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1. You JUST claimed all the people from the high rises were gone, and I proved differently. So much for your vastly superior experience and knowledge.
2. You have further claimed that unless all the former residents of East Liberty are forced out of the neighborhood, it can't improve. And yet many are staying, and the neighborhood is improving. So much for THAT being impossible.
3. I think we have established you have no idea what you are talking about in general. But I will note it is NOT true that Pittsburgh as a whole is highly segregated by INCOME, because there are many neighborhoods with a wide range of incomes. And I thought we were talking about income--or are you finally admitting you are really talking about race?
4. Nah. What is really going on here is you want to push all the lower-income people in the City into suburban shantytowns. On some level, though, you understand that goal makes you into a monster in the eyes of most people. So, you are trying to rationalize that goal by suggesting it is impossible to do any better.
5. Like I said, there is really no point trying to talk to someone like you. But I am in fact willing to make sure that other people understand that things you are claiming are demonstrably false.
1. Never said, "all". I know not all the people are relocated, but hoping enough are to make the area what it should be.
2. I don't see things black and white like you seem to think I do. Many people need to leave East Liberty for the area to grow in a positive direction. I lived right there long enough to know that to be true. You have not. really nothing to discuss with someone that doesn't know the area.
3. Personal attack and against forum rules.
4. To a point you are correct. I do want the drug dealers and violent people out of that area. It would help the city.
5. People will believe what they want to believe. Being someone that looks at Pittsburgh and watches local new telling us all the daily murders that take place in certain areas, I am tired of it and want those people OUT of the city as best we can. It is going to happen in East Liberty at some point. The area is prime for the taking and big money developers that I have experience with being in New Construction in multi-million dollar plans, these money people will not go half way. They know the payoff is too great to let it fail. It will work and the place will become more expensive and people will be relocated. NOT ALL PEOPLE. You always insert the words ALL to try and help your arguments. I don't look at the world as a black and white place. I look at trends. The trend is for the area to appreciate and do much better than anytime in my lifetime. Believe me, Shadyside, Highland Park and no doubt Friendship WANT the change. The big money companies want the change to make the money on the tail end of all this. It is going to happen. Live with it.
My two cents concerning East Liberty is the govt screwed it up years ago with the Liberty Circle, why should we get them involved again? Let the private sector handle it.
Section 8 housing should be a whole 'nother thread.
Listen, I think it is novel that people with mixed incomes live next to each other- I live in Lawrenceville which is a patch-work of incomes- I have no problem with it. I believe with my neighborhood, as well as several others here, this is a very feasible objective without over-government involvement.
So theoretically, if there was an abundance of neighborhoods with lots of walkable amenities and a range of employment opportunities, good public transit, a mix of housing units, good public schools, and so on, it may well be the case that you wouldn't need to do much, if anything, with respect to housing policy in such areas. And Pittsburgh is sorta accidentally close to being in those conditions right now--not perfectly so (e.g., not so much with respect to schools), but closer than you will find in many other cities.
The thing is, we know that such circumstances are very fragile. The problem is there are many, many policies stacked against matching the supply of such neighborhoods/housing to demand for such neighborhoods/housing: bad land-use policies, bad transportation policies, bad educational policies, bad health policies, and so on. In fact, there are bad housing policies (e.g., the deductibility of mortgages) that apply as well.
As a result, that theory doesn't apply in practice, at least not right now. Due to all these unwise restrictions on supply, it is very easy for lower-income people to get priced out of even modest units in such areas, and that is very bad for them because they can't easily afford to deal with the higher commuting costs, lowered access to vital services, and so on that will result, and concentrated poverty creates many avoidable problems. And it won't take too much growth in the Pittsburgh area for all the same problems to arise here too.
Given all this, I don't actually think it matters if you want to describe that as a situation in which there are too many rules restricting supply, and I want to describe it as a situation in which there are too many bad rules restricting supply. Either way, I think we can agree that there are a lot of rules already in place which are artificially limiting the supply of this sort of neighborhood. And in that context, it doesn't make sense to me to insist on refusing to respond through housing policy in the name of allowing a more "natural" outcome, because there is really nothing at all "natural" about the outcome that will occur absent intervention through housing policy.
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Maybe I'm just not sensitive enough to other poorer people like myself, but I just except the fact at this point of my life, I don't have a lot of money and am happy to live where I can afford with a roommate. Heck, when I lived in LA, I shared a bedroom- it's called roughing it.
I don't know your circumstances so this isn't personal to you. But there is a big difference between people who come from families of relatively high socioeconomic status but who are temporarily lower-income (say because they are students or just starting a career), and people who are born into a family which is of relatively low socioeconomic status AND living in concentrated poverty. In fact we can forget about adults and just look at kids--we know that a child raised in poverty and surrounded by concentrated poverty is much more likely to face all sorts of problems that will have effects well beyond childhood.
