborhood to a rich neighborhood you’re probably doing it with some intent to better the life of you and your family, you’re likely leaving a community with connections and it’s a very intentional choice to take a short term cost for longer term gain. You’re selecting against the types of people who would be the classic low SES nuisances/anti social actors that people want to spend money to avoid. It’s not a study but I’m quite aware of a few sets of issues in public housing in SF where a bottom 1% in concienciousness person ruins the experience for everyone else in the building by smoking meth, blasting music all day, screaming a ton and having shady associates come and go, or in another story a person in the affordable part of a nice building opened some kind of a giant water faucet for fire fighting on the 20th floor and and everyone on floors 15-20 had to be moved out to hotels for a few months while everything was repaired. I’d take a proceed with caution approach to any policy here, and I’d be more open to expansion if it was more broadly acceptable to deal with anti social/nusiance behavior vs accepting it.
It's not that I don't believe you, but it's tricky that the logic starts with "it is bad for kids to grow up around a lot of poor people" and goes to "so we would like to move some poor people into your wealthier neighborhood." Y'know? It's like every point of evidence for why the kids should get out of the bad neighborhood ALSO works as a point against bringing those people into YOUR neighborhood.
In the opener there's a line about "the benefits of integration — for the rich in addition to the poor" but when I read it, I did not really find those benefits for the rich. Without a tradeoff, this becomes just charity work and I worry it will not really happen.
BTW in terms of solutions - I love magnet schools and other specialized schools that bring people from different backgrounds together based on exceptional ability. As someone who grew up poor but tested into a fancy school, this was a great way to get contact with upper class people on terms that started by acknowledging that I was an equal re performance.
Americans love meritocracy! Meanwhile, at least in my hometown of Boston, school district integration has a famous history of NIMBYism. Why wouldn’t integrating some zip codes in a merit/class-agnostic way lead to the same evaporative cooling/race-to-the-bottom white flight that school integration did last time? This article leans heavily on observational work showing that limited integration probably won’t be a strongly negative experience for wealthier people, but ignores the actual dynamics involved. The fact that integration has already been tried with mixed results speaks to the limits of this research.
But like upzoning, maybe this is a case where if every neighborhood were 5% more integrated, people would hardly notice, with disproportionate benefits because of marginal effects.
The piece made the point that they couldn't quantitatively find any clear downsides for richer residents. The top comment here wonders if this is due to selection effects for higher conscientious poorer residents, but that would also work against the thrust of your comment. It's one thing if you have conflicting evidence, but do you?
Well... But your own words are "doesn't significantly harm the remaining 70%" - you are already stipulating that the impact is negative, or at least definitely not positive!
I'm also not sure choosing the example of undocumented immigration makes the point that you might hope. Undocumented immigration has turned into a major ugly political issue! The people do NOT like it, it seems.
Overall you're structuring an argument like "You well off people are fine - you can take this" and I really do not think that is the mood of the voters.
If “it’s just propaganda and bigotry“ worked as a persuasive tactic, then the last decade of US history would look very different. That is assuming that it is *true* that their opinions aren’t driven by experience. Annecdotally, I know at least one person who had difficulty finding a job because she did not speak Spanish, and her area had seen enough immigration lately that it hurt her in the job hunt.
And frankly, “it’s positive sum overall” is still a hard sell. You are asking for altruism, which can work…if the beneficiaries are sympathetic. But that doesn’t work if you frame your argument in terms of benefits for all parties, and then apparently forget to mention the benefits to one party at all
Truly a piece written by someone who does not have kids lol
Schools are THE key issue here upon which everything you're advocating fails. If you want to go see the true state of race relations in this country go talk with a parent who lives in a big city sotto voce about their school situation, you may be very surprised what you hear from even the most ostensibly enlightened liberal. (To be sure there do exist lefty parents who prioritize diversity and put their kids in lower-rated schools; but when you zoom in you see that they immediately start trying to segregate their kids within the school via gifted programs or language immersion programs...vanishingly few want to send their kids to the diverse school AND just have their kids sit in the same classrooms as all the other kids.)
A maddening thing about liberals is that they have some idea but then refuse to prioritize and make the tradeoffs needed to actually make it successful. And you end in a situation where no one is happy, everything is fucked up, and everyone who is rich enough just opts out of the system entirely (either by paying for private school or moving to the suburbs).
