Middle income people have been caught in a sham regarding investing in Bronzeville property.

[beaniemac]

Originally Posted by BRU67

What do you retrain them to? We can't have 325 million professionals. To quote Caddyshack, "the world needs ditch diggers too." We need good-paying manufacturing and low-skilled jobs in addition to the professional jobs. Throw around the word globalization all you want, this is a true fact.

I agree. everyone can't go to college and be a professional office worker. there need to be blue collar jobs for the folks who don't have the means for higher education.

[ChiGuy2.5]

Originally Posted by chicagoisdetroit

Middle income residents have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into mostly condominiums and some houses in the Bronzeville area. At a point of time Bronzeville was a severely neglected poverty stricken neighborhood. To increase and keep the value of the property at a certain level many have brought into the idea that lower income residents are the problem and must be removed. Most poor people actually spend the most money and are ones that shop and patronize with a lot of the local businesses. A lot of people have been displaced, but the reality of the situation is that a lot of people still live in the neighborhood and may never leave. Chicago is one the verge of collapsing and it's going to either be rich or poor with really little in between. The middle class is slowly starting to disappear in America with either declining or rapidly accelerated prices.

Bronzeville was once a predominately African-American neighborhood with a rich historical culture, people, and architecture.The reason behind this is due to the racism and housing discrimination which forced so many people to live together even if they had money or not. As decades went by affluent blacks moved to different areas and into the suburbs. The Bronzeville neighborhood quarantined poor working blacks into massive interment camp like housing projects as many fled the south to come here for better opportunities. As the industrial jobs dried up and greedy monopolies shipped work oversees for cheap labor it took a toll on many neighborhoods and communities throughout the U.S. There have been many different waves of black migration to the City of Chicago and Bronzeville along with Fuller Park, and Washington Park is where they went which was considered the black belt.

As the temporary 50-year housing project experiment was eventually demolished many poor blacks have been dispersed and displaced. A new social experiment was implemented on the Bronzeville Neighborhood by the way of gentrification, mixed-income housing, and an influx of condominiums. Many different ethnic groups are making their way into the Bronzeville neighborhood but yet the lower income blacks remain. According to neighborhood census statistics on Chicago, Grand Boulevard lost 81% of it's population since 1950. There is a socioeconomic tension going on in Bronzeville and throughout the city due to the above mentioned experiments. It becomes an us vs. them, rich vs. poor, lower income/section 8 vs condo/homeowners.

Statistics show that last year Chicago lost the most population of any major U.S City. The inflated property taxes, sales taxes, poor schooling and cheaper costs of living elsewhere have effected people decisions on living in the city. Real estate property value drop when people leave an area in masses, an area gets neglected, increase poverty, crime, lack of businesses, or it becomes overcrowded. If poor blacks are being discriminated into moving into parts of neighborhoods due to gentrification, and affluent people are leaving the city what does that lead to? If you are forcing people into one area only what does that lead to? It leads in to eventually inevitable collapse, Chicago has a high unemployment rate, high levels of people living below the poverty line, underfunded penitentiary discipline like schools, poor credit for the city, corrupt politicians, and many more issues that's been going on for years. When you face flight rather white or black it truly effects the neighborhood.

All in all, many middle income and homeowners have been brainwashed into believing that the whole Bronzeville is going to turn over. Most neighborhoods are broken up into different economic pockets. A lot of people are still going to live and go on with life like they have since forever. That places people who aren't used to the low end life with two options either learn how to live with, or move on. The longer people refuse to rent out properties to certain people the more buildings might go into foreclosure driving the property value down. As more and more affluent people wake up and realize it makes more sense to own a house in a suburb or another city than a condo in the city the more vacancies arise. Apartments on the other hand sell like hotcakes people always need an apartment; the more amentities and utilities that are included the easier it is to sell. Affordable rent-able condos are an option but eventually many people are heading elsewhere and the poor might still remain.

Any other SWEEPING generalizations you want to make?

For the last bolded statement I only ask this. If people are refusing to rent to the "poor" then does that mean they are sitting on vacant units waiting for the rich to move in? Short answer is NO. Long answer is that supply and demand controls the availability of units and the price at which those units sell or rent for. So no, we are not on the verge of collapse because rents are going up. If anything, the rents are going up because Chicago's Cost of Living is quite low for the market it supports. There is a lot of tech moving into this city and you're seeing the results of such. Chicago is currently building more supertall structures now than they were in 2008. That's a big deal and it supports the theory that people are demanding close locations to downtown and are willing to pay for it, and Bronzeville fits that bill.

