For years, I've been reading about deals where the government forces real estate developers to sell a certain percentage of lower priced units. Somewhat similarly, the Obama Administration recently forced Westchester County outside of NYC to buy or build "affordable housing" for minorities:
Here's my question: who gets discount housing?
Clearly, it's supposed to go very heavily to blacks and Hispanics, but to which blacks and Hispanics? Whose friends and relatives get the nod?
Westchester County entered into a landmark desegregation agreement on Monday that would compel it to create hundreds of houses and apartments for moderate-income people in overwhelmingly white communities and aggressively market them to nonwhites in Westchester and New York City.
The agreement, if ratified by the county’s Board of Legislators, would settle a lawsuit filed by an antidiscrimination group and could become a template for increased scrutiny of local governments’ housing policies by the Obama administration.
“This is consistent with the president’s desire to see a fully integrated society,” said Ron Sims, the deputy secretary of housing and urban development, which helped broker the settlement along with the Justice Department. “Until now, we tended to lay dormant. This is historic, because we are going to hold people’s feet to the fire.”
The agreement calls for the county to spend more than $50 million of its own money, in addition to other funds, to build or acquire 750 homes or apartments, 630 of which must be provided in towns and villages where black residents constitute 3 percent or less of the population and Hispanic residents make up less than 7 percent. The 120 other spaces must meet different criteria for cost and ethnic concentration.
Here's my question: who gets discount housing?
Clearly, it's supposed to go very heavily to blacks and Hispanics, but to which blacks and Hispanics? Whose friends and relatives get the nod?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
if this initiative becomes widespread, it could lead to actual, real resistance to the forced multicultural agenda.
ReplyDeleteas long as you can live far apart from it, you can mostly pretend it barely exists. when the fedgov forces it onto you every day, not so much.
Actually, I'm glad.
ReplyDeleteI hope that this new policy is pushed as hard as school-bussing and is made universal and mandatory by federal diktat - to the point of being forced with armed national guardsmen, not shy of killing a peasant or two who had the temerity to resist.
My Reason: For years andyears now the upper classes, protected in their exclusive suburbs (no blacks need apply, of course), have forced 'diversity' down the throats of those Whites trapped in inner cities (oh!, those stupid knucle-dragging ethnic bigots!), without tastig their own medicine.
Think of the Boston 'bussing riots' and the snooty contempt heaped on the Boston Irish - and all the nasty names the Irish were called by their 'betters'.
Amen to what Jody said. Isn't Westchester (along with the Upper East Side) pretty much home base to the infamous "limousine liberals" phenomenon?
ReplyDeleteAmerica is through the looking glass when an 'anti-discrimination' group can go to court and force a local authority to use race as the basis for housing allocation.
ReplyDeleteThis will cause a crisis among Westchester SWPLs: stay and have bitter experience strip them of their delusional romanticism about blacks and hispanics; or sell up at a discount and flee to another all-white sanctuary where they can retain their blissful ignorance.
My heart bleeds.
Attacking middle-class whites is one thing, but it seems incredible that the Obama administration would seriously attack the white elites who got him elected by importing poor & criminally inclined NAMs into their neighbourhoods. The US isn't Venezuela; he needs their support.
ReplyDeleteSo, it does sound fishy. Are these underpriced homes going to go to elite/well-connected blacks and other NAM Obama cronies, to then rent or sell on at a profit, probably mostly to whites and Asians?
Or are they simply there to help upper-middle-class blacks get homes among the white elite? That would seem to be an issue close to Michelle & Barack's hearts! I suspect that is the case - "affordable" will mean "affordable to upper-middle-class blacks, no homies need apply".
So, no white race riots in the Hamptons. The revolution is postponed.
I made this point in another thread:
ReplyDeleteThe settlement calls for something like 600 or 700 NAM households in the entire county. The entire county has something like 350,000 households.
My prediction is that 2 or 3 NAM families, carefully chosen to be non-disruptive, will be moved into Scarsdale. The people of Scarsdale will congratulate themselves for their tolerance and diversity.