Case in point: the primary reason parents don't want a bunch of poor black kids coming to their kids' school is because they are afraid those kids are going to be unruly; behave in ways to physically intimidate their own children; be distracting in the classroom/lower standards; and even engage in violent behavior. (I read in TNC's Between the World and Me how at his school growing up accidentally stepping on someone's new shoes could result in them beating you up. Which is like...completely fucking psychotic and insane? Why would I send my kid anywhere near such an intensely violent and fucked up environment? Or want to import that culture and behavior into their school?) But it is not some impossible thing to simply address this concern directly: schools could condition access based on behavior and expel kids who don't behave or otherwise bother the other kids; they could experiment with ways to dual-track classrooms so that the poorer kids don't drag down the well-performing kids, but also allow for ways to have those classes mix together sometimes; etc. But there's so many lefty shibboleths and so many topics and plain observations that are verboten that nobody can actually practically try to address all the problems and actually try to make something that works.
There's also just generally with bussing a huge downside which is that logistically it's a nightmare for parents to not have certainty about where their kids are going to attend school, and if the commute for the kid is long that is a horrible thing for the kid to have to endure. These aren't just inconveniences; these are life-plan-altering "I don't think we can live in this city anymore" type problems.
Anyway, it would be nice to hear someone advocate on this issue who 1) actually has kids and understands all the complexities and pain points and actual concerns, 2) is a liberal, and 3) is unafraid to speak plainly about obvious problems with mixing in kids from different backgrounds/socioeconomic statuses etc. I actually do think you could get to a place where a typical wealthier parent would be fine with their kid attending a mixed-class school if you actually had some mechanism for assuring the lower class kids were well behaved and engaged with their education.
This feels of a piece with a Disorder Theory of Everything that I'm always carrying with me as I try to navigate life in the United States.
Widespread tolerance, and at times even apologetics (Woke 1 was craaaazy!) for disorder is poisoning everything in modern American society. I agree that class segregation is unhealthy for everyone and I absolutely hate the reflex people have to physically isolate themselves rather than demand higher standards for public conduct, but we've gotten ourselves into a situation where there is little faith in the ability of either the state or informal society to keep people in line. Setting this up as a policy goal is a political nonstarter as long as middle and upper income people understand it to mean putting up with low-conscientiousness neighbors for the greater good. Other wealthy countries with less socioeconomic segregation, as I understand it, are able to run that way because they aren't under-policed, and social convention isn't so riddled with the threat of being called classist, or racist, or (horrors!) the dreaded "Karen," for having an issue with someone breaking the rules who is less well off than you.
I would love to see some efforts made to chip away at residential segregation, but any serious attempt is going to depend on first restoring people's trust in public order. As an aside, I don't think it's fair to make kids spend all their free time on the bus to a school far from home just to achieve social integration, so if you're going to do something, it really should be at the level of where people live, without resorting to such gimmicks. Having people integrated into a 24/7 neighborhood social fabric is probably much better for this than simply inserting them into a particular school cohort, anyway.
Noah Smith has coined the term “anarchyfare” for this kind of widespread tolerance and even demanding that people accommodate social disorder. Basically, as I understand it, the US has a poor social safety net, plus a fraught racial history. Many (most?) other countries do have that fraught history but most also have a better social safety net and/or much less societal tolerance for disorder (for instance, Japan’s social safety net isn’t the greatest, but *as a society* its tolerance for public disorder is basically zero). So, in lieu of actually providing the help that people need - and may find intrusive, such as supportive housing with more supervision and rules than a truculent mentally disturbed person wants to put up with - and also in lieu of really *reforming* the police, saying “Your slogan is serve and protect. You are going to live up to it and we will train you” - because that costs a lot of money that American society can’t or won’t spare - we get “being looted or mugged is just the price you pay for living in a city. It’s tee-hee adventurous!” Men who gather on street corners or in front of corner stores and harass women pedestrians are “neighborhood vibrancy.” Homeless people camping out in the library? There’s no where else for them to go (alas, so often true). Getting yelled at by random menacing creeps? Tee hee that’s city life, so exciting, so vibrant!
Anarchyfare is tl;dr we don’t want to spend the money (or don’t have it to spend) so we just let people do as they please in the name of “rights” and “freedom.”