So this is in part a moral point: if we get to the point where our cities look like the worst of Third World cities, meaning wealthier centers surrounded by shantytowns full of poor people with little economic mobility, very high crime, very poor health outcomes, and so on, I think from a moral perspective our society will clearly count as a failure.
But it is also an economic point. People are a very important economic resource, and getting more important all the time relative to other resources. That, in a nutshell, is why cities exist and are expanding (the increasing relative importance of other people as a resource for productive activities gives a comparative advantage to places where a lot of other people are around). The city model where the poor are concentrated in suburban shantytowns is thus wasting resources: the economic potential of those people is basically being thrown away, and the same waste of resources is being perpetuated generation after generation.
So even if you didn't care at all about poor people--and again I think that is a very immoral point of view--you could recognize this would be a bad outcome economically for the United States. And again, you could in theory think this outcome could be avoided if we changed a long list of existing policies, but unless and until those many other changes in policy are made, we will need a different solution.
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I truly believe that cities need to evolve naturally. When I use naturally, I mean with limited government authority and allowing for choices to made by individuals based on the greatest and best use of their property, with basic parameters. As an Independent, I hate to say this, but Capitalism made our North American cities what they are today. This is not to say government should have no involvement in our cities, just at basic limits. Again, I don't think dictating development based on a 'low or mixed-income' objectives is something they should have a say in.
Again, I don't think it actually matters whether you describe what you are talking about as "limited government", and I describe something very similar as "good government" instead. The bottomline is that our current policies with respect to land-use, transportation, education, health-care, and so on don't resemble anything like what it would take for there to be a "natural" outcome with respect to the supply of the relevant kind of neighborhoods/housing. And I do think in that context, if you isolate just this one policy for elimination, you are not in fact getting a more "natural" outcome, just a much worse one.
Fair enough. The things you are claiming are false, and demonstrably so, and demonstrated so, and you are still repeating them anyway. Your claims to having superior knowledge based on personal experience thus appear to be entirely unfounded, because your stated views on the facts are at odds with reality.
But I will stop expressing that thought with the term "clueless".
1. Never said, "all". I know not all the people are relocated, but hoping enough are to make the area what it should be.
"Guess you didn't notice the high rises that were given to the people that trashed them are all gone. Where did they go? They are gone."
You say a lot of things that are not true.
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4. To a point you are correct. I do want the drug dealers and violent people out of that area. It would help the city.
The "drug dealers and violent people" are only a minority of the people who have been living there. Again, the difference between you and me is I care about all the other people who have been living there, and your plan is just to send them all to suburban shantytowns, whether or not they are "drug dealers and violent people."
Now periodically you claim differently, but what exactly is your plan for filtering out just the bad people? I've explained how that will in fact work: if you give people opportunities to stay in these improving neighborhoods, the good people are much more likely to stay and the bad people are much more likely to leave, because the bad people aren't going to find these comfortable neighborhoods to be around.
But your plan is to just shove out anyone who can't pay market rates for housing. That doesn't just target "drug dealers and violent people", it targets everyone with a lower household income. So unless you can explain to me your plan for targeting just "drug dealers and violent people," I am going to keep assuming your real plan is to just get rid of everyone. And in fact periodically you defend that outcome anyway, so I don't think I am being at all unfair.
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Being someone that looks at Pittsburgh and watches local new telling us all the daily murders that take place in certain areas, I am tired of it and want those people OUT of the city as best we can.
Again, here you suddenly stop being clear on who "those people" are. I think you really mean everyone.
Incidentally, local news is just about the worst way to get an accurate impression of what is going on in an area imaginable. They deliberately report as much violence and crime as possible, and underreport good events, and don't report at all when nothing happens. They even have a saying for all this: "If it bleeds, it leads".
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The area is prime for the taking and big money developers that I have experience with being in New Construction in multi-million dollar plans, these money people will not go half way.
Again, this is all quite wrong. The developers operating in East Liberty are currently cooperating with public agencies like the URA and HUD, because those agencies are helping them get financing. So much for your "experience".
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NOT ALL PEOPLE. You always insert the words ALL to try and help your arguments.
No, you keep slipping back and forth between what you are claiming should be done, and I am pointing that out. But anyway, again, let me know your plan for targeting only the "drug dealers and violent people", and I will start taking the related claims more seriously.
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It is going to happen. Live with it.
You are wrong, and you will continue to be wrong, but if you are not willing to accept that your worldview is contradicted by reality, that is fine with me. It makes you largely harmless.
