What were they clapping about?” asked Shirley Hightower, a former president of the tenants’ association who picketed the demolition. “Clapping for a demolition? You’ve had generations behind generations behind generations living in this public housing. This is not a time for celebration.What this quote seems to imply is that it's a good thing that multiple generations of families lived in absolute poverty. I think about this more along the lines of Russ Roberts, who says the best way to understand wealth and poverty is longitudinally (how wealthy we are relative to our parents). In my mind, multiple generations living in the projects is a sign of their failure, not success. It's supposed to be an anti-poverty program, yet the end result is that poor people are staying in poverty. Doesn't sound to me like a program that is working as intended.
Ms. Glover does not blame the social engineers of the 1930s for creating housing projects. Their solution worked during the New Deal, she said, but collapsed as public housing became more racially segregated and attracted drug crime.
As previously mentioned, I would love to see the statistics measuring the success (people leaving projects to live in non-gov't subsidized housing and becoming part of the middle class) of projects pre segregation and drugs. Given the time frame we are talking about, I doubt there was ever a real time that projects weren't pretty segregated. I wouldn't doubt that drugs played a large part in the social collapse that took place. In general, I am highly skeptical of the projects having a truly positive effect on people moving out of poverty at any point in their existence.
The real winners, Ms. Beaty said, are business developers who make fortunes once the projects are torn down and the neighborhoods gentrify. For years, wealthier Atlantans, frustrated by long commutes, have been moving closer to their jobs downtown and, critics say, displacing poorer residents to outlying suburbs.This is by far the most amusing of the quotes and it reveals an absurd kind of logic. When whites/wealthier people moved to the suburbs it was seen as abandoning poor people in the city. Now that they are moving closer to the city, they are displacing poor people. I don't know what would be an "acceptable" place for wealthy people to live in relation to poor people.
My point is this; neighborhoods change. Property becomes more or less valuable based on any number of factors. Maybe there's a new Metro line being installed. Maybe entrepreneurs open new businesses that attract wealthier people, which raises rents. Maybe there is no way to know. This is how the housing market works. Neighborhoods go through ups and downs. More valuable property becomes more expensive, but that value is subjective and changes over time based on factors that few, if any, people are smart enough to understand. (Sidenote: while this person seems to very much dislike housing developers, who does she think builds the housing that essentially everyone lives in, wealthy and poor? would she like them less if they made less money? Because I may have heard about a few small things going on in the housing market lately.)
For the record, being able to move is a sign of how wealthy and free we are as a country (poor people included). Like I said earlier, it's a demonstration of their failure that multiple generations of families stayed in the same projects. As long as people's land is not being taken from them and they are being treated equitably under the law, there is no sweeping value judgement to be made on the morality of people making decisions about where they'd like to live. But for that statement to be true, people must actually have a choice and not be condemned to segregation in housing projects. I applaud ATL for moving to a decentralized voucher system and hope that my home town does the same.
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