To echo other commenters, you frame things in terms of the common good but the benefits seem one-sided. This feels like a request for charity wrapped up in civil-rights language that is at best an imperfect fit.
you have not addressed any of the reasons why rich people do not currently choose to live near poor people (it’s not like they can’t afford it). Some of those reasons are surely stupid and bigoted, but unless you want the rich to simply move away after the affordable housing goes up then those arguments cannot be ignored.
I don't necessarily disagree with the arguments laid forth in this article, but I do think some of the framing (mostly from Chetty's study) is a little misleading. Like, this article talks about "integration" but it seems like the bulk of it is a lot less about actually bringing rich and poor people together, and more just about busing a few poor kids into rich neighborhoods. Apart from one line about HOPE IV, there's no talk about busing rich kids into poor neighborhoods, or even generally just having a distribution that is more uniform. As another commenter mentioned, the discussed benefits are entirely incurred by the poor kids from being exposed to rich kids, and none in the opposite direction.
Part of this is that it relies on Chetty's study, which I find similarly misleading. He denotes his metric as "economic connectedness", and describes it as a sort of symmetric quantity: "The degree to which low-income and high-income people are friends with each other." As a gut check, I wanted to compare my socioeconomically diverse high school to the neighboring homogeneous, wealthy high schools in southwestern CT. To my surprise, extremely white and wealthy high schools like Darien HS, New Canaan HS, and Staples HS were above 90th percentile on this "economic connectedness" metric while my high school (Brien McMahon HS in Norwalk) was in the 60s. I promise you that no one would describe any of those schools as places where "low income and high income people are friends with each other".
But that's because the _real_ definition as listed elsewhere on the website is "the share of high (above-median) income friends among people with low (below-median) incomes", which is an incredibly asymmetric measure, and, as with the schools above, greatly benefits schools that are almost entirely rich and have a handful of low-income students (Darien, for one, has a program similar to the MTO one you mention).
So in my mind the case is a lot less "integration and increased economic connectedness is good for everyone", and more "busing a few poor kids into rich neighborhoods increases their economic outcomes down the line".
This was a superb piece with data and arguments everyone should be exposed to. Nonetheless, Milan, here is my question: how do you square this with Jerusalem’s most recent piece arguing that the government shouldn’t legislate the common good?
Of course, some class-based housing segregation is due to the lingering effects of redlining, or more recently, LIHTC and zoning regulation. But I’m sure we can agree that SOME separation of low and high income communities is simply due to the human desire to associate with similar people.
Most rich Americans really do not want to live near poor Americans, and even most poor don’t want to live with the rich, not because it wouldn’t help them, but because they share little culture in common: they have different professions, media tastes, educational backgrounds, politics, mannerisms, and of course, financial means. Again, to some degree, this is merely the product of free association, a well protected right in this country.
By arguing that the government should foment cross-class interaction, we are supporting the “violation” of free association in favor of the common good. So, which is it? Is this an unacceptable claim, as it gives the government power to legislate morality? Or should we admit that it truly is OK, at times, for the government to declare and encourage what the good life is? Personally, I’d say the latter.
A key YIMBY claim (that I believe in!) is the power of agglomeration effects; it’s positive sum to have all the finance workers in NYC and tech workers in SF because it provides a deeper talent pool to start companies, there’s more cross-pollination of ideas, other related industries can cluster…
If you run this causality backwards, would you support kicking a bunch of finance or tech workers out of their homes so janitors or nannies could live there? It would be a huge benefit for the janitors no doubt, or for the other high earners looking for a nanny. But for society as a whole it seems net negative. The market really is the best solution for allocating housing.
Just thinking about bussing, and how that one kid had to get up to catch a 430 AM bus or whatever time it was: during the 60’s and 70’s, most kids didn’t have a ton of after school projects, enrichments, “community service,” extra credit or whatever. Most kids who were not in glee club or drama club or chess club or (insert club here) just went home or to a friend’s house after school.
Even with no activities, I sometimes wonder how that long of a commute affected kids’ social lives. And nowadays with kids involved in a jillion math enrichment courses, music lessons, community service for school credit, and so forth and so on, would it even be feasible to bus kids for hours? Parents would probably have to drive the kids - and most parents can’t, as they are working.
This is tangential to the argument for integrating *neighborhoods* and having everyone go to the close by neighborhood school.
