> Hendren estimates that the lifetime benefit to a newborn child of moving from a low- to high-opportunity neighborhood is about $210,000 in additional income, or an 8.1 percent increase in lifetime earnings. Compare that to the $2,700 cost of counseling, and an additional $2,500 to $3,000 more per year per family that Section 8 paid due to higher rent in their new neighborhoods, and it looks like a pretty exceptional deal. The program doesn’t quite pay for itself by increasing future tax revenue, Hendren says — but it comes pretty close.
This logic assumes that none of this benefit is positional. The family moves to a richer area, the kids do well in the fancy local schools, get into top colleges, make lots of money, etc, yes. But a lot of these opportunities look like "each year we take the best N people we can", so there are probably other (less qualified) kids who do slightly worse than they would without the move.
As an analogy, if being in the tallest 5% of society makes you earn $100k more, we would expect a randomized controlled trial on increasing children's heights to have a large positive effect on income. But if we then rolled that out to the whole society those benefits would turn out to be illusory.
This is still valuable from a perspective of reducing segregation and inequality, but I'm skeptical of its presentation as an extremely good deal economically.
This is an interesting question, but the situation that's being studied here is not the one that you describe. The "Moving to Opportunity" study upon which this new research is based is primarily not concerned with children who "get into top colleges" or "make lots of money". In that study, the mean annual income of subjects is $11.7k and $14.3k at ages 24 and 28 respectively [0]. Fundamentally these interventions are concerned with making extremely poor people slightly less poor.
The question you ask—are these opportunistic moves zero-sum?—is still an interesting one. But the realities of the sub-population studied here change the intuitive answer to that question. There may be a finite number of seats at Harvard, but there is plenty of capacity for upward mobility from lower classes into the middle class.
This is a very zero-sum take on the project, where it’s very possible that creating more diversity in the neighborhoods these families are moving to raises the level of education and outcomes for everyone involved. Making some people smarter doesn’t require making others dumber.
> Making some people smarter doesn’t require making others dumber.
On the other hand, it doesn't have to be a requirement to happen. Making some people smarter can actually have a negative effect on the smarter ones.
This can be illustrated with schools, where it benefits the troublemakers to be placed in a group with calm children, but it is on the expense of the calm children who will now be disrupted in their studying.
In the scandinavian countries, this is often done to children. Troublemakers, most often boys, are placed together with groups of calm children, often girls. This is such a common practice that there is an expression for such girls - pillow girls, "kuddflickor".
That said, isn't the Chetty proposal (moving from low-opportunity location to higer-opportunity location) basically why there are millions of migrants in Europe right now.
It may not be as straight forward as you seem to think it is.
Girls are generally expected to be better behaved. This can be extremely suffocating and unhealthy.
If they are exposed to "troublemaker" boys and learn to have a little back bone and stand up for themselves (to possibly oppressive adults), it's still less socially acceptable for a girl than for a boy. So then she blames the "troublemaker" boy to cover for herself because he will get in less trouble than her and that's what the adults find plausible anyway.
It's entirely possible that even if she tried to accept the blame, the adults would interpret that as her trying to be kind to him and cover for him.
If, as you suggest, the kids who move in do much better and the kids who are displaced do slightly worse, that does indeed sound like a very good deal economically.
I don't think that was an implication of the parent comment. As an example, Consider the toy zero-sum model where there are ten fixed outcomes. A kid is moved from outcome 10 to outcome 2, doing much better, but every kid from 2-9 is bumped down by one. By construction, there is no change in overall outcomes, but the oversimplified claims in the article that parent is complaining about would chalk that up as a huge +8 gain, by only checking one side of the ledger.
As the parent and other sibling comments point out, the real advantage may come from positive-sum effects: reduxed inequality, a more efficient market from a leveled playing field, etc. But that doesn't change the fact that the math being used is too incomplete to be held up as an economic efficiency argument, the way the article does.
we have seen similar stuff..a VU professor Valparaiso University in the late 1970s moved some black single moms from Chicago to attend VU tuition free..ten years later 95% of that group had better jobs and stable productive lives
Raj was on Ezra Klien's podcast recently discussing this topic.