In a few years, the NAM families will move out at a big profit, their residences quietly snapped up by non-NAMs.
The bottom line is that places like Scarsdale are NOT about to see a destabilizing influx of NAMs.
Just my prediction.
I cannot imagine that the powers-that-be would be so stupid, or blinded by ideology (ok, same thing) as to build a 'mini-hood' up there and thus prove so many people's point. Even at that, I wonder how much this will cost in decreased property valuations ? No doubt, Westchester's Jewish community, being immune to accusations of racism, will act as a shield to derail this nonsense.
ReplyDeleteThe answer is Kofi Annan's son Kojo...
ReplyDeleteThe Roosevelt Island home is part of an estate of low-rent state-regulated housing. For years, the Annans saved considerable sums by occupying an apartment meant to help financially strapped low- to moderate-income New York families.
Simon is exactly right. Subsidized housing frequently benefits well-connected, upper-middle class blacks.
Steve -
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of racial preferences, in the healthcare bill, it mandates preferences for Blacks when applying for medical schools.
(My comment provides some color on Westchester county's geography, but doesn't address Steve's question--who, exactly, gets the subsidized housing prize?)
ReplyDeleteThis agreement is just the nose of the camel poking into the tent: 750 units isn't that many for the northern 2/3s of the county (see the graphic associated with the NYT article).
Being pretty familiar with Westchester County, I'd say the "SWPLs getting theirs" comments are probably off base. It's a matter of detail: who lives where, exactly.
First, southern Westchester abuts the Bronx, and nobody would mistake Yonkers or Pelham for "one of America's wealthiest suburbs."
Second, Westchester is defined by its two Metro-North commuter rail lines. The Hudson Line runs along the river (surprise), and the Harlem line cuts through the county's middle: Mt. Vernon - White Plains - Somers.
Aside from the built-up, close-in towns around Scarsdale, the tony, landscaped Westchester of popular imagination is to the north of the narrow waist (by Mt. Pleasant, on the NYT map). In these areas, bus service is poor to nonexistent. That means that unless you live within walking distance of one of Metro-North's stations, a reliable car is a necessity. (Even then, the train will get you to NYC, but not to the supermarket or Target.)
Needless to say, the homes of northern Westchester's elites aren't clustered around train stations.
In practice, then, it will be the lesser liberals--the ones whose only experience with limousines is prom night and wedding day--who will be living next to subsidized housing.
The long-term issue is what this development will mean for northern Westchester's towns' crown jewels: their public schools. All schools have to manage a certain amount of deliquency, antisocial behavior, parental indifference, etc.--it's not as if such students are unknown at the high end of the socioeconomic scale. The question is whether a tipping point will be reached, where the elites put their kids in tony private schools. Or move to towns off the Metro North lines, or north to Putnam county.
In sum, this agreement very much fits the long-established pattern.
I agree with both Jody and Simon. Obama must be delusional with power if this is actually an upper/upper middle class area of white people. He must know they'll turn on him, but maybe not, or maybe he thinks he is invincible. I just wonder if this is a more middle class area. The mayor of the city where I grew up boasted of putting section 8 housing in the very much middle middle class area I grew up in. It was already 50% or less white, but he acted like he did some big integration thing. Yet there was NO WAY integration was going to occur near his very well off neighborhood. No, it remained overwhelmingly white.
ReplyDeleteBut like Jody said, if this really does become widespread and people have to live with this every day in every way, it will definitely engender resistance. Go to the grocery store? It's there, stealing, cutting in line, kids screaming and running every where. Come home? It's there, the thumping music, the domestic fights, the trash on the lawn. No haven. I just recently moved to a neighborhood that, while itself is nice, borders some small, less nice areas. So, my residence is quiet, but grocery store trips definitely have that "flavor" that reminds me of what I had to grow up with, the crude sexual comments, the vaguely threatening attitudes, etc.). Just prior to now I had lived in a very white/Asian area, and I had repressed (but not forgotten) what that flavor was like.
