From Knuckledragger, talking about his old neighborhood (happens to be in California, but could have — and has — happened anywhere):
The shooting happened in the 200 block of Semple Street, I used to live at 238 Kimble, one street over. Most of the houses there were built in the 1920s.
…
When I first moved there in 1996, it was a nice neighborhood – quiet with a lot of older folks that would sit out on their front porch in the evening drinking tea and talking with other neighbors that were out for their evening walk. As time went by, those folks either died or sold their homes to go into retirement communities or whatever and younger folks moved in. Then they opened up an apartment complex on Johnson, 2 streets over, to Section 8 [low-income] housing and shit really went downhill after that.
One of the biggest failures of “progressive” philosophy is the “magic dirt” theory: that transplanting people from a bad place to a better place will somehow magically make them change, and act more like the people in the better neighborhood than they did in their old one.
As any amateur* student of human nature will tell you, that’s completely wrong. Instead, the transplantees will bring all their old behaviors to the better place, and infect it with thuggery, crime and general lawlessness, to the point where the original inhabitants of that (no longer) “better” area simply pack up and move. Then that’s referred to derisively by the “planners” as “White flight” or, to be more accurate, as “middle-class flight” (which is what it is).
Then the neighborhoods go to shit, as Kenny observes, the schools start to fail, businesses also leave and voilà! a shithole is created where no shithole existed before. By social redistributionism. (In this case, not of wealth but of antisocial behavior, to make it somehow more “fair”.)
And no matter how often it fails, the Leftists (as always) continue the practice, again and again, because Leftist activity only concerns itself with intentions, and outcomes are always the fault of others rather than of the basic Marxist principle. (The “others”, of course, being “capitalism”, “greedy businessmen”, “bankers” or, more recently, “racism”.)
*the “professional” students of human behavior are the ones who initiate and perpetuate this foolishness, reminding me of the (paraphrased) expression that so stupid and wrongheaded a precept could only have been produced by an academic — academia, of course, never having to live with the consequences of their folly.
Uh huh.
When I was a wee lad my parents lived in Staten Island, NYFC, NYFS, in an area called Mariner’s Harbor. From birth to age 9 or so we lived in one (rental) apartment (half of a two-family house). When the Mariner’s Harbor Projects (NYC called them Housing Projects or Public Housing, we just called them the Projects) opened the neighborhood rapidly turned to shit. When the house we lived in was sold, we moved to another in Mariner’s Harbor, a bit further from the Projects, and I was old enough then to see the neighborhood transition from a nice, working-class, predominantly Italian neighborhood to a shithole-in-waiting.
Just another example: In the more commercial area of Mariner’s Harbor a motel opened up. It seemed pretty nice, and during the summer for a modest fee you could spend the day at the pool. Then the owner noticed he could make FAR more money by renting to the City as a welfare hotel. Instant shithole, just add people who don’t have to pay for the damage they do.
Funny story time: A new tenant moved in across the street, and one of the poor disadvantaged youth in the new family decided to do some wealth redistribution via burglary, so he and his buddies broke into a neighbors house (literally across the street and two houses down from his own house, talk about shitting where you eat), while the elderly couple were in their bed, they could hear the kids robbing them. Well half the neighbors (including the victims) were related either by blood or marriage (the woman’s sister lived around the corner with her family, the man’s brother lived up the street with his, the brother’s oldest son married the daughter of a family that lived three houses up from me, etc). The neophyte burglar made the mistake of showing off his ill-gotten gains, and someone recognized a piece of jewelry that belonged to his friend’s grandmother. Did he call the police? No, silly, he told his friend, and that evening the entire neighborhood was in front of the criminals house with baseball bats and tire irons, his MOTHER called the police and said “My son robbed the neighbor’s house, please come arrest him before the neighbors kill him”.
Nowadays of course, in DeBlasio’s NYFS, such actions would be verboten.
It looks like all Progressive and Dem run cities entropy this way. I used to live outside of Pittsburgh, and there were many neighborhoods that may have been steel jobs created, but they’ve quickly devolved to bad governmental programs, terrible elected officials, hollow campaign promises, and the changing demographic changes. No real foundations, like family, common interests, ethnic, ect., to hold them together, they socially rot. My family used to live in the Braddock section, ethnic German (they used to speak it on Sundays when I was little…), heavily family centered, and hard working steelworkers and craftsmen at Westinghouse. Now, its rundown rows of brick row-homes, with hollow people of every facet.
I live outside Baltimore, and travel down Orleans Street to the city. Its the same view – boarded up brick row homes, trash everywhere, blank hollow stares, but the common factor is one – African Americans.
Many politicians scurry and struggle to find the causes and solutions, but often overlook the mirror. It never lies.
Interesting how when the reverse happens (gentrification turning a once-shithole into a livable place) they piss & moan about that too. The progs won’t be happy until everyone is at a common level of abject misery (except for themselves, of course).
“The progs won’t be happy until everyone is at a common level of abject misery (except for themselves, of course).”