Where do the integration studies take place? High-density urban areas? I'd think there's a big difference between adding some carefully placed, well-maintained low-income housing in an already dense urban area and plunking down a "project" into a wealthy suburban neighborhood.
Our liberal / progressive council members tried to pull a fast one recently by fast-tracking the redevelopment of a city-owned property in the middle of a quiet, historic neighborhood with sidewalks and narrow, tree-lined streets. They planned to build an affordable housing project that also incorporated a hotel and parking lot. When the plan became public, there was a rebellion. All these liberal homeowners displaying BLM signs and diversity flags on their lawns stormed a meeting of the city council and shut down the plan.
And they weren't wrong. Who would want a 5-story low-income project next door, towering over their 100-year-old $600k+ homes that would instantly drop in value, while the little brick streets are are blocked by a massive increase in traffic and scores of people move in from the neighborhoods residents had worked hard to escape?
People berate the idea of gentrification, where rich people move into poor neighborhoods. But we're supposed to support the opposite, where poor people move into rich neighborhoods? I get how sad all this is. But the only folks who support these ideas are those who will never be negatively affected by them.
Like Milan I grew up in a mixed income neighborhood and think I'm better for it. No one was poor, but you saw all ranges from properly middle class to very rich.
The reason is that I lived in a city that allowed multiple different zoning types. My family lived in a SFH, as did my neighbor, but next to me was a 6 unit condo where residents had much smaller units and smaller incomes. In the same block we had 15+ floor towers with different apartment sizes, allowing both wealthy families and middle income ones to reside together. My parents eventually moved to a nearby one when they became empty nesters, without having to leave the neighborhood.
This mix of housing let different classes mix, and I think that's what the US misses.
The other factor is that in my country public education is bad, so if you're middle class or above you pay for private. This removed the coupling of housing with education that is so prevalent in the US too.
Absolutely Miles. Well done to you. And I have seen that growing up as well. I am currently working with some people to start a public charter school that is intentionally structured this way.
In the first study referenced I’m quite certain that a huge lurking variable is the concienciousness and executive function of the parents on a big 5 personality test. If youre poor and you move from a poor neighborhood to a rich neighborhood you’re probably doing it with some intent to better the life of you and your family, you’re likely leaving a community with connections and it’s a very intentional choice to take a short term cost for longer term gain. You’re selecting against the types of people who would be the classic low SES nuisances/anti social actors that people want to spend money to avoid. It’s not a study but I’m quite aware of a few sets of issues in public housing in SF where a bottom 1% in concienciousness person ruins the experience for everyone else in the building by smoking meth, blasting music all day, screaming a ton and having shady associates come and go, or in another story a person in the affordable part of a nice building opened some kind of a giant water faucet for fire fighting on the 20th floor and and everyone on floors 15-20 had to be moved out to hotels for a few months while everything was repaired. I’d take a proceed with caution approach to any policy here, and I’d be more open to expansion if it was more broadly acceptable to deal with anti social/nusiance behavior vs accepting it.
It's not that I don't believe you, but it's tricky that the logic starts with "it is bad for kids to grow up around a lot of poor people" and goes to "so we would like to move some poor people into your wealthier neighborhood." Y'know? It's like every point of evidence for why the kids should get out of the bad neighborhood ALSO works as a point against bringing those people into YOUR neighborhood.
In the opener there's a line about "the benefits of integration — for the rich in addition to the poor" but when I read it, I did not really find those benefits for the rich. Without a tradeoff, this becomes just charity work and I worry it will not really happen.
BTW in terms of solutions - I love magnet schools and other specialized schools that bring people from different backgrounds together based on exceptional ability. As someone who grew up poor but tested into a fancy school, this was a great way to get contact with upper class people on terms that started by acknowledging that I was an equal re performance.
Americans love meritocracy! Meanwhile, at least in my hometown of Boston, school district integration has a famous history of NIMBYism. Why wouldn’t integrating some zip codes in a merit/class-agnostic way lead to the same evaporative cooling/race-to-the-bottom white flight that school integration did last time? This article leans heavily on observational work showing that limited integration probably won’t be a strongly negative experience for wealthier people, but ignores the actual dynamics involved. The fact that integration has already been tried with mixed results speaks to the limits of this research.