Very much a similar discussion to this article, but they focus a bit more on the macro benefits. I felt like it was a really nice blend of political topics and data science. Raj seems to do a very good job of finding and conveying meaningful insights and statistics.
Indeed. My understanding is that most socio-economic housing segregation is deliberate (on the part of those that can afford it). The ethno-racial segregation is a byproduct. Potential allies of reforming the latter are de facto opposition due to the former.
Racial segregation in the US is at least partly a direct descendant of New Deal and postwar housing policy that mandated segregated housing projects. Segregation was a deliberate policy and a massive social engineering effort.
There is nothing natural about the current amount of segregation in the US.
Not a descendant. Redlining was explicitly part of the New Deal era’s HOLC’s mission. There’s a great podcast on the topic from a couple years ago here: https://castro.fm/episode/UxCiQp
Segregation was a deliberate policy and a massive social engineering effort
Segregation happens naturally as well. In Singapore after few race violence instances government made it mandarory for all government provided housing have a similar make up as the population in general.
it shouldn't be more challenging if each locality addresses this problem on their own on the local level.
the problem with doing a nationwide campain is that they tend to be pushed from above with a one size fits all approach: if it worked in seattle, then it must work in miami. but really, each locality needs to approach this on their own and find a locally appropriate way to solve it.
as you say finding out, at a very micro-level, how to solve it
I'm absolutely in no way qualified to interpret results, but it seems like in Western Australia we've had a similar policy since the 1990s, where the WA Housing Authority put policy in place to ensure that no suburb had more than 1 in 9 houses dedicated to public/government housing.
Over here in the ACT, we have an official policy of "salt and peppering", i.e. spreading public housing out evenly across the city including in wealthy areas.
also, is it better to build public housing in expensive areas (which implies less housing for the same fixed budget), or build public housing at the lowest cost, maximal housing capacity (which implies going to lower cost areas).
In the United States, projects applying for Low Income Housing Tax Credits actually get a 30% boost in their subsidy if they're in qualified low-income Census tracts.
Over in NZ, there isn’t an official rule, but as if by magic, new subdivisions in wealthier areas don’t have social housing, but new subdivisions in more working class areas have plenty.
It was a high-touch intervention, but one with amazing results.
Social issues need social solutions. Money may be needed to make it happen, but merely throwing money at the problem typically doesn't work. Tech can do a lot of good things, but tech solutions for social issues often fail.
People problems are generally solved by the right kind of human involvement.
The program doesn’t quite pay for itself by increasing future tax revenue, Hendren says — but it comes pretty close.
I wonder how those figures look if you also include savings on future welfare programs and even incarceration.
Agreed. It's also why federal programs are so ineffective: how can you possibly try to administer a fair and effective high-touch social assistance program across 330 millions people across very diverse localities?
No, you need local programs that take into account local economic conditions, social situations, etc.
I'm a libertarian at the federal level, but I'm much more receptive to local government interventions and have voted for local tax increases when I live a place that seems to be well-run.
Unfortunately local government is often directly and intentionally responsible for perpetuating de facto segregation. These housing interventions can get off the ground in more liberal areas but they will be total non-starters in much of the country. The federal government has historically been forced to intervene when peoples rights are being systematically violated. Are we to believe the same officials who try to stop black people from voting will do the right thing in their jurisdictions?
> I'm a libertarian at the federal level, but I'm much more receptive to local government interventions and have voted for local tax increases when I live a place that seems to be well-run.
That's an interesting take, but would you agree that it's often the places that aren't particularly well-run that also have the most need for interventions?
What if federal programs were conceived as high-touch assistance programs for local government?
What form would that assistance take? Kicking bad politicians out? Rewriting bad laws? Investigating crimes, arresting and prosecuting criminals? Picking up the trash?
No, that would just eleminate the idea of a local government. The only thing they can really do is throw money around, or some glorified variation thereof.
Centralizing power is risky (a lot of things can go wrong), ineffective, and promotes division.
