Posted on 07/12/2015 7:08:33 AM PDT by Second Amendment First
The Supreme Court issued an important ruling last month when it reminded state and local governments that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 bars them from spending federal housing money in a manner that perpetuates racial segregation.
Last week, the Obama administration took an even more important step — one that has already changed the decades-long discussion about how to combat residential segregation. It rewrote the rules under the provision of the act that requires state and local governments to “affirmatively further” housing goals by making real efforts to cope with the cumulative results of the discrimination that confined black Americans to ghettos in the first place.
For the new rules to be effective, federal officials need to make clear that local governments can lose federal housing aid if they persist in dumping subsidized housing into depressed, racially isolated communities instead of putting more of it in integrated areas that offer better schools and job opportunities.
The fact that it has taken nearly 50 years since the law’s passage for these common-sense changes to materialize is all the more distressing, given that federally sanctioned housing discrimination has played a central role in racial ghettoization.
The Fair Housing Act was intended to break down historic patterns of segregation. But it was undercut from the start by federal officials, including presidents who believed that segregation was the natural order of things. With the threat of sanctions almost nonexistent, many state and local governments confined subsidized housing to poor minority neighborhoods and found it quite easy to hide these wrongful practices behind ineffective, vaguely worded rules and loose oversight.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
*The issue here is not racial integration -- segregation is always wrong -- but rather social class. And if you build low-income housing projects in middle class neighborhoods the middle class people will move, because they are strongly averse to crime and antisocial behavior. End result, new street, same isolated ghetto population, same pathology.
This kind of ham-handed social engineering is particularly harmful in urban areas where a delicate balance has been established that allows people from different groups and widely varying economic strata to live in close proximity to one another, sometimes only a block or two away. Destroy that balance, and you end up with Newark or Detroit, and then just try to integrate.
This is the kind of thinking that makes me embarrassed to be a liberal.
*If you place subsidized housing in the center of a good middle class neighborhood, the value of the existing houses will drop precipitously. Is it any wonder why current residents would be opposed to that happening? Their opposition would not be a result of racism or snobbery but of economic reality.
* A story earlier this week in the NYT's about the efforts in Dallas to give larger federal vouchers to move people out of cities and into the suburbs with better schools, had some of the most brutal comments ever posted in the NYTs. It is a pipe dream to believe people paying 10K or more in property taxes are going to welcome federally funded section 8 housing in their area.
* It is "overreach" by the Obama Administration. This effectively makes the federal government someone's neighbor without his knowledge or say so. The rules were likely ignored because they were onerous and/or infringed upon people's decisions about where they choose to live and with whom.
Leave it to this Administration to continue to find ways to impose the heavy hand of government on individuals. They are not even safe in their own homes.
* It is time for local governments to reject federal housing aid. By rejecting Federal aid the Government's social engineering experiment will not be foisted upon communities' residents. n fact, once the Government is out of the way supply and demand will determine who can afford to live where. And if Scarsdale ends up with few Black and Hispanic families, too bad. People work too hard to have heavily subsidized families living next to them. And if it's such a great idea of mixing low-income into upper-income enclaves let it start with Obama and his ilk who are pushing it. Let's see how Sasha and Malia like dealing with kids from the hood.
*
This is what amounts to FEDERAL/LOCAL block busting. It is patently illegal and was declared so way back in the 50’s.
Chappaqua, Beverly Hills, exempt?
It is time for local governments to reject federal housing aid
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Never happen in a gazillion years.
The Fair Housing Act was intended to break down historic patterns of segregation.
....
Look at any demographic map. People segregate themselves voluntarily. Trying to undo that is like pounding a square peg into a round hole, but THAT is a government specialty.
I myself am bugging out deep into Red State territory. Not that I am convinced I can escape this social engineering but that any economic contraction any social engineering deep in Red State territory will be the first on the chopping block.
The “smartest” people in the world can’t fathom why people move away when poor anti-social criminals move into the neighborhood.
Must be racism...
Can’t be because white people hate being robbed and assaulted. And the middle class blacks who move out must be uncle toms in blackface who side with their racial oppressors.
Just the other day, a white woman in Chicago was attacked by a black mob who shouted racial epithets and told her to get out of their neighborhood. What do the butt-sniffers at the NYT have to say about that?
"Welcome them into YOUR neighborhood."
This kind of ham-handed social engineering is particularly harmful in urban areas where a delicate balance has been established that allows people from different groups and widely varying economic strata to live in close proximity to one another, sometimes only a block or two away. Destroy that balance, and you end up with Newark or Detroit, and then just try to integrate.
This is the kind of thinking that makes me embarrassed to be a liberal.
It's a pity more liberals don't think like that...:^)
“For the new rules to be effective, federal officials need to make clear that local governments can lose federal housing aid if they persist in dumping subsidized housing into depressed, racially isolated communities instead of putting more of it in integrated areas that offer better schools and job opportunities”
What exactly do they believe creates good schools? I believe many schools in inner cities are getting about $25,000 a year per student.
Middle Class homeowners have seen their clean,safe neighborhoods trashed by the government moving undesirables into their areas. Home prices go down, and home owners leave.
So the next wave of government meddling should be done in the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard and the neighborhoods that the Hollywood stars and professional athletes inhabit. The Poor should be moved to a gated enclave where government office holders live.
By the way, whatever happened to the right of association? We tell our children not to hang out with bad characters, and then Obama moves them into our neiborhoods and schools, so our sons get beat up and our daughters get raped in the stairwells. When are we going to fight back for OUR children???
Chappaqua doesn’t take any federal government housing assistance, nor do any other exclusively upscale suburbs. These rules will mainly impact economically-mixed cities which have had “bad” neighborhoods and ESPECIALLY impact cities which have a considerable poor white population.
If I am in Seattle, I cannot afford a home in Madison Park where Howard Shultz CEO of Starbucks lives, I have to buy in Burien, close to the airport, that is the neighborhood I could afford. Oh, that's not fair because I want to be in Madison Park but can't, is it because of discrimination or affordability?
Their families live in those areas, this is like breaking up neighborhoods and what remaining family oriented life that exists in these communities.
This is like the last nail in the coffin.
Subsidized housing should be some of the cheapest housing that is considered reasonable housing alternatives. I agree it makes no sense to put subsidized housing into middle class neighborhoods.
But we shouldn’t abandon those areas to crime just because they are poor.
And the best way to provide an upward mobility out of subsidized housing is to make sure that jobs are plentiful. To do that we need to raise the import tariffs and bring American jobs back.
Allows them to build and house section 8 in middleclass nieghborhoods like yours and mine to “integrate” the populace. We shall all have the enjoyment of drugs, rapes robbery and gang activity. Read an article about a small town out west about 500 woke up one morning to find they have new inhabitants in thier town none of which speak english from somolia planted there by your gov and subsidized by you. They are muddying the waters while we sleep
Block-busting is against the law, isn’t it?
Every suburban community that enjoys below-average crime and is above average in the percent of intact and financially prosperous families will get to enjoy their own taxpayer financed, solar-powered, energy efficient, multi-generational Section 8 Ferguson enclave.
This is just an expansion on the concept of bussing children from the inner city to suburban school districts. Now the children’s mothers will be given free housing near the child’s assigned school.
Our wise progressive overlords theorize that the reason for poor people “of color” is due to “white flight.” [see note] and a lack of opportunities to rub shoulders and share the sidewalks with those who have managed to do well in life. Progressives cannot allow anyone to escape full participation in the Utopia they are building. Vote Progressive!
[Note: Since race is really a proxy for ideological tribe, successful black families are no longer “people of color”.]
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