The quote's pretty ambiguous, and I don't know much about these sorts of schemes; does this mean they're selling cheap houses in expensive neighborhoods to "qualified" (poor) buyers? How does that work? How are these people going to afford property taxes? So it's a rental scheme then? So how are the landlords going to afford property taxes? Oh wait, I just heard a knock at the door...
ReplyDeleteI can't say this bothers me. If it's handled at the federal level, sounds like the south is going to have a seat every time the music stops, for the foreseeable future (if the "attention" of the fedgov isn't fairly distributed, I think a lawsuit would be in order); good, about time the SWPLs started eating what they cook. I think this is going to give some anti-elitist lawyers (assuming such critters exist) a lot of action in places like LA and NYC.
~Svigor
Careful guys. Where in Westchester County? In areas that densely populated no county is homogeneous. New York County (Manhattan) has the Upper East Side and Harlem. Bronx County has the South Bronx and Riverdale.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't be too surprised if he's screwing some middle-class neighborhood that has the bad luck to be in a county with a rich neighborhood...and then he can say, 'look, I got minorities into Westchester County!'. The rich rarely, if ever, suffer, except in rare cases of total uprising like the French Revolution.
sure the obama administration forced westchester to desegregate. but the article says that westchester applied for gov't grants and lied about their effort to use those grants for their intended purpose: desegregation. if westchester didn't want gov't imposed desegregation they sure as hell shouldn't have applied for gov't money to do it.
ReplyDeleteso at this point, who cares who gets that housing? the ppl living there deserve whatever residents they get.
If the units are anything like the ones they built in my sleepy, northwest Jersey town, the occupants will not need to be upper middle class. Any part of middle class should be good enough to afford the affordable.
ReplyDeleteWhat's a tad mind boggling to me (besides how accurate Sailer was regarding Obama's social agenda; I mean, it looks like there has been little to no change in him since he wrote "Dreams of my adulterous father".) is the chimerical belief by certain folks in places of influence that the true desire of people of different races is to live together. They appear to think that the self segregation chosen by most people is not truly representative of their wishes. Yet the cafeteria in my integrated high school looks exactly the same today as it did in the 70s at lunchtime - White sections, Black sections and a few White/Asian tables. The few blacks who sit with whites are called Wiggers by their African American schoolmates.
I thought it would have evolved differently, but the fact is, it didn't.
And as someone said, if they push this one agressively, there might just be a fairly significant groundswell of oppostion; from both sides is even possible.
Great. Now instead of respecting whatever hardworking black and hispanic residents already live in those wealthy areas, people will just wonder if they're the "affordable housing" bunch. Good job, communists.
ReplyDeleteAffordable housing brings criminals into otherwise safe neighborhoods. Somewhere in Westchester County today there are unsuspecting children who will be raped, teenagers who will be killed, and elderly who will end up being robbed and savagely beaten to within an inch of their lives because of this agreement. To the signs put up at the county line that advertise the local chapters of Moose, BPO Elks, Rotary, and the Presbyterian Church, will be added MS13, Surenos, Bloods, and Crips (written in graffiti, of course).
ReplyDeleteThe real reason for this kind of forced integration is dollars and cents. Or as your favorite local black politician is fond of saying: revinooo. The professional white class can be fleeced for taxes to pay for the poor browns, while they live their chaotic, violent, intoxicated, purposeless lives. The public schools built and maintained for local children will simply be handed over to the hoody rat population. And the emergency rooms will be crammed with Mexicans waiting for free organ transplants and Tamiflu shots. This is a huge transfer of wealth from the people who built these pleasant, erstwhile livable communities to vagrant third world freeloaders.
The Minority Occupied Government wants to outlaw white flight, it would seem, by making no place safe to run to.
The details of this will be quite interesting. Some parts of Westchester county is big homes of the rich, other parts are a lot more working class. I spent a day or two in New Rochelle (famous as the home of Dick and Laura Petrie in "The Dick Van Dyke Show") and it seemed to be about as Mexican as Santa Ana, CA. There is an entertainment complex there called "New Roc City" which had a riot by the diversity a few years ago.