Imagine Congress deciding on one kind of car for everyone in the country -- people in manhattan don't want any car, people in the suburbs want a sedan, outdoor people want a truck, etc. It would be a huge argument dividing everyone in the country into factions and nobody would be happy. It sounds ridiculous, but that's what happens to a small extent with each new federal law that gives more power to the central government. And look what's happening.
This is more like helping them bridge a culture gap. Once you actually live somewhere, you slowly acculturate by osmosis. But getting there requires some means to not only move physically, but also navigate a cultural transition. That's a fairly tall order.
They got coaching for how to talk to landlords in better neighborhoods, they were fed information they didn't really know how to find and they were educated about various things. If you come from the right neighborhood, either your parents teach you a lot of that or you just pick it up without trying because you see it everywhere.
If there is no one in your social circle who knows how to navigate certain things, it easily becomes an insurmountable barrier.
It kinda sucks that the tone of this article ("you should have an objective of moving out of your not-so-great neighborhood to the rich neighborhood") is basically the position that we've ended up on for fighting disparities.
Maybe busing should become a thing again... get everyone motivated to fund _all_ schools properly and not just have dumb magnet schools
It's not just school funding. It's the classmates the child has in school, the extra curricular opportunities unrelated to school in the neighborhood, the lower incidence of crime (especially violent crime), lower levels of environmental pollution, safe places to play outside, and so on and so forth.
> And as is usually the case in the US, the racial divide is also an opportunity divide.
> Living in certain neighborhoods seems to expand opportunity, and living in other neighborhoods seems to diminish it.
What I don't get about these policies is that they do zero to actually address the problem and instead just shift things around.
If you have good neighborhood A and bad neighborhood B, taking a handful of people from B and relocating them to A does nothing to actually address the problems in B for those that remain in B. B continues to B bad.
The solution that should be pursued is how to make B as good as A. Once B is as good as A, people from B will naturally migrate to A and people from A will migrate to B. This is essentially what gentrification accomplishes. The problem with gentrification is that is pushes people in B out to some other bad neighborhood C.
It seems to me that this being the case, the ideal scenario is to figure out how to gentrify B without displacing those in B to C. What you want is good influences found in A to dilute the bad influences in B until the bad influences are extinguished.
I live in north Seattle. There is a tremendous amount of misleading information in this article.
In fact, the neighborhoods mentioned as 'high opportunity' already have quite a lot of low-income, public, and section 8 housing. Yes, demand exceeds availability, but that's true anywhere in Seattle.
> Most American cities have a stark racial divide. In Seattle, the divide runs north to south: North Seattle is largely white; South Seattle is largely not.
That map is for the entire metropolitan area, and then some. Consider [0], the neighborhoods of Seattle itself, and then look at the island of blue color in the middle of downtown and the affluent neighborhoods of Magnolia, Ballard, and Queen Anne.
Across from Seattle, across Lake Washington, you can also see the majority-blue suburb of Bellevue.
The is an amazing map, but like so many such maps as you zoom out you loose the dynamic range to capture the difference between populated countryside and city.
So, if you restrict yourself to downtown Seattle, it looks like a clear divide, but if you go to the Seattle city limits, it doesn't, and if you go to the Seattle metro area, it looks even less like that?
What's the problem supposed to be? And why is "North Seattle" being used to refer to the northern half of downtown, rather than the northern part of Seattle?
This is exactly why local/micro-level expertise is so important. It's common in the US now for areas just on the city limits of bigger cities to be more mixed racially and socioeconomically than ever before; this is a temporal as well as spatial phenomenon driven by the change from "white flight" to the suburbs to instead lots of folks moving to the suburbs because they're cheaper than the downtowns, and the suburbs mixing racially because they've removed their sundown laws and racial covenants. Now many downtown areas are coveted instead of abandoned, with luxury condos instead of skid row.
I don't know anything about Seattle. If you look at the area of the clear divide, what differentiates the houses on one side from the houses on the other side? In Minneapolis-St Paul, there are pretty clear differences in amenities between many racially separated areas: more trees and walking paths in some areas; fewer trees, worse streets, and highway noise in others.
