DC is 60% black!?

[minionofmidas]

Phil can be excused for thinking it was higher.
This is because Goldie (not Bob, the other one.) is right about one thing - the Black proportion of the city's population has been falling.

[minionofmidas]

PG's now has a higher Black percentage than D.C.
Same#s true in the Atlanta area btw. (DeKalb and Clayton have higher Black percentages than Fulton.)

[minionofmidas]

Yes, suburban elitists will never understand that most people who live in the cities like it there and don't want to move to the nightmarish pit of hell that is suburbia.

False.  Might be true for the soft hipsters and elite.  My parents grew up in the projects and they despised it.   I know a lot of people who still do and they hate it as well.  City living is only better if you can afford its benefits.

Dude, you have it exactly right.  I know several people who grew up in bad sections of the Bronx, and they absolutely despise it.  Once they get out, they are absolutely determined to NEVER go back.  Most don't even like to visit it, don't want to be reminded of it.  Nobody who really lived in some of those neighborhoods would ever make light of it, or say that anybody in their right mind would actually choose it.  They wouldn't.

Notice that these are the people who have moved out, not the people still living there.
Just a thought.

[minionofmidas]

Some photos of the Bronx...

Here

Some interesting stuff Here as well

I dunno, this one reminds me of home.

[minionofmidas]

Public housing is one of the worst failures of the mid-century liberal philosophy.  There are other outgrowths of that same philosophy, such as busing, that failed just as badly.  They are all intertwined in one big poison ball, and we need to see how they all intersect and have put us on the road to hell.

The idea of public housing isn't a bad one IMO; government (local or national) providing decent quality housing for people who can't afford it from private providers.
As an example this is an old photo of a (then) new council estate next to the housing it replaced:



And there's nothing to say that government built housing can't look nice either:



The problems start with bad and/or insane planners (especially when there's a new or newish fad around, like tower blocks) and shoddy construction due to a desire to get them built as fast as possible and at the lowest cost possible.
I'm not sure what drives people to design the sort of **** seen in the Projects in and around New York... sadists perhaps?

Racism.

Really. I think that had a role to play.

[minionofmidas]

True...(although I was thinking mostly of 70's architecture.) Not to mention that class prejudice can be quite as bad as racial one...really it's one and the same. The fundamental message of privileged group x-ism is "these are not really people like us. We need not care what happens to them."

But I'm not claiming that's the only reason, only that it plays a role in shaping attitudes towards public housing architecture.
God. Architects. Don't get me started on architects. Anyone who values the aesthetic pleasure of a model higher than the opinions of people who'll actually have to live in or work in or, in the cases of skyscrapers, live or work near them is a piece of human buttwipe. (stops ranting)

[minionofmidas]

True...(although I was thinking mostly of 70's architecture.) Not to mention that class prejudice can be quite as bad as racial one...really it's one and the same. The fundamental message of privileged group x-ism is "these are not really people like us. We need not care what happens to them."

But I'm not claiming that's the only reason, only that it plays a role in shaping attitudes towards public housing architecture.
God. Architects. Don't get me started on architects. Anyone who values the aesthetic pleasure of a model higher than the opinions of people who'll actually have to live in or work in or, in the cases of skyscrapers, live or work near them is a piece of human buttwipe. (stops ranting)

Much as I hate public housing, I don't really agree that there was malice behind the design of it.  It was really more stupidity than malice in my opinion.

If the motive was malice, it would have been easier to simply do nothing about housing.  We spent billions of dollars on "slum clearance" and built new housing in its place that was supposed to solve the slum problem, but instead created worse slums than existed before. 

But the intentions were good, in my opinion.  Public housing was made dense so that it could accomodate as many needy people as possible.  These nightmarish hellhole projects are actually a good example of runaway idealism, untempered by any type of realistic look at problems.  The thought was that slums were a building/construction problem, and that new buildings that were well-maintained would solve the problem.  This thinking didn't take into account the fact that it was the tenants themselves who were destroying the buildings, shooting out windows, urinating in the elevators, etc.  These projects were also a product of failed urban planning notions that gained popularity starting in the 1930s that failed to take into account the way people really live.

So while I am hostile to public housing, the disaster we created was more a product of unrealistic idealism, and a certain amount of presumptuousness and ignorance, rather than malice toward the poor, in my opinion.  People who really hate the poor don't advocate spending billions of dollars to house them.

You're living in a democracy, and one with a bureaucratic apparatus at that. That means that people of very different persuasions are involved in shaping decisions. The people who sit on the planning comittees that decide which architect to use are not the same people who forced the decision to "do something" through congress.

Then, it should be noted that the problem was in no small part a construction/maintenance problem, and that a modern "project" is tangibly better than a 19th century slum. Don't believe me? Look at the cholera rates.

I'm not saying that your point is entirely ludicrous, not at all - just that it needs a fair bit of tempering to make it into a valid one.

[minionofmidas]

The architecture used in public housing was designed for cost-effectiveness.  The goal was to house as many people as possible, and even in the liberal 1960s, planners knew that there were limits to what the public would fund.

Yeah, exactly. So what were they so f'cking surprised about if they knew they weren't doing enough? After all, 19th century slums had been built for cost-effectiveness too, so they should've known what they were creating.

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Actually, it would have required a higher level of investment...just over a longer period of time, in a more localized manner, and with a smaller government involvement quota.

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Well, and obviously both sides had a point... you can't tear down the slums and not offer anybody who lived there a place to go, can you? Well, you can, if you're a brutal military dictatorship and are perfectly ready to gun them down at any sign of further trouble.
But of course, there's no reason why dysfunctional people should behave differently in one sort of cost-effective nightmare than in another one.

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Actually, wasn't the 1960s. Take a look at US unemployment rates for the 50s, compared to Europe. But yeah, sure, least-effort survival strategies. Perfectly sensible, from a "business science" point of view, as soon as you give up all hope of rising out of poverty through hard work, btw.

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The funny thing is...while all that is true, probably at no point was a majority of the people living there like that.

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Word.

[minionofmidas]

Horrible places.
And Le Corbusier is a good example for the sort of archtiect I was cursing above.

[minionofmidas]

Those remind me of some of the old soviet style housing. If I had to live in one of those I'd take myself to the top and free fall my way down. Yuck what horrible places.

Very few of East Germany's Soviet style monster blocks look anything like that bad. Although some do.

[minionofmidas]

Washington, DC is geographically restricted, so most of the actual "city" is in Maryland and Virginia.  Only the inner city is DC proper.  If you took inner city Philadelphia, Chicago, or Detroit, and made them their own cities, they would also be predominantly black.

Good point. Going slightly off topic I noticed this the other day

This is news?

[minionofmidas]

Just for fun, compare and contrast to where I live now

Quite a contrast
Be careful; that site is addictive...

Al, check my town out.

If you look on the left center of the map and see a street that says W. Nosleda.. I live about where the "W" is on that map.

Not far from the hood I see... Good for you.