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing there are other working class towns which are still mostly white and that is where this housing will be built.
"elite/well-connected blacks"
ReplyDelete"upper-middle-class blacks"
How many of these are there to go around?
As Jody says, the danger is this initiative's becoming widespread. Not because it could lead to revolution, but because it would lead only to destruction - property values collapsing, more thefts, more rapes, more noise and danger, a significantly lower standard of living, increased misery. After all, what "revolution" occurred in response to bussing, quotas, crime waves, etc.? None.
Tom Regan's quote is perfect: "America is through the looking glass when an 'anti-discrimination' group can go to court and force a local authority to use race as the basis for housing allocation."
What I want to know is: who ARE these "anti-discrimination" groups? Who are their members? Probably the usual suspects plus some delusional Christian* front people, but it would be good to investigate these groups and find out. Why? To bring pressure to bear against their individual members in terms of protests.
America is truly long gone when racial totalitarianism is openly and brazenly proclaimed by the central government. It will to "hold [white] people's feet to the fire" to MAKE them live around low-income crime-prone proles, their freedom and property be damned. I'm going to get in trouble with Komment Kontrol for saying this, but it is a fact that when America was strong any politician who displayed such psychopathological arrogance would be in some danger of finding himself hauled out of bed at night by a group of angry men. Now there's no danger because today's men prefer sitting on the couch and watching Vick on TV.
Wasn't it Gore Vidal who said whites' political ideal is "keep taxes down and blacks out"? Well, what's wrong with this? Everything, according to evil President Paper Bag. He wants taxes up and blacks in.
* Here's a related link by KMac:
http://tiny.cc/b9XLZ
Steve,
ReplyDeleteAssuming that they aren't going to use this as a means to bring in fellow elitists of color with a discount paid by everyone else, I like the idea for the reasons others have listed above.
Where I want to see the pilot program done first is in the area where the editors of the Wall Street Journal reside. Some diversity outside of the ethnic restaurants would serve them well. Hell, I even know which favored group I want sent there, illegal aliens from Latin America.
Just think of all the joys of diversity they could experience- corn growing in the front yard, chickens scratching around, cars parked in the front yards, all night loud parties that they would enjoy attending, etc.
Anyone who has read Taylor Caldwell's The Devil's Advocate knows how this would work out.
I like it! :D
If insider minorities get the housing, is that good or bad from the point of view of the people already living in these areas? I mean are the well-connected more or less likely to be good citizens with reasonable manners?
ReplyDeleteSteve--all housing is affordable its just a matter of who is doing the affording! What I can afford and Bill Gates can afford are very differnt things. Lets not contribute to the continuing debasement of language. Affordable is code for various and sundry schemes to subsidize housing for various groups. Again--everything is affordable!
ReplyDeleteI can't even guess at the Constitutional basis for this sort of power or how you would defend it in court
ReplyDelete“This is consistent with the president’s desire to see a fully integrated society,”
ReplyDeletei smell busing again
“This is consistent with the president’s desire to see a fully integrated society,” said Ron Sims
ReplyDeletesilly question but who mandated this? and where is it in law or the constitution that this is a goal of our government... i know, silly question.
I used to be a public social worker (San Franciso 1969). As it happened I tended to get the worst cases. Worst meaning least socially desireable not least enterprising. Most of these worst of the worst were of course black. I had a woman who had a history of burning down her place of residence. The Welfare Department would then reimburse her for the price of her lost furniture. By the time I got her on my caseload she had organized a whole building Housing Authority building. They all emptied their apartments to some place safe and then torched the building.
ReplyDeleteShe was a natural leader.
She was also irrate that the Housing Authority was going to move her into an all black building. She explained to me that she much preferred white neighbors becausee they were so much better behaved.
This attitude was common. Poor people, especially poor black people didn't want to live near people like themselves.
