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there aren't any humble houses like this anymore, at least not at a price that people without money can afford in neighborhoods where they would be happy to raise their kids.

True. There are few starter homes being built. Most cities will no longer grant permits for domiciles of less that $100K value or under 3,000 square feet. This prices almost all new housing out of the market for those who live paycheck to paycheck and have no savings or investment income to use as capital — after all, it takes capital to buy even the least expensive house.

Members of the working class (i.e., those without capital who have no means of support other than by selling their labor for wages) today have few options when it comes to domicile. Most rent. Unfortunately, apartments fit to raise a family in are extremely expensive and are likely too expensive for working class renters. (And a good many of them don't allow kids or pets as well.) A lucky few renters find decent houses for rent, but these tend to be located in older neighborhoods where most of the properties are long since paid for. Over time these cheap rental houses will disappear as the owners die off and their kids sell to developers, who will then bulldoze the houses and build another ugly snout house monstrosity on the property. (Two examples: Oak Lawn and Lakewood Heights in Dallas — each once full of funky, quaint, cheap-rent houses populated by the young and striving, now almost completely bulldozed flat and replaced with nauseatingly ugly and extremely expensive Celotex-sheathed townhouses and condos.)

Therefore, the working class today mostly lives in slum apartments or trailer parks. Some inhabit urban trailer parks, where they at least have access to public transportation, public libraries, and the other civilizing benefits of urban life. However, like starter homes, these urban trailer parks are considered blight, and are being zoned out of existence by the local Babbitry in each city.

This leaves only the cheap land on the edge of town for trailer parks — and even these are going, as sprawl converts one after another into "exclusive country living" developments.

Developers and gentrifiers are runing our cities not ouf malice but out of a natural desire to meet the demand of the market. But why is there a market for ugly new houses and urban sprawl? There are three reasons. The first, which applies primarily to those with children, is the desire for "good schools", i.e. schools free of Negroes. Many white people fear Negroes and do not wish to encounter them in everyday life. Most people who move to the sort of bland, paved-over nighmate suburbs and exurbs that are ruining Texas and other states do so out of the desire to keep little MaKenzie and Jayden in a lily-white environment from K to 12. (This is not necessarily a criticism, by the way, but it is a fact.)

The second is presitige. The noveau riche want to show the world that they have a high personal income, and do so by moving to the newest, most exclusive, and most expensive developments on the edge of town (if they have kids), or to "hip, young" neighborhoods where children are scarce and coffee shops are ubiquitous (if they are single and/or gay). These "urban pioneers" draw developers who flock to older neighborhoods, tear down the beautiful old homes, throw up block after block of pricey, ugly townhomes and apartments, and destroy whatever environment and culture the neighborhood once had. (Then a few years later, the single hipsters will have kids and/or grow old, abandon the urban lifestyle for Edge City, and leave their former neighborhood to become a haven for drug dealers.)

The third reason is politics. The slime that bubbles to the top in a given city would rather die than have their town become known as a place with "affordable housing"? Why? Because affordable housing attracts Negroes, Mexicans, and White Trash, and drives away big-box strip centers, NFL stadiums, and the other sources of kickback money so vital to the bigwigs in every town. So, by the use of zoning laws, eminent domain land-grabs, and other forms of governmental piracy, they make it impossible for builders to construct affordable housing inside some predefined limit. Once a cordon sanitaire has been established, the remaining working class neighborhoods can be destroyed piecemeal, either by deliberate slumification (reducing their police, sanitation, and infrastructure to low levels) or by simply confiscating their land and houses, bulldozing them, and putting up the new Cowboys stadium where they once stood. Thus the Negroes, Mexicans, and White Trash are offloaded onto some other city, and "all is well".

So where are the working class supposed to live? Answer: in neighborhoods. More and more urban neighborhoods have discovered that the key to beating both the gentrifiers and slumlords at their own game is the historic preservation district. Our neighborhood association is in the process of petitionng our city to declare our neighborhhod a historic preservation district. This will prevent developers from buying out the homeowners in our neighborhood and bulldozing our great old houses to build the repulsive piles of feces that pass for houses today. The classic 1950s houses in our neighborhood are still sound and strong, and are small and cheap enough (most <1500 square feet and <$100K) to be within the price range of solid working class families, yet require enough hard work and investment to maintain that the truly trashy people have no desire to buy in.

By establishing good, solid neighborhoods in central urban areas, and protecting them so that honest people can aford to live in them, we can keep our cities liveable and strong.