That is a good thing in my opinion- if you observe the best parts and spaces of the city and understand their history, you can trace their heyday to the period of intense Capitalism. I use the term "Capitalist City" in reference to Spiro Kostof's North American city of the early 20th century. Did Capitalism have adverse affects on a large segment of our population, absolutely- but I did have a profound impact on creating one great cities. Somewhere done the line, after WWII, people abandoned them in-masse, got in their cars, and headed to the suburbs.
I know nothing more about Kostof than what Google can tell me - evidently a notable career. It seems to me, though, that depending on definitions an important distinction might be made between "limited government authority" and "government allied to capital". I wouldn't describe late Victorian or Edwardian government as limited - even in the U.S. its authority in urban affairs was pretty sweeping. But especially in the U.S. it was generally allied or captured by capitalist interests, which meant either not exerting its authority contrary to those interests or actively using its authority on their behalf - Pittsburgh in the era of Carnegie seems to me a pretty clear example.
The distinction might seem recondite, but it's the difference between an libertarian ideal of capital without government vs. a classical-liberal ideal of government in the service of capital.
But especially in the U.S. it was generally allied or captured by capitalist interests, which meant either not exerting its authority contrary to those interests or actively using its authority on their behalf - Pittsburgh in the era of Carnegie seems to me a pretty clear example.
Interestingly, this is exactly what happened in the post-WWII era as well. The politicians in the Pittsburgh area and the big business interests in the Pittsburgh area were all aligned, and all supportive of the "Renaissance". The same sort of thing was going on in places like New York--in fact the same people were often involved in both cities.
Which is why I really don't think the distinctive thing about this era was the role, or lack thereof, of "capitalism". They just had a lot of bad ideas.
And I am even partially sympathetic to the situation they were in. Environmental and health issues in cities were extremely pressing. The feds were adopting policies consciously designed to disperse populations from cities. They didn't really have a road map for dealing with all this, so the fact they screwed it up is somewhat understandable.
On the other hand, they were really pretty racist, and that contributed to these problems and led them to counterproductive solutions.
I don't think it actually matters whether you describe what you are talking about as "limited government", and I describe something very similar as "good government" instead. The bottomline is that our current policies with respect to land-use, transportation, education, health-care, and so on don't resemble anything like what it would take for there to be a "natural" outcome with respect to the supply of the relevant kind of neighborhoods/housing. And I do think in that context, if you isolate just this one policy for elimination, you are not in fact getting a more "natural" outcome, just a much worse one.
I dread the idea of what genuine libertarian "limited government" (i.e. no interference with capital or market forces apart from protection of property) would do to our cities.
But that apart, the question comes down to whether government authority should be used to clear the way for the operation of private capital, or should somehow direct and supervise it. Louis-Napoleon's authoritarianism was happy to direct capital toward the interests of the state, and gave the world Paris. Sir John A. MacDonald's paternalist conservatism did likewise and gave the world Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Gilded-Age liberalism cleared the way for capital and gave us Pittsburgh (or Homestead) and Chicago.
Seems to me that how you order that list of cities by preference will largely determine how you feel about the use of government authority in urban affairs.
It is obvious that we all have varying opinions that go well beyond specific tactics related to East Liberty/Pittsburgh as a whole. We also seem to really enjoy the city as we are spending a lot of time on this discourse. Though our opinions always evolve, each of us has formulated opinions that can't be taken away.
I don't hate poor people but I would hate to see cities stop evolving from a truer Capitalistic system as described by the late, great Mr. Kostof. I do think the government needs to continue involvement with basic facets of urban life (basically a level of involvement similar to an early 20th Century city). I think there needs to be more mass-transit provided in cities for not only more transportation freedom/options for all, but because it really stimulates private development all lines and near stations. I think if government was simpler and wasn't concerned with having a hand in SO many issues, we could get a LOT more done in American cities. In my opinion, related to the subject matter here, our government/planners shouldn’t concern themselves with mixed income housing. Housing should be provided for the very needy but people, including families, need to rough-it more times than not. Schools and urban housing is never going to be perfect and people need to put a lot more honest on themselves rather than looking for answers from the government. Though stories about subsidized, mixed-income developments provide feel-good moment for some, it is really just a minuscule drop in the barrel of an issue that the government cannot possible address unless it went into complete Socialism. It is also, unfortunately, just a chance for local politicians to have a photo shoot and their name/political alignment in the paper.
I don't have an all or nothing opinion or a purely idealistic one- indeed I am greyer and would never be elevated as a Democratic or Republican candidate! I have lived in some of the most liberal places in America and most of my friends are quite liberal- sometimes explaining my opinions takes longer as I can't just align with polar viewpoints and when I say Capitalist City, they would absolutely freak-out. Thanks for hearing me out all- it was fun!
I would imagine we would all take away something different from his word/opinion- they are very entertaining and thought-provoking. I recommend at least checking out Pt. 13-14, as it relates to this topic, and 1-3 as the Renaissance city is very interesting as well.
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