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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29336 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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There's a reason that safe and dense housing only exists in expensive areas: it has to be expensive to keep the undesirables out.

Which ones? San Francisco is 40% white, 35% Asian, 5% black (a much lower proportion in the latter case than Paris, London and many other major European cities). It has extremely high median income. The reason it is a shithole has nothing to do with demographics, and everything to do with policy (regarding the homeless, mostly).

Enforce the law, and it’s entirely possible to have affordable, safe and dense housing. Inner cities (provided they’re safe, amenable and walkable) will always be expensive, but dense inner suburbs like in most Euro cities and NYC are totally feasible.

Which ones? San Francisco is 40% white, 35% Asian, 5% black (a much lower proportion in the latter case than Paris, London and many other major European cities). It has extremely high median income. The reason it is a shithole has nothing to do with demographics, and everything to do with policy (regarding the homeless, mostly).

It's a shithole precisely because of demographics.

Childless PMC whites in San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland vote for shithole policies because they're the shithole demographic. Once you get out to Bay Area suburbs that are full of Indians and Chinese, the shithole factor declines to nearly nothing.

Quite a few of the most zealous supervisors and school board members in SF have been Asian, iirc.

Back in the 1950s-80s 5-10% was often the tipping point for safety.

2 out of 3 for safe, affordable and dense is a best case scenario. You can have somewhere like San Francisco that manages to do worse than that and is overrun with petty crime despite high prices. I agree that enforcing the law would work but that's a hypothetical. If anything the voters have turned strongly against tough on crime policies compared to five years ago so I don't see any signs that it's about to change. In the world as it exists (in the US) if you want dense and safe housing you need to be ready to write a huge check.

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