This has been going on for decades in New Jersey, as a result of the State Supreme Court’s Mount Laurel I and Mount Laurel II decisions. If you want to see how these efforts play out, NJ might be a good place to start. Although I suspect that the towns fight the decisions for as long as they can, bargain down (say, an order for 500 affordable units becomes 200), or manage to locate the affordable units on the other side of town, away from the rich people.
ReplyDeleteI live in one of the targeted areas. They've been trying to get us to zone for "affordable" housing for years.
ReplyDeleteHere's my post on the situation:
http://meep.livejournal.com/1828559.html
Maybe it's intended as a cash-in for the well-connected, as Steve intimates.
I do know it could be a cash-in for the developers, who are in a hard time right now.
The people who pushed this through were no doubt planning how to scam it up on the other side of the settlement.
ReplyDeleteNow white neighbors will be even more expensive than they already are.
ReplyDeleteThis has been a hot topic lately in Chicago when it was discovered that many of the affordable units were bought by the upper-end of the "affordable" income scale only to be quickly flipped for a profit.
ReplyDeleteSee here for one representative article (there are more if you search the "Sun-Times"):
http://www.suntimes.com/news/cityhall/1578118,CST-NWS-daley17.article
While Westchester has a lot of wealthy liberal areas and Obama wone it by a large margin, I know Obama is not stupid. The blacks and Hispanics will probably be moved into more middle class areas that voted against him. If Obama is stupid enough to screw his own voters, that's great, but unfortunately I don't see it happening.
ReplyDeleteIn the comments section, one woman who described herself as black and college educated said she and her husband were looking for a house, but hadn't managed to save $50K for a down payment. She thought it was great news that affordable houses were going to be available for people like herself. It was pathetic on so many levels I don't know where to start. But I'll try. First, if you and your husband are college educated, and working, and you still can't manage to save $50K, it's time to get the heck out of NYC. Second, if you can't, you have no business buying an expensive home in the burbs. Third, why should someone else have to pay taxes to pay for your expensive home in the burbs. Fourth, since when was affordable housing supposed to benefit college educated people buying pricey homes in the burbs. Pathetic.
ReplyDelete"one woman who described herself as black and college educated said she and her husband were looking for a house, but hadn't managed to save $50K for a down payment."
ReplyDeleteThat's disgusting. Why do people EXPECT us to pay for their housing? Shez beez gettin' hers, I guess. Off the backs of whitey. I'm single, been working for six years, and have managed to save $50,000+. They have two incomes (NYC ones) and can't do it on their own? I have to! They either haven't been working long enough or they can't manage their money. Chief Seattle is right; they shouldn't have a house in the burbs right now.
Natural Rights be Damned!
ReplyDeleteI for one am tired of this ****. Humans learned 200 years ago what rights can rationally be assigned to humans (natural/negative rights). ANYTHING else is immoral, and is a form of tyranny. Period.
But why does no one else believe this?
1) Westchester will probably try to comply by building one-bedroom units for seniors/disabled. No crime, no impact on the public schools. If the units are sold, rather than rented, they will eventually end up being purchased by whites, even if they are initially sold to minorities.
ReplyDelete2) In this day and age, the government CANNOT earmark all of the units for blacks. They can rig the results for "diversity", but they are going to have to let qualifying whites have a reasonably proportionate share of the units.
3) I was involved with a similar program in CA in the late 80s. My guess, assuming the units are a mix of 1, 2, and 3 bedrooms: a year-and-a-half before the units will be ready for occupancy, the housing authority will send a letter to people already on a government housing program informing them that they can return an enclosed postcard to get on an information list for a lottery. A few months later, they will send out letters inviting people to fill out an enclosed application with a check for $25 which will be cashed ONLY if they win the lottery and pass a credit check/housing reference check. Months later, they will send out the results of the lottery -- thin envelopes to the losers, thicker envelopes to the winners, with instructions that they have X number of days to turn in further paperwork to be assigned housing. A month or two later, they will send out letters telling some of the winners who asked for 3 bedrooms that they are being offered a 2 bedroom, and winners who asked for a 2 bedroom will be offered a 1 bedroom. They will also inform people that HUD housing vouchers will NOT be allowed to piggyback on top of the already reduced rents. This means that if you are chosen by the lottery and accept, you will be moving into nicer quarters, but will probably experience a substantial increase in rent.
