Affordable Housing : Winds of change in Plano (Houston, Dallas: fit in, apartment)

[ThomasCrown]

Originally Posted by DabOnEm

well that person taking your order in the drive thru needs a place to live and their kids are mandated by law to go to school. where else are they going to go?

Prosper is small, and we already have a few apartment complexes. We also have a minimum of amount of retail/restaurants, so your point isn't valid, most of that is along 380, and McKinney and Frisco have plenty of apartments to support those jobs.



This is about developers taking advantage of Prosper's ISD by cramming their apartments along our borders, and McKinney is fine with it because it's not impacting their ISD.


This criticism isn't defined to just apartment builders either, but single family developments. Whitney Place pissed off everyone around them when they built that around Cockrell Elementary, with no thought to what that development would do to the capacity of that school. That impacted all the families already living here negatively.



Prosper ISD/Town Council took action though, and they forced the Lilyana and Mustang Lakes developments to plan for elementary schools in the neighborhoods rather than have those kids crowding existing Prosper schools.

[NTXPerson]

Originally Posted by DabOnEm

well that person taking your order in the drive thru needs a place to live and their kids are mandated by law to go to school. where else are they going to go?

Don’t forget teachers, law enforcement, firefighters, city employees, etc. These aren’t high paying jobs, yet cities and schools need people to do them. One way to attract those people is offering affordable housing. Specifically, affordable single family homes.

[Leonard123]

People here seem to look at everything through the lens of public schools and their reputation and rankings. I can't understand why this would be a concern unless it was an unsafe environment. The endless sea of threads on here about schools is insane.

Maybe if parents who cared would actually move outside their comfort zone and get involved and try bringing their desired changes to the schools rather than self-select schools where they don't have to, it wouldn't be such a big issue? I'm not a parent and never will be, but it seems like common sense to me.

Regardless, parents whose children are self-motivated shouldn't need to worry about it. Those parents have their priorities mixed up.

Many parents understandably may not want their kids in public school at all, and I don't blame them. Neither would I. However, that has more to do with the fact that they're indoctrinating students with their political views and the fact that many schools are unsafe. Beyond those two criteria though, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever why parents would be so obsessed over it. That's not rational or sane. However, we are sadly no longer in a rational or sane world.

[Leonard123]

Originally Posted by NTXPerson

Don’t forget teachers, law enforcement, firefighters, city employees, etc. These aren’t high paying jobs, yet cities and schools need people to do them. One way to attract those people is offering affordable housing. Specifically, affordable single family homes.

City employees like the McKinney mayor with his seven-figure McMansion in Adriatica?

[Radraiderz2004]

Originally Posted by ThomasCrown

Prosper is small, and we already have a few apartment complexes. We also have a minimum of amount of retail/restaurants, so your point isn't valid, most of that is along 380, and McKinney and Frisco have plenty of apartments to support those jobs.



This is about developers taking advantage of Prosper's ISD by cramming their apartments along our borders, and McKinney is fine with it because it's not impacting their ISD.


This criticism isn't defined to just apartment builders either, but single family developments. Whitney Place pissed off everyone around them when they built that around Cockrell Elementary, with no thought to what that development would do to the capacity of that school. That impacted all the families already living here negatively.



Prosper ISD/Town Council took action though, and they forced the Lilyana and Mustang Lakes developments to plan for elementary schools in the neighborhoods rather than have those kids crowding existing Prosper schools.

It doesn't matter where it is, affordable housing is always going to be a need. As much as the average Prosper resident would love to pull a Southlake, the diversity and multitude of housing options other than single family are coming fast and that's not a bad thing. I went to Folsom Elementary in the early 2010s and would much rather deal with the humble apartment and trailer park kids at Denton Ryan high rather than the ritzy kids from elementary.



To be fair, City and school district aren't related so I don't think being in PISD affects how McKinney views developments they approve or what they approve.



Cockrell was always planned inside of Whitley Place so I'm not quite sure how it pissed off nearby people in like whispering farms or gentle creek. The only complaints I had ever heard were from parents and friends that liked being at Rucker and Baker.


Those developments aren't in the town of Prosper, just the school district. Also other than Rucker, every elementary school is built and planned inside of the neighborhood anyways even going back all the way back to Folsom where I could see it from my house. Elementary schools being in the subdivisions is not a new concept.

