Quote:
Originally Posted by openheads
Teaneck? Do explain.
Is it due to the sizable middle class African American population? Ohhhhhh, black people who pay their taxes, mow their laws & send their kids off to college at a high rate are scary!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Teaneck is a great town. What the hell are you talking about?
This is why opinions on CD are to be taken with a grain of salt.
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Just saw your comments here, as well as the mention of Teaneck, and definately think your points here are valid! Just because there is a presence of Blacks/African Americans in an area does not at all make that area necessarily undesirable or certainly a ghetto!
Teaneck does have a fairly significant concentration of African Americans being about a quarter of its total population. Looking at median incomes and housing prices, I'd say that for sure these folks owning homes are middle class.
However... and this is a sticky subject I dare to bring up... but... there are numerous communities across America that carry a sizable middle-class African American population who care well for their homes and properly parent their children so as these families are stable and productive citizens on their own being self-sufficient. And yet mixed into these communities are lower-income African Americans through federal subsidized housing such as Section 8, and for whom their neighbours (mind you also African American!) find to be disruptive to the community's middle-class values and ways of living. Are we going to label middle-class African Americans who complain about the behaviours of their lower-income neighbours who happen to be of their same race as racist?
This is precisely why I began my discussion here about ghetto being not just a place but a mindset. There is a saying in the ghetto (being the place) that "you can't take the ghetto out of the ..." and that's coming from again the people who live in the ghetto.
I think there is truth to this that has nothing to do with race at all. When a person has come from not just an economically disadvantaged place but also a socially disadvantaged place (meaning no home training... no discipline and no structure and no expectations for respecting both self and others, as well as a poor academic education), how in the world will that person who becomes a parent (at too young an age anyway regardless of upbringing) be able to parent their child effectively? They won't. And government subsidized housing like Section 8 does absolutely nothing to address this issue. It is simply yet another example of government spending that remains ineffective in reversing the problems of poverty in this country.
How so?
First, it only places low-income households (the majority of whom are single parent headed by a female which places the family already at a disadvantage) into higher income areas. That's it. No much needed services are ever given to these at-risk households. It is well-documented by minorities themselves that many of their Section 8 neighbours bring with them "the ghetto" being not the place itself but the culture.
Second, it continues to create the incentive for those eligible to receive housing vouchers to remain unmarried because of income requirements and a priority given to the lowest income earners. By default this attracts single parent or single wage earner households.
Third, it does not foster a high degree of personal investment (be it financial or any sort of sweat-equity) in the property they do find to accept their voucher. It is natural for someone who is so disadvantaged to begin with, and who on top of that doesn't have a great stake in the value of the property itself, to take less an interest in improving it than a home owner typically will do.
Fourth, the kinds of rental properties that do accept Section 8 are not of the greatest quality to begin with, as it's well-documented that certain Section 8 landlords oftentimes are simply milking the taxpayers dollars in the government-backed income they receive from participating. You find Section 8 landlords who own hundreds of properties and end up renting such to those with vouchers and by default such ends up creating once again large areas of concentrated low-income dwellers! The original intent of Section 8 was to deconcentrate low-income persons and place them in better neighbourhoods. Yet it just doesn't work that way in the end oftentimes. The saying is that we've gone from vertical ghettos to horizontal ghettos.
Section 8 I think is, indeed, an example where both the public and private sector fail.
And although the more recent government built Hope VI housing does address issues neglected by the 50s and 60s style public housing, being that it involves tearing down these old and run-down, high-density public housing complexes that history shows to be failures by and large because of how they quickly became traps of crime and violence for tenants, Hope VI too is not without flaws.
The newer public housing under this urban model does create more attractive and lower-density housing, and impose a time limit on occupancy by requiring its tenants to commit to working towards self-sufficiency through participating in funded vocational training/education, etc. to that end. But what it fails to do so far is to build enough units to handle the displaced tenants from the older public housing. Sometimes the gap is very wide according to published reports, and yet it is assumed by the federal government that Section 8 makes up that gap. The reality it doesn't work that way lots of times.
Have we made improvements in public housing. Yes I think so but again... I contend that our tax dollars to this end even in the 21st century are still not being managed effectively by the US government. The federal government (HUD) continues to put restrictions on private enterprise and even local housing authorities so that the objectives of these low-income housing projects continue to be unmet.
Here's an interesting article I found which supports my observations:
Let’s End Housing Vouchers by Howard Husock, City Journal Autumn 2000
Like the above linked article says, Liberals like the voucher system because they assume the recipients will get housing they normally could not afford and Conservatives just assume you can transfer low-income families into a middle-class environment (through the private sector via vouchers) and somehow these folks will transition seamlessly. Not so... and such creates friction on all sides not because of racism but because of class.
I think such is a factor that can cause some people of any race to now find "undesirable" certain communities that are not just inner-city. We continue as a nation in our public policy to fail to address the social issues surrounding poverty and primarily focus on the economic issues.
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