Note that the process for acquiring one of these apartments will tend to eliminate people who travel a great deal, move around a great deal, people who don't have checking accounts, people who can't afford a moving van, people who can't afford moderate level move-in costs, people who are too lazy or disorganized to fill out repeated rounds of paperwork and mail it in by a stated deadline, people who KNEW that their rental references would be lousy, etc. Finally, I can't believe that the lottery will be run honestly, especially in New York.
I just remembered, the paperwork sent out to people who "won" the lottery was very confusing. The "minimum income required" formula ALWAYS produced a number that was higher than the "maximum income allowed." No doubt a lot of people failed to send in the paperwork when they realized that they didn't qualify. But if you called the office, and actually got through (which could take hours of repetitive dialing) you would be told that the "formulas" were just a "guideline." The people administering the program could let in people above the maximum or under the minimum at their discretion.
4) Bottom line: no riff-raff will be moving into Chappaqua, and the Clintons can rest easy. These units are going to handpicked people, many of whom will have insider connections.
Let's see how the story develops. I suspect this is more showy and stylized to let off some steam from the base than "Obama as prisoner of his own mythology" popularity suicide.
ReplyDeleteSo far Obama seems to me to have a tendency to misstep from the mainstream in the direction of his ideology when he's cocky, but that he responds quickly to negative feedback and is quick to retreat back to the popular, politically safe white middle class social aesthetics middle ground -and that he does it in time to save himself.
There are what, 700 units? How many "connected" Black/Hispanic folks are there that are upper income that will move there? My guess, not a lot, and this is a patronage move to put a LOT of low-income Blacks and Hispanics in Westchester.
ReplyDeleteNow, these folks are not going to just "stay" in one area ... someone always has a car, and profiling being forbidden, there's not much police can do but take reports.
Obama's problem is he's operating on Chicago rules. People could always move away to the suburbs. People can't move away from the US. And now with a deep recession and credit to only, Bill Gates essentially, no one is moving anywhere. Anytime. Which means people are stuck, with inner-city slum Section 8 residents, moved into a middle/working class area and moving inevitably to fat, easy targets where there's real money.
This will spread nationwide, of course. Making people even MORE angry. Machiavelli advised to kill enemies rather than making them poor. Obama proposes, essentially, by reducing property values, to do the latter rather than the former, with an extra helping of daily humiliation.
In NJ, towns can pay other towns to meet the Mt Laurel requirements. Age-restricted housing and group homes for the developementally disabled also meet requirements.
ReplyDeleteMt. Laurel used to hit towns every ten years to exact new low-income units, even if there had not been any development. Mt. Laurel has counted land between the parkway lanes as developable.
There has been a recent shift away from the old requirements, a rebellion, but I don't think it will ever go away.
I'm single, been working for six years, and have managed to save $50,000+. They have two incomes (NYC ones) and can't do it on their own? I have to!
ReplyDeleteBn
Better put that money into something the Feds can't find/track/touch. The gov't is going to to expand their search for people who are making or God forbid, saving money. Foreign currency, silver, gold and especially brass and lead are going to be the mediums of exchange.
I'd spend that 50K on some acerage in a rural, white area. Good Luck.
testing99:
ReplyDelete"There are what, 700 units? How many "connected" Black/Hispanic folks are there that are upper income that will move there? My guess, not a lot..."
I'm sure there are more than 700 upper-middle-class Barack & Michelle type black families in New York. Hospital admistrators, AA lawyers, even Nigerian politicians' sons...
The blacks I know are no good at money management.
ReplyDeleteOne example: I always thought that the black attorney husband/county social worker supervisor wife couple I know must have been doing very well: He drives a Benz, she a Lexus; They bought a new house about 8 years ago and had the kitchen gutted and remodeled 5 years later (oak cabinets, Corian countertops and black appliances out ... maple cabinets, granite countertops and stainless restaurant grade appliances in); And they take a lot of trips.