What are you asking when you ask, "What's the problem supposed to be?" I don't quite get it.
Do you see how Southeast, Dunwamish, and Delridge are a rainbow of colors with barely any specks of blue while the north neighborhoods are all blue with specks of green?
I think they mixed “divide” and “division”. Or they misplaced the “runs”. A divide runs perpendicular to what it divides. The North American continental divide runs north south, but divides east and west hydrologies.
The divide is east-west, but the division is north/south.
Didn’t Freakonomics tackle this subject and concluded that school doesn’t make that much of a difference in results and it was more about each persons makeup?
Our cities did not used to be so divided but this was the direct outcome of Roosevelt era polices which actually forced it. The FHA when created would not insure mortgages for blacks and went to far to finance new subdivisions for whites only - requiring that no blacks be allowed to buy. Legal unionization allowed exclusion of low skilled labor which effectively pushed nearly a half million out of jobs and thereby out of their homes.
Throw in how most New Deal recovery efforts were only aimed at states the Democratic party needed votes in and this lead to the exclusion for any funds to help poor blacks in the South.
The FHA created this mess and on purpose. It simply comes down to politicians constantly trying to focus the ire of the people on those who did not cause it so as to keep people divided and the situation perpetuated.
Want to fix housing segregation and outcomes, get politicians out
FHA policy had a lot to do with neighborhood segregation but we shouldn't ignore the role of community violence directed against black families trying to move into white neighborhoods either. Black owned houses in certain areas really did tend to burn down and that's a huge indictment of the people who lived there and the local governments who were unwilling or unable to do something about it. So while the federal government deserves blame there's plenty to go around.
Worth doing, but it only serves the deserving poor. What about the undeserving poor, which includes most of the druggies?
I'm one of the undeserving poor, that's what I am. Now think what that means to a man. It means that he's up against middle-class morality for all of time. If there's anything going, and I puts in for a bit of it, it's always the same story: "you're undeserving, so you can't have it." But my needs is as great as the most deserving widows that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same 'usband. I don't need less than a deserving man, I need more! I don't eat less 'earty than 'e does, and I drink, oh, a lot more. - From My Fair Lady / Pygmalion.
Unless, they started doing drugs, or whatever else you consider immoral or that which deserves poverty, by choice from the day they were born, society failed to raise them as good humans.
You can fight the tide with the help of someone looking after you and helping keep you on the straight and narrow. Parenting and life at home have a far greater influence on a child's future than the neighborhood does. The real opportunity zone is the one under the roof.
> the housing navigators worked with landlords to expedite inspections and generally try to cut through red tape that might make landlords not want to deal with Section 8
So, the key to getting people to move, is to get the landlords to allow it. Surprising tool they call it?
When I read the title, I was thinking there is another tool. That tool might be homelessness. The homeless do not care after all whether they sleep in a posh uptown or a run down ghetto. If there are enough of them opportunity levels would surely equalize as median income of inhabitants averages out to zero.
I’m going to sound like an asshole, but part of the reason to pay 750k+ for a basic home is so that your family lives in a neighborhood with families of a similar socioeconomic background... what is the benefit of integrating housing to the people paying a premium for the privilege of living in an exclusive neighborhood?
If your only question about helping non-affluent people is "what's in it for me?" then yes, I think you're right about how that sounds. It's not about you.
But broadly, the long-term benefits of social programs are to create a richer, more stable society. If one's goal is strictly positional, then other people being less poor is negative, because the whole point is having someone to look down upon. However, you can take some comfort from the "more stable" part, as it means your kids are less likely to get guillotined at some point.
> part of the reason to pay 750k+ for a basic home is so that your family lives in a neighborhood with families of a similar socioeconomic background
I think the value of the location of a house for me would be tied to the relative safety, convenience, and nearby opportunities compared to other neighborhoods. None of those things require that people less affluent than me don't live in the same neighborhood. That being said, it might be tough for some of them to afford it, but that's what the housing vouchers are designed to help with in the first place.