But like upzoning, maybe this is a case where if every neighborhood were 5% more integrated, people would hardly notice, with disproportionate benefits because of marginal effects.
The piece made the point that they couldn't quantitatively find any clear downsides for richer residents. The top comment here wonders if this is due to selection effects for higher conscientious poorer residents, but that would also work against the thrust of your comment. It's one thing if you have conflicting evidence, but do you?
Well... But your own words are "doesn't significantly harm the remaining 70%" - you are already stipulating that the impact is negative, or at least definitely not positive!
I'm also not sure choosing the example of undocumented immigration makes the point that you might hope. Undocumented immigration has turned into a major ugly political issue! The people do NOT like it, it seems.
Overall you're structuring an argument like "You well off people are fine - you can take this" and I really do not think that is the mood of the voters.
If “it’s just propaganda and bigotry“ worked as a persuasive tactic, then the last decade of US history would look very different. That is assuming that it is *true* that their opinions aren’t driven by experience. Annecdotally, I know at least one person who had difficulty finding a job because she did not speak Spanish, and her area had seen enough immigration lately that it hurt her in the job hunt.
And frankly, “it’s positive sum overall” is still a hard sell. You are asking for altruism, which can work…if the beneficiaries are sympathetic. But that doesn’t work if you frame your argument in terms of benefits for all parties, and then apparently forget to mention the benefits to one party at all
Truly a piece written by someone who does not have kids lol
Schools are THE key issue here upon which everything you're advocating fails. If you want to go see the true state of race relations in this country go talk with a parent who lives in a big city sotto voce about their school situation, you may be very surprised what you hear from even the most ostensibly enlightened liberal. (To be sure there do exist lefty parents who prioritize diversity and put their kids in lower-rated schools; but when you zoom in you see that they immediately start trying to segregate their kids within the school via gifted programs or language immersion programs...vanishingly few want to send their kids to the diverse school AND just have their kids sit in the same classrooms as all the other kids.)
A maddening thing about liberals is that they have some idea but then refuse to prioritize and make the tradeoffs needed to actually make it successful. And you end in a situation where no one is happy, everything is fucked up, and everyone who is rich enough just opts out of the system entirely (either by paying for private school or moving to the suburbs).
Case in point: the primary reason parents don't want a bunch of poor black kids coming to their kids' school is because they are afraid those kids are going to be unruly; behave in ways to physically intimidate their own children; be distracting in the classroom/lower standards; and even engage in violent behavior. (I read in TNC's Between the World and Me how at his school growing up accidentally stepping on someone's new shoes could result in them beating you up. Which is like...completely fucking psychotic and insane? Why would I send my kid anywhere near such an intensely violent and fucked up environment? Or want to import that culture and behavior into their school?) But it is not some impossible thing to simply address this concern directly: schools could condition access based on behavior and expel kids who don't behave or otherwise bother the other kids; they could experiment with ways to dual-track classrooms so that the poorer kids don't drag down the well-performing kids, but also allow for ways to have those classes mix together sometimes; etc. But there's so many lefty shibboleths and so many topics and plain observations that are verboten that nobody can actually practically try to address all the problems and actually try to make something that works.
There's also just generally with bussing a huge downside which is that logistically it's a nightmare for parents to not have certainty about where their kids are going to attend school, and if the commute for the kid is long that is a horrible thing for the kid to have to endure. These aren't just inconveniences; these are life-plan-altering "I don't think we can live in this city anymore" type problems.
Anyway, it would be nice to hear someone advocate on this issue who 1) actually has kids and understands all the complexities and pain points and actual concerns, 2) is a liberal, and 3) is unafraid to speak plainly about obvious problems with mixing in kids from different backgrounds/socioeconomic statuses etc. I actually do think you could get to a place where a typical wealthier parent would be fine with their kid attending a mixed-class school if you actually had some mechanism for assuring the lower class kids were well behaved and engaged with their education.
This feels of a piece with a Disorder Theory of Everything that I'm always carrying with me as I try to navigate life in the United States.
