[LoneRangerMassachusetts]

Think about it - where else in the world would communities across the nation make available the cheapest single family housing stock near urban job centers for illegal immigrants (God bless them), thus forcing the working class to seek housing in "Edge Cities" with long commutes far from major cities? Where else would this occur without some sort of an uprising, major urban riot, or political upheaval?

I grew up in a city. I was not forced out by cheap housing for immigrants. I was ready to leave even before blacks migrated to the cities in the 1960's when we were given the "Great Society." If the author had any experience with cities, he would have known they are noisy, violent, congested, and dirty places compared to the suburbs. You need to be rich to and live in a well to do neighborhood to enjoy the high society life. There is no peace for the middle class in cities.

[WayneLusvardi]

The residential neighborhoods surrounding the “city core” discussed in the previous post once were the tranquil “suburbs.” They typically are comprised of smaller, older housing stock that, prior to the waves of immigration, served as starter or fixer homes for first time buyers. These homes were how first time home buyers were able to climb onto the lower rungs of the housing market and build up equity and then “trade up.” With this housing stock now removed, new home buyers are compelled to search further out for new tract homes which results in traffic congestion and pollution and highway budget funding crises. In textbooks it is called the “neighbhorhood filtration process.” This process of moving up the housing ladder has been radically interrupted by immigration thus resulting in the housing affodability crisis. So unaffordable housing is “caused” by the proletariat, not the bourgeouise gentrifiers as we are led to believe by the cognitive elites. This is not to bash immigrants or gentrification, but to point to an empirical reality. Our elite politicians and policy makers, and their cognoscenti in academia, have framed this as the rich inflicting the poor, when it is more like the poor crowding out the lower middle. Because of how the affordable housing crisis has been inaccurately framed, the faith-based community (wrongly)has intervened due to its “preferential option for the poor.” But the “poor” and the faith-based affordable housing advocates are just as much a part of the problem. Contrary to the faith-based advocates, there is no moral higher ground on affordable housing in a “push down/pop up” world.