You left off public school rankings. Which are tied to the areas income (well educated parents have the time, income, and genetics to produce high achieving kids). Which drives up home prices. And the cycle reinforces itself to some extent.
Too many Section 8 residents will hurt school scores, which hurts home values, which hurts school scores, ...
I have no idea how many it would take to impact values in such a way. But, the school board meetings I’ve attended show that if nothing else, wealthy parents are fiercely protective of their school districts.
Do you really think higher income individuals have better genes? Overall? ...Or better in a narrow, rat-race sense? Genetic expression changes based on life experience doesn't it? I really don't think section 8 recipients are genetically inferior. Surely that isn't what you are saying, right? I'm not a biologist, but I would wager worse outcomes are mostly a result of continuous stress.
Of course it's not the rich people being genetically superior.
It's the chance of a genetically fortunate person (with a great nature-given voice, or intelligence, or strength and perseverance) to become rich through it, and maybe pass it to children. This chance is not very high, of course.
If you believe that intelligence is at all heritable, then it would be an astonishing fact if low-income individuals had the same genetic distribution as high-income individuals.
If you don't believe that intelligence is at all heritable, then I'm not sure how you would explain why it is that people with genetic defects like Down's syndrome have below average IQs.
In terms of intelligence adoption studies usually show that inheritance is mostly through genetics. But for wealth this doesn't seem to be the case. There is a genetic component but it seems to be mostly nurture.
Again, not a biologist, but another HN user has told me phrenology is a better measure of intelligence than genes... Which would imply that genetics simply isn't suitable for accurately measuring any form of intelligence.
In regards to arguing that genetic defects cause lower intelligence, you have to define intelligence. The rate at which certain, particular categories of knowledge are learned? The speed at which knowledge is utilized? Are autistic savants the most intelligent people to have ever lived? People with down syndrome seem adept at reading and responding to body language, in my experience. Precise empathy is certainly a form of intelligence. I think our intelligences are diffuse. In the abscence of how biological data relates to these, we are just pattern matching.
After that, you have to ascertain what is even a factor in those intelligences: the total pool of genes we can draw from, the ways the genes express themselves on or off, or the delicate mosh-pit of biochemistry weaving our personality together. There are too many variables to control for, variables that aren't understood. It seems clear to me that environment dictates more than heritability of genetics. How much more is up for debate, but I'm not confident genes will be adequately contextualized in my lifetime.
Well, if another HN user told you that something with a genetic component is a better measure of intelligence (whatever the Hell that means) than genes...
"People with Down's syndrome are not less intelligent than average" is the sort of thing that you can only say in an ultra-progressive environment. It would not be taken seriously by most people. Under any reasonable definition of intelligence, those with Down's syndrome have less of it on average.
Your observation about multiple intelligences isn't novel or profound. The interesting thing about intelligence is that different kinds of intelligence are positively correlated (SAT math scores correlate with SAT verbal scores. Musical ability is correlated with mathematical ability. Etc. etc.)
I don't even think a statement like "It seems clear to me that environment dictates more than heritability of genetics" is intelligible. The idea of dividing it into X% genetics versus (100 - X)% environment betrays an incredibly naive understanding of the question.
The interesting thing about intelligence is that different kinds of intelligence are positively correlated
It's a bit more than that. If you look at all the different measure of intelligence that people have come up with like vocabulary, finding patterns in shapes, SAT scores, etc, and do a factor analysis there seems to be more or less a single factor behind the correlation. Some of these, like vocabulary, have an additional large effect from training. Some, like vocabulary and SAT verbal scores, have a strong correlation independent of the the rest of these varied scores. But in general there seems to be one factor, the hypothetical g, that explains why everything is correlated together. And it seems to explain part of other test results too that don't seem to be what we would normally consider intelligence, like the classic reflex test that measures how long it takes you to press a button after a light turns on.
IQ tests try to measure this 'g' by using a number of different subtests chosen to not respond strongly to practice. But these, like all tests, have a certain amount of noise and shouldn't be taken as absolute truth.