Widespread tolerance, and at times even apologetics (Woke 1 was craaaazy!) for disorder is poisoning everything in modern American society. I agree that class segregation is unhealthy for everyone and I absolutely hate the reflex people have to physically isolate themselves rather than demand higher standards for public conduct, but we've gotten ourselves into a situation where there is little faith in the ability of either the state or informal society to keep people in line. Setting this up as a policy goal is a political nonstarter as long as middle and upper income people understand it to mean putting up with low-conscientiousness neighbors for the greater good. Other wealthy countries with less socioeconomic segregation, as I understand it, are able to run that way because they aren't under-policed, and social convention isn't so riddled with the threat of being called classist, or racist, or (horrors!) the dreaded "Karen," for having an issue with someone breaking the rules who is less well off than you.
I would love to see some efforts made to chip away at residential segregation, but any serious attempt is going to depend on first restoring people's trust in public order. As an aside, I don't think it's fair to make kids spend all their free time on the bus to a school far from home just to achieve social integration, so if you're going to do something, it really should be at the level of where people live, without resorting to such gimmicks. Having people integrated into a 24/7 neighborhood social fabric is probably much better for this than simply inserting them into a particular school cohort, anyway.
Noah Smith has coined the term “anarchyfare” for this kind of widespread tolerance and even demanding that people accommodate social disorder. Basically, as I understand it, the US has a poor social safety net, plus a fraught racial history. Many (most?) other countries do have that fraught history but most also have a better social safety net and/or much less societal tolerance for disorder (for instance, Japan’s social safety net isn’t the greatest, but *as a society* its tolerance for public disorder is basically zero). So, in lieu of actually providing the help that people need - and may find intrusive, such as supportive housing with more supervision and rules than a truculent mentally disturbed person wants to put up with - and also in lieu of really *reforming* the police, saying “Your slogan is serve and protect. You are going to live up to it and we will train you” - because that costs a lot of money that American society can’t or won’t spare - we get “being looted or mugged is just the price you pay for living in a city. It’s tee-hee adventurous!” Men who gather on street corners or in front of corner stores and harass women pedestrians are “neighborhood vibrancy.” Homeless people camping out in the library? There’s no where else for them to go (alas, so often true). Getting yelled at by random menacing creeps? Tee hee that’s city life, so exciting, so vibrant!
Anarchyfare is tl;dr we don’t want to spend the money (or don’t have it to spend) so we just let people do as they please in the name of “rights” and “freedom.”
To echo other commenters, you frame things in terms of the common good but the benefits seem one-sided. This feels like a request for charity wrapped up in civil-rights language that is at best an imperfect fit.
you have not addressed any of the reasons why rich people do not currently choose to live near poor people (it’s not like they can’t afford it). Some of those reasons are surely stupid and bigoted, but unless you want the rich to simply move away after the affordable housing goes up then those arguments cannot be ignored.
I don't necessarily disagree with the arguments laid forth in this article, but I do think some of the framing (mostly from Chetty's study) is a little misleading. Like, this article talks about "integration" but it seems like the bulk of it is a lot less about actually bringing rich and poor people together, and more just about busing a few poor kids into rich neighborhoods. Apart from one line about HOPE IV, there's no talk about busing rich kids into poor neighborhoods, or even generally just having a distribution that is more uniform. As another commenter mentioned, the discussed benefits are entirely incurred by the poor kids from being exposed to rich kids, and none in the opposite direction.
Part of this is that it relies on Chetty's study, which I find similarly misleading. He denotes his metric as "economic connectedness", and describes it as a sort of symmetric quantity: "The degree to which low-income and high-income people are friends with each other." As a gut check, I wanted to compare my socioeconomically diverse high school to the neighboring homogeneous, wealthy high schools in southwestern CT. To my surprise, extremely white and wealthy high schools like Darien HS, New Canaan HS, and Staples HS were above 90th percentile on this "economic connectedness" metric while my high school (Brien McMahon HS in Norwalk) was in the 60s. I promise you that no one would describe any of those schools as places where "low income and high income people are friends with each other".
But that's because the _real_ definition as listed elsewhere on the website is "the share of high (above-median) income friends among people with low (below-median) incomes", which is an incredibly asymmetric measure, and, as with the schools above, greatly benefits schools that are almost entirely rich and have a handful of low-income students (Darien, for one, has a program similar to the MTO one you mention).
So in my mind the case is a lot less "integration and increased economic connectedness is good for everyone", and more "busing a few poor kids into rich neighborhoods increases their economic outcomes down the line".