Figuring that they must have taken a big hit in the last year in the stock market like I did, so we would be able to commiserate about that, I brought up the subject. He told me that they did not have any investments -- that they were underwater on their house (after taking out a couple of home equity loans during the bubble), owed on their cars and had a lot of credit card debt. Then he made a testy remark about how "it must be nice" that I have have enough money to worry about a stock portfolio. This is a couple in their 40s.
What, it's not first come first served? I'm shocked, shocked!
ReplyDeletePer above. If half of Steve's writing about the racial character of mortgage defaults is true, the black middle class has been totally screwed by affirmative action lending--including and especially the ones who have worked hard and declined to turn their homes into ATMs.
ReplyDeleteWhy? I've lived in middle-class minority majority neighborhoods, including Brooklyn and parts of Long Island, for 30 years--next to whites and the 70 percent of blacks who qualified for mortgages before affirmative action lending became the rule. In recent years, the irresponsible borrowers have moved in next door, defaulted on their loans, and, like the New York Times' economics writer, are sitting there waiting for the eviction notice to drop on them. They're not maintaining their building now, and when they're gone, those buildings are going to be bought by speculators and flipped into rental units, with Section 8 being the landlord's best friend. Couple this with Obama's new funding initiative for subsidized rental housing, and you have the perfect recipe for total melt down of integrated /gentrified neighborhoods nationwide. Only this time around, we're going to have black flight, not just white flight.
Steve did you catch the article today in the NY Times on Rahm Emanuel?
ReplyDeleteOne part that was interesting was the following :
"But when a New York Times Magazine profile of Ms. Jarrett last month explored the old scratchiness, White House officials said the normally calm Mr. Obama erupted with anger. An informal edict went out: no more cooperating with staff profiles. As a result, Mr. Emanuel declined a formal interview for this article."
What do you think from that Jarrett profile really got to Obama?
"Bolt again! 9.58 World record in Berlin!"
ReplyDeletehttp://berlin.iaaf.org/news/kind=100/newsid=53047.html
This one's for you Steve.
And to annoy the more, um, "nationalist" types among your readers that seem to get upset anytime certain kinds of athletics and athletes are mentioned here.
I think Sabril and Amac said about 95% of what needed to be said, i.e. we're talking about 700 units in a county with 350,000 households; and the really wealthy in the northern part of the county won't be affected. The notion that this settlement is going to spark a counterrevolution is just wishful thinking. Incidentally, Westchester County is already 13.4% black and 15.7% hispanic.
ReplyDeleteA few more points to address comments in the thread.
According to the settlement agreement Steve linked to, 50% of the total units have to be low-price rentals. Most of the remainder have to be low-cost units for sale. Only 25% of the total can be for senior citizens. So the county cannot satisfy its obligations by selling only to upper-class blacks and hispanics, or by building housing for seniors.
Under the settlement, the county has to pay the federal government $30 million. The county also has to pay $2.5 million to the pressure group that brought the original action, the Anti-Discrimination Center of Metro New York, Inc. The Center brought the action under the False Claims Act on the theory that the county was lying when it said it was complying with the various federal fair housing statutes and regulations. The Center's success will inspire similar pressure groups elsewhere.
In Saturday's WSJ: The New American Dream: Renting
ReplyDeleteBy Thomas J. Sugrue
"It's time to accept that home ownership is not a realistic goal for many people and to curtail the enormous government programs fueling this ambition."
"If insider minorities get the housing, is that good or bad from the point of view of the people already living in these areas?"
ReplyDeleteDefinitely bad. "Reversion to the mean" predicts that most of the kids of socially successful blacks will be noticeably less successful. There is empirical evidence for this: the children of blacks with high educational attainment tend to display very low SAT scores. And the children of very successful blacks often become criminals (sometimes comically, as when the daughters of both Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and (later) Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard Parks ended up in jail).