Being a professional athlete is very lucrative. Do you think that professional athletes have the exact same genetic profile as the general public, and their professional success is entirely a result of their environment?
It's funny how even the most restrained statements with any eugenic implications are outright rejected, but people don't bat an eye at Lysenkoism.
Definitely “better” in a narrow sense. Whatever traits (not just genetic, but economic, environmental, etc), taken together, make a parent successful, also tend to make offspring successful. Maybe the genetic component is far smaller than I realize?
If you think wealth has nothing to do with crime, you should meet more rich people. Paul Manafort is an instructive example here, as is Jeffery Epstein. Felony and luxury go together just fine. I'd be much more comfortable trusting my younger relatives among people who make the median income than people in the 1% or, worse, the 0.1%.
People feel relatively unsafe around muggings, shootings, burglaries, and the like. And people who do that do not have 750k homes. People will pay a premium to be far away from that sort of activity, especially if that activity is taking place in and around the schools their kids attend.
There are rich crooks, yes, but that's beside the point here.
If you care about your kids' safety, that is not at all beside the point. Again, consider Epstein. Or more generally, think about how the kids of rich sociopaths will treat other kids.
I think it's petty crime that doesn't pay, indeed. Stealing a pack of smokes from the convenience store just doesn't pay; manipulating regulations to benefit from lax enforcement of environmental law or gain tax breaks or otherwise pad your bank account is gentlemanly.
I mean that in a somewhat literal sense: it was once true that "gentleman" meant a man possessing property, a member of the gentry. The section titled Sir George Sitwell in the Wikipedia article on the word "gentleman" is amusing and to the point.
There isn't one for you and the people in your neighborhood, and you have a lot of power, which is why things will probably stay as they are, at least in California, which is the place I know.
I think the main driver is maybe less living in this area, and more that your kids can go to a great school.
I think if the US ever figures out a way to make the schools for poor people decent or even good, much of the reason for segregation would disappear.
The only remaining legal way to separate is via money. In other words: fuck the poor, they are not allowed to decide with whom they associate.
Instead of trying to fix the problem by allowing non-monetary ways to segregate, which would be available to everyone, people are busy trying to universalize the problem.
To answer your question: you're not an asshole, but you're the only one without a broken leg... and we'll break it to make things fair to everyone.
"[The poor] are not allowed to decide with whom they associate."
That's exactly what this study ISN'T saying. The entire point of this research is to determine if the reason very poor people stay in very poor neighborhoods is personal preference or other factors. This study found that many poor people would in fact prefer to move from very poor neighborhoods.
> what is the benefit of integrating housing to the people paying a premium for the privilege of living in an exclusive neighborhood
There isn't. You didn't buy the house from the government and they don't owe you any right to not meet any poor people. Segregating out the poor from access to quality education just reinforces generational class stagnation- no one can be anything better than their parents were. This is a bad thing for everyone in the long run.
> I’m going to sound like an asshole, but...
Life-tip: if you need to start a sentence with that, chance are it's because what you sound like is reflecting reality.
>You didn't buy the house from the government and they don't owe you any right to not meet any poor people.
Ignoring the snark, arguments like these stop making sense when the government is actively tipping the scales by manipulating the housing market in that area. You can make arguments for the morality of it, but arguments along the lines of the government not owing one group something are pretty weak when you're literally supporting the government owing another group something. The government can owe whoever and whatever we want them to owe.
No one can be anything better than their parents were? My father and mother were drugged out losers and I’m not that at all. This comment is condescending and paternalistic. It’s something that would only be said by an out of touch elite who needs to “save the poor”.
I used to live in a highly integrated neighborhood. The neighbors across the street were section 8. I had no problem with that. What I did have a problem with is when my daughter was playing in the front yard and their son ran outside screaming shooting his rifle as a car peeled out down the street. This was of course on mother’s day while my mother-in-law was on the phone.
We moved to the most expensive neighborhood we could afford after that. And you know what? The worse thing I’ve had to deal with was some neighbors having a slightly heated conversation at 11pm on their front porch.