[JacksonPanther]

Originally Posted by BRU67

The core purpose of a capitalist economy is to provide the citizens of the economy with jobs that provide them with a good enough living so they can participate in that economy and create a social order. Making stuff is ancillary to that, so the appropriate evolution of capitalism should not be increased automation and trade agreements that allow our richest corporations to use cheap, exploited labor. Sure, those will provide some high paying jobs, but not enough to offset the job losses and marginalization in the lower tiers.

We have been losing sight of this for many years. Eventually, the result is going to be chaos.

Back in the day, before cars became ubiquitous, there was a factory in every neighborhood because people could only travel so far. Once cars and buses came around there was no need for so many small factories, so there became a smaller number of larger factories. Of course one large factory doesn't employ as many as 10 small factories...

My point is that automation (cars, robots, communication, etc) can't be stopped. Any economic plan that relies on limitation or stoppage of automation for its success, is doomed to failure.

The eventual end of this, many years in the future, is a world where almost no one has a "job." No one buys "things" because every thing we want is already easily provided. Money is superfluous. So in this world, what does everyone do all day? I have no answer to that. Look to philosophers, or Star Trek, for an answer.

[Avondalist]

Originally Posted by JacksonPanther

The eventual end of this, many years in the future, is a world where almost no one has a "job." No one buys "things" because every thing we want is already easily provided. Money is superfluous. So in this world, what does everyone do all day? I have no answer to that. Look to philosophers, or Star Trek, for an answer.

What if you want someone else's girlfriend in this world of plenty? Is he just going to clone a new girlfriend and give you his?

What if everyone becomes an artist pursuing their muse? Who has the best art? Who is the most famous? That's the new game in town in a world of plenty.

Competition never ends. It can never be eradicated, because evolution depends on it.

Karl Marx thought that the industrial technology of the 1840s would alleviate all poverty and bring about the end of competition because everyone would have what they wanted. People have been predicting the end of work for 150 years. It hasn't happened yet. Marx has been consistently wrong about this, just as wrong as Thomas Malthus has been about overpopulation. The persistence of these ideas despite over a century or countervailing evidence is remarkable.

Every time something new comes out, people want more.

Work isn't necessarily doing something you don't like for money. Lots of people like their jobs. Work is competition, whether you're at the office making money or at the gym building muscle. If a flabby upper middle class office worker and a fit part-time personal trainer are competing for the same woman, and the personal trainer gets her because he is better looking, who worked harder? Who worked smarter?

I'd like to believe in a Star Trek universe, but it's obviously a utopia. The future will be more like Alien with spacefaring megacorporations competing with nation-states for power.

People who are banking on technology obviating the need for work will get a rude awakening. When revolutionary new technology comes out, it's the people at the top of the pyramid who get the most benefits before it trickles down to the rest of us. This happened in the 1880s with railways, 1920s with the assembly line, and 1990s with computers. It didn't happen in the 1950s and 60s with jets and such because there was a labor shortage left over from WWII. I don't see massive depopulation on the horizon because of nuclear deterrence and a global media that fosters international sympathy. So this time around with robots, we're going to have work it out on our own, just like in the 1880s and 1920s.

[JacksonPanther]

Avondalist, you have several points I want to quote and reply to, but writing on a tablet makes that too difficult. So let me just say that any utopia that marks the end of work would be many centuries away, nothing that's just around the corner.

I think Marx was way off base, predicting an end of work. What I see is a diminishing need for manual labor, which leaves us with only knowledge work or service work. But even the service industry in the long term automates itself out of the need for labor. A robot McDonald's can take my money, cook my food, and deliver it to me. Suddenly the only people needed is a couple guys to fix broken robots.

The population of this world continues to grow, but the incremental need for labor is trending down. How does that resolve itself in the long term? If star trek is the utopia, then there are dozens of dystopian tv and movie futures we can hopefully not aspire to. But even star trek never addresses what billions of earth people are doing with their time...

[Avondalist]

Originally Posted by JacksonPanther

But even star trek never addresses what billions of earth people are doing with their time...

TNG resolves this with the Holodeck.