Being wealthy is not any kind of prerequisite for leaving behind urban schools. There's thousands of perfectly good acceptable reasons to avoid sending anybody's kids to most urban schools.
The article only takes a minute or two to read but it is excellent food for thought. I think it is the first time I've seen any MSNBCite put affordable housing in the same sentence with the idea that any affluent society that permits affordable housing is killing itself and its future affluence. People usually try their very damnedest to conceal that prospect from the neighborhoods targeted for such diversity.
When one thinks about it, government exists to selectively destroy. It doesn't create anything but it can whip up destruction of real value overnight just by hinting that there will be change. Stock markets and the Fed aside, just look at the conniptions engaged in if nice neighborhoods are put forward as favored targets for low income housing, the winter public refuges where homeless can shelter in deep winter and when there is talk about running mass transit out to a really nice suburb. People visiting me in San Diego always wondered why there were only 2 ways into La Jolla and no mass transit at all there. It's because they fought tooth and nail, relentlessly and without pity or mercy to keep it so.
Usually though, nobody every just comes out and says it.
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| Roads meant to move armies brought civilizations |
7 comments:
I thought Jessica's closing graf about Millennials being willing to send their children to "mediocre schools" a SERIOUS case of wishful thinking.
That said, it's not just families with children that want to isolate themselves. The Second Mrs. Pennington and I considered being "urban pioneers" when we moved to Dee-troit (and were childless), i.e., buying an old home in one of the supposedly up-and-coming, reinvigorated old neighborhoods south of Eight Mile. We decided against that, and that decision was one of the BEST moves we ever made in our life together.
'AFFORDABLE" housing? Lets get real and drop the euphemisms and call it what it is: SUBSIDIZED housing. It is "affordable" to the occupants only to the extent the taxpayers subsidize the rent/note. When the two worst projects in New Orleans were "modernized" and magically transformed into "middle-class" quality "affordable housing" the renovation cost/apt was $350,000 in the St. Thomas project in the Lower Garden Dist and $175,000/apt in the Fischer complex on the Westbank.--costs subsidized by the taxes of many middle-class and working poor living in homes valued in the $64-75,000 range all across the nation outside of urban center real-estate values. PLUS they're on the hook for the subsidizes to the operating costs, i.e., the occupant's monthly rent. Such a deal. PICK ME!!
"I try to be cynical, but I can't keep up"
------Lilly Tomlin
I love that all of these believers can earnestly state that it might take a few generations to fix the schools and that every person that cannot afford to get their kids out of the broken schools must continue to not just pour money down that rathole but also keep sending their children there for generations if necessary. This while never actually acknowledging any problem with the teachers or the school or the students and while actively working to undermine and destroy all school options except those of the very wealthy.
I saw today that the head fascist-in-charge of the Teachers Union in Chicago basically came out and told the world that her people own that city and that everybody else just better sit down and shut up. Shades of Detroit. The other population study I perused today showed that people of every ethnic type are leaving the urban core of major city in America.
I tried the old city life up in Oakland, CA for a couple of years. It was a nice old house right next to Children's Hospital and just a couple of blocks outside of the Piedmont neighborhood. After my car was broken into twice I finally left after they broke into the house and selectively stole things. What bugged me the most was that none of my neighbors saw a thing. What made it really easy to leave was watching the Metro Oakland Fire Department respond to the house fire across the street. I kept the flames off the downwind house using a garden hose and they ran me off while they attacked the house fire from the upwind side and let both houses burn to the ground. It turned out to be a place without charm or any civilized graces. I moved to Emeryville.
We went to Tennessee to see if we would like to live there when I left the navy and one of the cities we went to was Memphis. I did not like the city then at all and read for the next couple of years how the city totally collapsed when they demolished the old public housing estates and the former occupants were scattered to every neighborhood in Memphis where they busily set about destroying the neighborhoods. It was the first time I'd seen that. As I recall in Chicago, when they demolished Kabrini Green they put the same people into newer better affordable housing and didn't spread them all over the city.
I saw what San Diego did when it got the navy land at Point Loma from the Navy after the BRAC. The old Navy Training Center was totally given to a developer with the understanding that some of the housing would be subsidized for the poor and it was, a couple of them and they in turn turned around a week later and sold their affordable housing to the hordes of buyers eager to pay 4-6 times what they paid for the house. Liberty Station is now a very nice and genteel wealthy big enclave of all new houses at Loma Portal. It happens to be directly under the flight path out of San Diego Airport 400 yards away but into every life a little blue ice must fall....
Curtis/
Victor Davis Hanson has a post today on this very subj concerning the Calif elite @ PJ Media. Go Read!!
I'm sorry, it's Nat Review Online (NRO)...such is life surfing the innertubes--can't remember where and when--especially from guys like VDH that post both places and elsewhere..
Virgil, I read it and I agree with VDH. I lived there too and family lived in Menlo Park and Palo Alto. They don't get more progressive liberal socialist. And they don't even see what they do or its affect on the rest of us. The coastal californian liberal does not care at all about the central californian unless it is a little tiny fish or a turtle of some kind.
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