This was a superb piece with data and arguments everyone should be exposed to. Nonetheless, Milan, here is my question: how do you square this with Jerusalem’s most recent piece arguing that the government shouldn’t legislate the common good?
Of course, some class-based housing segregation is due to the lingering effects of redlining, or more recently, LIHTC and zoning regulation. But I’m sure we can agree that SOME separation of low and high income communities is simply due to the human desire to associate with similar people.
Most rich Americans really do not want to live near poor Americans, and even most poor don’t want to live with the rich, not because it wouldn’t help them, but because they share little culture in common: they have different professions, media tastes, educational backgrounds, politics, mannerisms, and of course, financial means. Again, to some degree, this is merely the product of free association, a well protected right in this country.
By arguing that the government should foment cross-class interaction, we are supporting the “violation” of free association in favor of the common good. So, which is it? Is this an unacceptable claim, as it gives the government power to legislate morality? Or should we admit that it truly is OK, at times, for the government to declare and encourage what the good life is? Personally, I’d say the latter.
LIHTC always seemed like a huge waste of money relative to YIMBYtopia.
A key YIMBY claim (that I believe in!) is the power of agglomeration effects; it’s positive sum to have all the finance workers in NYC and tech workers in SF because it provides a deeper talent pool to start companies, there’s more cross-pollination of ideas, other related industries can cluster…
If you run this causality backwards, would you support kicking a bunch of finance or tech workers out of their homes so janitors or nannies could live there? It would be a huge benefit for the janitors no doubt, or for the other high earners looking for a nanny. But for society as a whole it seems net negative. The market really is the best solution for allocating housing.
Just thinking about bussing, and how that one kid had to get up to catch a 430 AM bus or whatever time it was: during the 60’s and 70’s, most kids didn’t have a ton of after school projects, enrichments, “community service,” extra credit or whatever. Most kids who were not in glee club or drama club or chess club or (insert club here) just went home or to a friend’s house after school.
Even with no activities, I sometimes wonder how that long of a commute affected kids’ social lives. And nowadays with kids involved in a jillion math enrichment courses, music lessons, community service for school credit, and so forth and so on, would it even be feasible to bus kids for hours? Parents would probably have to drive the kids - and most parents can’t, as they are working.
This is tangential to the argument for integrating *neighborhoods* and having everyone go to the close by neighborhood school.
People shouldn’t commit crimes
Where do the integration studies take place? High-density urban areas? I'd think there's a big difference between adding some carefully placed, well-maintained low-income housing in an already dense urban area and plunking down a "project" into a wealthy suburban neighborhood.
Our liberal / progressive council members tried to pull a fast one recently by fast-tracking the redevelopment of a city-owned property in the middle of a quiet, historic neighborhood with sidewalks and narrow, tree-lined streets. They planned to build an affordable housing project that also incorporated a hotel and parking lot. When the plan became public, there was a rebellion. All these liberal homeowners displaying BLM signs and diversity flags on their lawns stormed a meeting of the city council and shut down the plan.
And they weren't wrong. Who would want a 5-story low-income project next door, towering over their 100-year-old $600k+ homes that would instantly drop in value, while the little brick streets are are blocked by a massive increase in traffic and scores of people move in from the neighborhoods residents had worked hard to escape?
People berate the idea of gentrification, where rich people move into poor neighborhoods. But we're supposed to support the opposite, where poor people move into rich neighborhoods? I get how sad all this is. But the only folks who support these ideas are those who will never be negatively affected by them.
Like Milan I grew up in a mixed income neighborhood and think I'm better for it. No one was poor, but you saw all ranges from properly middle class to very rich.
The reason is that I lived in a city that allowed multiple different zoning types. My family lived in a SFH, as did my neighbor, but next to me was a 6 unit condo where residents had much smaller units and smaller incomes. In the same block we had 15+ floor towers with different apartment sizes, allowing both wealthy families and middle income ones to reside together. My parents eventually moved to a nearby one when they became empty nesters, without having to leave the neighborhood.
This mix of housing let different classes mix, and I think that's what the US misses.
The other factor is that in my country public education is bad, so if you're middle class or above you pay for private. This removed the coupling of housing with education that is so prevalent in the US too.
Absolutely Miles. Well done to you. And I have seen that growing up as well. I am currently working with some people to start a public charter school that is intentionally structured this way.