This boils down to the fundamental misunderstanding of Liberals. They, like everyone else, want to live a life of plenty, comfort and happiness. Their mistake is that they believe the pie is fixed and finite, therefore if THEY have more someone else MUST have less (hence their hatred of The Rich, believing that they stole their wealth). They believe there’s a fixed amount of wealth, so they must rob from the rich to give to the poor (with a little skimmed off for themselves, administrative costs you know).
They don’t understand that wealth is CREATED by innovation. A one-pound block of steel and a wooden stick aren’t worth much, but mold the steel into a hammer head and the stick into a handle and it increases in value far above the cost of the resources used to make it, and someone who knows how to use it can generate even MORE wealth with it. It works the same for hammers, computers, trucks, nuclear power plants, factories, all the way up and down. The the Left Just. Doesn’t. Get. It.
Screw it, where’s my bourbon.
” Their mistake is that they believe the pie is fixed and finite”
This is a pretty incredible “mistake,” one so obviously wrong it’s hard to credit that anyone who’s given it more than a moment’s thought could take it seriously. All the wealth in the world of, say, 150 years ago, wouldn’t, when concentrated, give the US our standard of living, let alone everywhere else. It should be plain to anyone that wealth can be created.
They confuse “wealth” with “money”, obviously there’s a finite amount of physical (or even electronic) money at any given time. So obviously, if there’s only $100 dollars split among ten people, and one person wants more he has to take from someone else, because the $100 is all there IS. We understand money as a marker or stand-in for value, so if you take raw materials and make something out of them which has more value than the sum of the resources used to make it, you’ve increased the amount of value, you could in effect create more physical money because of the increased value.
This leads to a fundamental confusion: When we say “make money” we mean do something productive that increases the value of whatever you’re working on (see example above of making a chunk of steel and stick into a hammer), they think “print money”, meaning making more physical money without increasing the value associated with that money, leading in inflation, essentially a devaluation of the physical money to meet the actual wealth in existence at any given time. Inflation isn’t an issue of the increasing supply of money keeps pace with the increased value in the system. Or we have AOC suggesting that we print enough paper money to pay off the National Debt, then we’re all free-and-clear.
You see, THIS is what happens when you read Thomas Sowell: you get people who understand Basic Economics [sic].
Yes, I know what I did back there.
Kim: When the world comes to its senses and elects me Benign Dictator for Life, one of my first acts will be to make reading, and proving understanding of, Thomas Sowell, especially Basic Economics and A Conflict of Visions, mandatory for graduating High School and/or registering to vote.
Yes, I’m surprised that my brother the Stalinist or his Left of Kim Jong Un wife hasn’t figured that out yet. They have a nice house with two one bedroom units in back, and the difference between it when they bought it and now is all the money they put into it, borrowed and getting paid back, and sweat equity, although to be blunt, for all the talk my SIL gave about how handy she was, she seems to have retired that since marriage*, and it’s my brother’s sweat creating the equity.
*similar in concept to the widely acknowledged retirement of certain sexual practices upon tasting of the wedding cake.
I remember seeing a documentary about relocating people from the projects to nicer neighborhoods. The researchers found that crime followed the people being moved and that the idea of moving these people to a better place would lift them up was false.
While they accepted the results of their study they seemed surprised that it followed racial patterns and that the premise didn’t work as the liberal politicians thought it would.
Oddly, try as I might I can no longer find this documentary on the internet anymore.
Is this it?
American Murder Mystery
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american-murder-mystery/306872/
Yes, and apparently no one still knows what to do about it.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, “Talking to Strangers” discussed something similar to this idea. According to him, patrolling an area known for, say, street prostitution, cut down on the incidence of the crime, it didn’t just move it over a couple of blocks. He quotes erstwhile criminals that they just didn’t know the people a couple blocks over, so he draws the conclusion that it’s possible to reduce crime by the broken window theory of operation, although he did not mention that by name, nor did he mention the “magic dirt theory”.
The Magic Dirt Theory makes me think of people planting noxious weeds in new places, hoping that something useful will come up.
I remember this theory got lampooned in a Judge Dredd strip perhaps 40 years ago.
It’s not white flight or even middle class flight. It’s people with options flight. Proggy assholes are basically working to eliminate the options.
“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
– Winston Churchill
In “Every Time I Say Goodbye”, After Tom Hanks’s character said his pastor father was a Socialist, the sister of his love interest said, “So we can all be poor together?”
The proponents of socialism are not THAT dedicated. Everybody can be equal, but they see themselves as more equal, based on their good intentions, apparently
This is a cynical idea, but I’ll put it out there…
Centralize all welfares and subsidized housing in a few locations. Accept that those locations will turn into Demholes. But the rest of the country is reasonably safe and liveable.
You can count on two things with the progs.
If it makes sense they will not do it.
No poor people will be given housing in the neighborhoods they live in.
If you give a man something he will destroy it but if a man earns something he will cherish it.