[NTXPerson]

Originally Posted by Leonard123

City employees like the McKinney mayor with his seven-figure McMansion in Adriatica?

No...City employees like trash services, public works, parks & recreation, and other blue-collar positions that don't pay a lot.

[ThomasCrown]

Originally Posted by Radraiderz2004

Cockrell was always planned inside of Whitley Place so I'm not quite sure how it pissed off nearby people in like whispering farms or gentle creek.

It most certainly was not. The land/plans for Cockrell were purchased and decided on years before Whitney Place was. Cockrell was completed for the 2012 school year. The earliest homes began being built in Whitley Place in 2012 as far as I know. For years, we had multiple temporary buildings and combined classes because of Whitley Place being built without regard to what that many homes would do to Cockrell enrollment.

[20Hope20]

There isn't that much land left in easily commutable areas so multifamily housing and smaller lots are coming to all towns, there is no way around it. For developers it doesn't make sense to build 1 house on an acre when they can build 80 apartments.

[hindsight2020]

Originally Posted by Xalistiq

Plano was an idyllic place twenty years ago. It was less crowded and actually felt like a suburb rather than just an extension of Dallas. One never encountered “riff raff” (even on the slightly rougher central and east sides) because they had no reason to even drive through Plano. Due to its proximity to Dallas and the amount of corporate growth Plano has seen, these changes were inevitable, but have completely changed the cultural landscape of the city.

oof this forum I tell ya. At least you speak the quiet parts out loud. This ^^^^ is city data for me in a nutshell, when it comes to the upper middle class echo chamber I often speak of.

Let it be known that yours is indeed not a racist complaint. Yours is quintessentially a classist one, full stop.

It's just that classism in America (income bigotry) is hardly debated as an original-sin type source of friction, the way say race tension between white and black skinned people was in the development of the Country. It's also why americans speciously consider themselves to live in a "classless" society where everybody self-reports as middle class for plausible deniability reasons. Certainly the case when comparing themselves to say, pre-Bretton-Woods Britain for instance. Richard Reeves goes a bit into this deflection/delusion on the part of upper middle class Americans in his book DreamHoarders.

At any rate, in the case of Americans, the desire for income-based apartheid (especially due to the overemphasis of housing equity as their financial lifeboat in life, as opposed to mere shelter; life choice which is another causal problem from where I sit) may be passive-aggressive by the use of race tokenism arguments, like the one made earlier in the thread about affluent non-whites existing. The implication thence being that all's well here in income-apartheid Shangri-La, because we got monied brown people hating on poor brown people. Unreal the odiousness of the upper middle class.

To wit, upper class Americans (the PMC/upper middle class, overrepresented in this website, very much included) love to be passive aggressive about classism, by distracting the conversation with universally agreeable utterances against racism. And to the degree it seeks to distract from the conversation by accurately pointing out that income in america isn't exclusively proxied by race (with the exception of the Anglo to African American chasm), they get to skate (in their minds anyways) on the obvious question of class-driven economic inequality in this Country. To say nothing of the hypocritical subsidy of their own affluence of course by policy choices shoehorned onto the Country by their outsized money-based political clout (the hoarding argument Reeves makes in his book).

BL, I care not for distinctions without difference. Classism hiding under "well, there's affluent brown skinned people around so.." is one such distinction without difference. Socioeconomic apartheid is an odious quality present, dare I say endemic, to my socioeconomic class. I despise the prevailing attitude of people in my income bracket for that reason, especially given their cowardly unwillingness to speak the quiet parts out loud, your open screed being the exception.

Perhaps that's the more subconscious reason I end up living (and working) among the "poors" in cookie cutter hell, more so than my verbally spoken desire to eschew housing inflation and cost burdens as the venerated deity that it seems to be for those in my income bracket and professional circles.

Self-sorting behavior may be normalized to you, but it's no less odious and contemptuous of those who also contribute to the establishment of the Country you enjoy. The Upper middle class thinks too highly of themselves and of the degree to which their cohort input supposedly contributes to the usufruct of the system they enjoy. It's a classist delusion; the fact that is classist and not racist, doesn't make it any less of a delusion. Speaking this in this echo chamber is farting in church so I digress.

Sincerely signed, a proud class traitor.

[ThomasCrown]

LOL! If you talk this way in person I bet a good drinking game when you're around would be to drink whenever you say the word odious.