Posted on 07/01/2008 12:06:10 PM PDT by Jasper
Homeowners: 'Someone Is Going To Get Hurt'
SANFORD, Fla. -- Families in a crime-ridden Central Florida neighborhood are arming themselves with shotguns and talking about adding electric barbed wire to stop thieves targeting their homes.
"Somebody is going to end up getting hurt," resident Andrea Fine said. "The homeowners are tense. We are all on edge. For the first time in my life I'm really scared to live in my home."
(Excerpt) Read more at local6.com ...
Tough to do ballistics on buckshot. Not a recommendation, just saying...
I enjoy visiting my parents in Boca, and my friends in Miami, but I would suggest another state if you are family oriented and want a future outside of real estate speculation.
i gre up in florida moved here in 59 at 3yo. left in 75 navy came back in 79. job market sucked so i went north where the rest of the family was. (massachusetts) bubble burst in mid 80’s and left for ohio where wifes family was from. i had sworn i would never come back to florida. well ended up back here in 89 and can’t get ahead enough to get the hell out of dodge fast enough.
Blue City ping!
The south florida crime wave hit orange/seminole/volusia county over the past 10-20 years.
Man, I hope the researchers quoted in that housing article will get up the courage to read The Bell Curve, because it answers a bunch of their questions. Specifically, it uses data to demonstrate that, because poverty is *largely* associated with cognitive abilities, poverty does indeed "accompany" people no matter how much external forces, such as the government, try to change their impoverish circumstances.
As several former housing project residents stated in the article, all the bad stuff just came right with the people into the new neighborhoods.
I also found it interesting that TBC spends quite a lot of time talking about community and valued places in communities for people of all cognitive abilities. So many of the people in the housing article lamented their loss of place in community, having ended up just as poor, with almost as many problems in their neighborhood, but without the sense of community and the ability to find a valued place in it.
oh i know all too well. used to live in the st cloud kissimmee area. they were once nice quiet cowboy towns. need i tell you what they are now? the cowboys all left the state.
It uses two females -- the young one who got her GED, and says “I know I have to venture out in the world,” she said, running through her options: Go back to school? Get a job? Get married? Have a baby? “I want more. I’m so ready to have my own. I just don’t know how to get it.” (Hint: how about working for a living?)
Then there's the older woman: "11 years crack-free and, at 47, eager to take advantage of every free program that comes her way—a leadership class, Windows Vista training, a citizen police course, a writing workshop." (Hint: How about working for a living?)
Of course, the article doesn't suggest that maybe, just maybe -- these two women should try getting an actual job, but that this experiment is has become "baffling and disappointing" and "When the projects came down, the residents lost their public-support system—health clinics, child care, job training. Memphis’s infant-mortality rate is rising, for example, and Betts is convinced that has something to do with poor people’s having lost easy access to prenatal care. The services remained downtown while the clients scattered all over the city, many of them with no convenient transportation."
So, after all, the problem is the government's fault -- besides move these people out of rat-infested "projects," they should have followed them with all those services they were accustomed to....with no accountability or responsiblity required from the recipients, as usual.
That comment is racist! oh wait...
www.thugreport.com
"I want the rest of you cowboys to know something, there's a new sheriff in town. And his name is Barack Obama. So y’all be cool! Right on."
Spot on. I used to live in Apopka and had business in Sanford on many occasions. It was a nice and friendly small town.
But as Orlando grew it syphoned off business from Sanford and it started a downhill roll. Property values decreased and crime rose.
I don’t blame those folks for arming and taking care of themselves. The chief sounds a bit too cautious to me.
The criminals will think twice if they know the populace is armed. The problem is that the “community” elects people who work very hard to keep the victims from getting guns. The “community leaders” need the votes of those mommas whose children are committing the crimes. Momma ain’t gonna tolerate her little baby getting capped while robbing a liquor store on parole.
Let’s not forget that the term “crime ridden neighborhood” is now an official racist term!
let’s all be seeeeensative.
Ya know if someone is not a fan of Blazing Saddles, they might, just might get the wrong impression.
My grandparents lived there. Among my fondest summer memories are sailing on Lake Monroe and Lake Mary and visiting at the zoo. We attended the Episcopal Church. It was a nice small Southern town.
My uncle was an engineer at Canaveral with Pan Am. My grandparents came to Fl to be closer to him when they retired. They chose Sanford for its quiet small town atmosphere.
I am sorry to hear it is no longer the way I remember it.
One conclusion the former residents of housing projects draw in the article is that the “project” seems to follow them.
The researchers seem unwilling to explore what that means.
One thing it means is that there is more to changing social pathologies (crime, illegitimacy, drug use, illiteracy) than simply changing the environment. There is no “geographical cure.” Or, as someone once said, “wherever you go, there you are.”
People make bad choices not because they are poor, but because for whatever reason they don’t have the ability to make better choices. Moving those people to “nicer” homes doesn’t improve their ability to make better choices.
We have all driven down a nice street of townhomes and been able immediately to pick out the Section 8 house. The idea behind this Section 8 utopia was that poor people would see how other non-poor people lived and then naturally want to and be able to emulate them.
Just doesn’t happen.
If it doesn’t happen, then what if anything can Section 8 accomplish except to bring down neighborhoods and destroy communities that, though poor, were functioning at some level?
I lived in a big city once where there was a push to extend the subway to a poor part of town. The idea, of course, was then that poor people could have access to the nice part of town and, again, then naturally want to and be able to figure out how they could make their situation nicer too, including by getting jobs, etc.
The first weekend the new line opened up there was a murder in the parking lot of a very nice high-rise apartment building. When the perps were caught, they told police that one had said, “Hey, let’s go ride that new subway (without paying, of course) over to the rich side of town and steal a car.” Which had turned into a murder, but never mind.
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