DC is 60% black!?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

And white people are moving back into the city.

Perhaps its just desegregation slowly taking place.

You mean gentrification? If so... desegregation? Hah! Gentrification tends to push out the people who lived in the area before the Yuppies came; maybe the overall numbers might look desegregated, but as soon as you look at more detailed statistics...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

And gentrification isn't a bad thing.

I would dispute that

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Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Things really don't work like that. If they did, I wouldn't have as much a problem with it.
Pushing the problem further out away from the centre of a city doesn't help solve it at all.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Some photos of the Bronx...

Here

Some interesting stuff Here as well

To say that public housing has been done badly in the U.S is an understatement of epic proportions...

For comparison this is a photo of what is (IMO) the very worst piece of public housing ever built in the U.K, the Hulme Crescents in Manchester (since demolished).



That there seems to be literally thousands of pubic housing projects in the U.S worse (far, far worse) than that is pretty depressing...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I dunno, this one reminds me of home.

Yeah, but that's more a case of urban decay that anything else; the *really* bad parts of the Bronx are The Projects

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Racism.

Really. I think that had a role to play.

Probably true up to a point

[Filuwaúrdjan]

An image of one of the Robert Taylor ghettoes:



One project, described as a "family site"

Good Lord... people lived in those things? Makes Drumchapel look like paradise...

I have a new theory:

Maybe the planners stood a brick up vertically, drilled a few holes in it, did the same with other bricks, plonked them all together, drank too much and decided that they looked like lovely housing?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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

So an ironic congratulations to U.S City Planners then?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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

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

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This is news?

It isn't... I just think it's odd that there's such a clear division as if someone had drawn a line from one corner to the other.