If that hadn’t been an option, if everywhere had this “affordable housing”, we’d have just moved three hours away and bought 100 acres and lived in a trailer instead. I’m not going to risk my daughters safety to fulfill some equity agenda.
My concern is that class stagnation, where one cannot be anything more than the class they were born to, is a bad thing that we must work hard to prevent from happening. Keeping poor people out of nice schools? That is a thing that causes class stagnation.
> We moved to the most expensive neighborhood we could afford after that.
Right, and what if that neighbourhood had raised prices, locking you out of that option? What if that neighbourhood re-zoned it's school district to ensure no one with less than $K/year income could possibly afford to go there? That's what class stagnation is all about, locking you and your daughter into where you are so that you cannot become anything more than you were born.
Affordable housing means poverty is not isolated in a single, dense community. It gives those born into families with lower incomes the option to go to better schools- as you have with your daughter.
You made it- wouldn't it be good if more people could? Or are you the type to say "Got mine, fuck the rest of you"?
I think the argument is that if there's a low density of this economic integration, you won't have the screaming & rifle shooting. I'm not sure that's true.... but... 1) it's harder to hear the neighbors screaming at each other across a bigger yard, 2) sometimes neighborhood dynamics cause trouble, by giving the feeling the sort of thing you describe is more or less ok/normal, and 3) there is a social pressure that happens the does subtly push people to conform, perhaps thereby breaking them out of the rifle-shooting habit.
The Gini coefficient seems to indicate that high degrees of economic integration results in more crimes, not less [1]. My current neighbors might not do fewer drugs (I suspect the issue was a drug deal gone bad) but maybe keep it quieter. The police would likely respond to such an event immediately here, whereas it took them over an hour to respond before. Then again that might just be because very little (reported) crime is happening here anyway. I hate that I live in this giant house far away from the city because one bad apple made it feel too dangerous to live in our previous house. It felt like the only reasonable choice available to us.
You don't really seem like an asshole to me for writing that because I live in a college area and the noise is ridiculous. It would be nice if affordable homes were built in such a way that every neighbourhood was priced for your income level with single vs family factored into it.
Who knows or cares? Overcoming the opposition of wealthy, cloistered local elites is an important political problem, but the specific nature of their opposition isn't relevant to the policy issue or the public interest.
It's relevant to the political problem of defeating their opposition, sure, but not relevant to the merits of the policy.
It's also fairly obvious - rich people think they're better humans than poor people and don't want to live near them. Not worthy of much hand-wringing or fretting in my opinion.
There's a term used by "race realists" to describe the liberal consensus towards integration: "magic dirt". It's a mocking way of phrasing the belief that an immigrant who moves from a dysfunctional to a successful society will likely become successful, or that the same is true for a child from a dysfunctional neighborhood going to a good quality school.
Naturally, I don't agree with the "race realist" view on this, and think the term is a bit of a strawman. Humans are intensely social, people's actions are deeply shaped by their social environments, and the liberal view being mocked isn't that your location transforms you but that your social milieu does.
But your comment seems to actually be this strawman come to life, which I find fascinating. To be clear, do you really think it's likely that good neighborhoods are shaped _primarily_ by factors independent of who lives in them? I know this is possible in the abstract, eg a downtown neighborhood is closer to jobs, a neighborhood with a freeway running through it is rarely cohesive, etc. But this seems dwarfed by the mountains and mountains of data points of neighborhoods transforming dramatically due to shifts in resident demographics, and pretty much every housing-related phenomenon is in line with this: white flight, gentrification, the recent impoverishing of the suburbs etc.
> To be clear, do you really think it's likely that good neighborhoods are shaped _primarily_ by factors independent of who lives in them?
I do not - I was pointing out the contradiction. Although to be fair, the way schools are funded in the US complicates this. If a neighborhood becomes low-income, then the schools will get less funding as well, as I understand it, because schools are funded from neighborhood-level property taxes.
No need to apologize, my comment wasn't unambiguous. But that's because it doesn't matter how my sentiment is interpreted - it gets people thinking either way.