To bring "worthy" blacks into the neighborhood is (statistically) to bring their unworthy kids in as well, and the kids will pick fights, take and sell drugs at school, burglarize their neighbors' houses, and so forth. If you really want to see your neighbor's house surrounded by cop cars at 2AM, just get yourself a "successful" black neighbor.
Reversion to the mean is a disaster for successful blacks because it means they are disappointed in their children even more often than successful whites.
Reversion to the mean is also a disaster for American liberals, who erroneously think that if they put a few successful blacks into nice neighborhoods or good schools or professional jobs, those blacks will found persistent dynasties of successful blacks. That isn't gonna happen.
i believe pelham is part of westchester county, and pelham is dumpy. so no effect on neighbors. perhaps nothing changes by this other than a nice headline for sims.
ReplyDelete"Incidentally, Westchester County is already 13.4% black and 15.7% hispanic."
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's important to note that Westchester County stretches south to the border of the Bronx, and it includes Yonkers, which is a pretty ghetto city. So it does have its more undesirable areas.
My town counsel talks about building "affordable" housing for the "disadvantged" all the time.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that there is never enough money for the projects. It winds up turning into a Sopranos style real estate scam.
It also seems that few NAMs want to live in all white neighborhoods. "Ghettto" pride seems to be the norm among NAMs, especially among younger minorities.
I am only a few years out of high school and I recall many whites from upscale neighborhoods bragging about being born and raised in "the projects."
NAMs who lived in our neighborhood complained about their parents forcing them to move and give up thier beloved slums.
I think it is a policy doomed to fail.
Re: Bolt
ReplyDeleteAnd to annoy the more, um, "nationalist" types among your readers that seem to get upset anytime certain kinds of athletics and athletes are mentioned here.
And the actual point of your bare faced ethnic triumphalism is what exactly?
Bolt is doped up to his ears. Whenever a German anti-doping official tried to have him checked out in the Caribbean, Bolt was forewarned by the local authorities or the local non-existent anti-doping authority had a lame excuse about jurisdiction. Bolt is just a pharmacy on legs, just like Johnson was.
ReplyDeleteI am always supportive of personal meritocracy when resulting from individual competition on a level playing field.
ReplyDeleteMay we assume there were no lead weights tied around the white competitors' legs to achieve equality of results?
May we assume there was no "historical black disadvantage" 0.1 second handicap subtracted from Mr. Bolt's time?
May we assume that Mr. Bolt did not run downhill while the white competitors ran uphill to "address historical discrimination in the workplace"?
If not, them Mr. Bolt has my heartfelt congratulations on being a man and standing on his own two legs!
And were I there, I would certainly have cheered him, as (I am sure) all the white Germans did. You see, white folks respect individual accomplishment as black folks used to.
As Booker T. Washingon and WEB DuBois used to say, [decent, honest, desrving] black folks aren't looking for handouts or anything they do not personally earn, they just want to be treated equally, and if they can't keep up, too bad.
I tried to leave this question a couple days ago and it never appeared....
ReplyDeleteWhat's a good source on the Web wherein one may find the earliest signs of white flight from Westchester?
Well my gosh, no one seemed to have a problem with rent control that took place in NYC for decades.
ReplyDeletenosum Bolt is doped up to his ears... just a pharmacy on legs, just like Johnson was.
ReplyDeleteThe other one who is doped-up out of her mind is that chick who beeyotch-slapped Gina Carano the other night.
To quote Mike Myers: It's a man, baby!
Dara Torres ain't got a thing on her.
Cyborg, indeed.
donna said
ReplyDelete"no one seemed to have a problem with rent control that took place in NYC for decades"
I believe the late Milton Friedman did and he was correct. Many libertarians today have a problem with it too.
I would love to live in Larchmont, Chappaqua, Scarsdale etc, but I can't afford to so I don't. Its that simple. This is not about racism. You live where you can afford to live. If you are black or hispanic and you can afford to live in Chappaqua, be my guest. Where is my low income housing? Oh that's right, I'm the wrong color. I have to fend for myself.
ReplyDelete