One of the successes of london is that unlike paris they didn't eject all the poor people to the outskirts in the 1930-70s. this means that even opposite the houses of parliament, there is social housing.
Yes there are sink estates, but they are not whole boroughs (well, kinda, there are stressed areas.)
yes, we still have problems. The police still stop black people because they are "suspicious" (alas we've recently gone backwards)
But they are not stopped because they are in the "wrong area" the whole "Trayvon Martin" effect just doesn't really apply.
TL;DR:
Segregation increases problems, regardless of it being by choice, or by an act of government (ala rhodesia/south africa) unless you socialise with the "other" you are going to continually live in fear/contempt
Not only that. The only reason the selected families moved to the better neighborhood is because a team of experts were paid to intervene on their behalf.
Unless such families make the effort to change their circumstance and save enough to move to the preferable area, programs like this one rob them of their free will.
I don't understand why advocates of progressive programs like this seem to always miss this crucial point. Real, lasting change only comes when people make conscious decisions to improve their lives with no external input whatsoever handed to them. Anything else is anti-competitive and subject to regulatory capture.
> Real, lasting change only comes when people make conscious decisions to improve their lives with no external input whatsoever handed to them
that doesn't sound right. most people want to improve their life. it's not about making the decision, but about knowing what steps to take to achieve it. and why wouldn't someone take help for that?
you seem to think that making a conscious decision is all it takes. far from it. in particular, when the steps to achieve it involve time and effort that you don't seem to have time for.
i made a conscious decision to increase my income years ago. it wasn't effective until i found partners who helped me get clients (iaw i found a sales person who would work by sharing profit instead of taking a salary), so that i could focus delivering the service.
>The only reason the selected families moved to the better neighborhood is because a team of experts were paid to intervene on their behalf.
>Unless such families make the effort to change their circumstance and save enough to move to the preferable area, programs like this one rob them of their free will.
This is a bizarre claim. Participants were given advice, not forcibly relocated:
>They would also be given information on which neighborhoods promise the most opportunity for their kids, based on the research data. They’d also be assigned “navigators” whose job it was to walk them through the apartment application process, and receive additional financial assistance with down payments if necessary.
>This time around, they linked the experiment to tax records and concluded that people whom MTO had placed in lower-poverty neighborhoods really were likelier to go to college and had higher average earnings than kids who didn’t move.
Doesn't seem terribly surprising. The cultural atmosphere pervading low-income areas is not conducive to academic and financial achievement. Children who see strangers walking down the street at night are not going to have the same attitude towards school and behavior in general as children who see neighbors walking dogs in the morning. Garbage in, garbage out. ANY kid is capable of doing great when they're not surrounded by shit-heads.
> Children who see strangers walking down the street at night are not going to have the same attitude towards school and behavior in general as children who see neighbors walking dogs in the morning.
I'm fascinated by this view, and it's the first time I've ever heard it. Can you elaborate as to what you think the connection between seeing strangers outside and educational drive is?
Ah yea, that's sort of where I was expecting your comment to go, but as written, it just seemed like an indictment of exposure to people you don't know. Thanks for clarifying.
> Children who see strangers walking down the street at night[...]
really stands out. I live in a busy neighbourhood, and there are lots of people on foot at all times of day. Yet I somehow doubt it's doing anything to my attitude to education.
Just two nights ago, I actually started to talk to a group when they asked for directions, and two of them had physics PhDs. What a hellhole.
This logic assumes that none of this benefit is positional. The family moves to a richer area, the kids do well in the fancy local schools, get into top colleges, make lots of money, etc, yes. But a lot of these opportunities look like "each year we take the best N people we can", so there are probably other (less qualified) kids who do slightly worse than they would without the move.
As an analogy, if being in the tallest 5% of society makes you earn $100k more, we would expect a randomized controlled trial on increasing children's heights to have a large positive effect on income. But if we then rolled that out to the whole society those benefits would turn out to be illusory.
This is still valuable from a perspective of reducing segregation and inequality, but I'm skeptical of its presentation as an extremely good deal economically.