Posted on 08/02/2012 5:28:05 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Roll back the clock to 1980 and Greater Houston looks quite a bit different.Some of the tall buildings, meandering toll roads and shiny professional sports venues aren't there, of course, but of more significance is the absence of many places that Houstonians now call home.
As the metro area's population doubled over the past three decades, extensive developments and master-planned communities popped up or expanded to serve those with the means to buy spanking new homes on the suburban fringe. As for those of little means - many of them immigrants, legal and otherwise - they increasingly crowded into older, low-income neighborhoods abandoned by residents who lost jobs or found better housing elsewhere.
The result, according to a new study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center, is a dubious honor: Houston leads the way among the nation's 10 largest metropolitan areas when it comes to affluent folks living among others who are affluent, and poor living with poor. Pew said residential income segregation is increasing across the country and especially in Texas and the Southwest.
Of the nation's 30 top metro areas, San Antonio, Houston and Dallas command the medals podium in Pew's Residential Income Segregation Index. In Houston, the percentage of upper-income households in census tracts with a majority of upper-income households increased from 7 in 1980 to 24 in 2010. Likewise, low-income households in majority low-income tracts jumped from 25 to 37.
Income inequality
The Pew researchers stopped short of saying precisely why Texas' major cities lead what has become a national trend. Rapid growth has a lot to do with it, they said. But there are other causes they found of particular concern............
"The real challenge for the future of America is not a race divide but a class divide,"...Stephen Klineberg, a Rice University sociologist......
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
Pap, right? Not the way he put it. He said that the above secret should be implemented by living well below your means in a neighbourhood with houses less costly than what you can afford.
He lives in a neighbourhood where the average family income is somewhere around $120,000 per year. He himself clears a lot more than that. As a result, he's less stressed than his neighbours when it comes to ye olde treadmill.
Admittedly, his advice isn't practical for many. In a nutshell, it's this: see how much house you can afford, see what neighbourhood it corresponds to, and then knock it down one level and move into a neighbourhood corresponding to that lower notch. The trouble with this approach is that it only works if you wear your wealth lightly, which he does. (He drives a sporty Saturn.)
But there is something to it if you can find a safe and reasonably well-kept neighbourhood where you can live quietly below your means. I know of another fellow who was the national vice-president in charge of retail sales for a big Canadian brokerage firm who lived contentedly in a 2,000-2,500 square foot Toronto house with 40' frontage. The way he lived, you'd never know who he really was unless you knew him personally.
I remember when the racist crack head Mayor of DC, Marion Barry, put ghetto housing in the middle of a nice neighborhood of DC. He was so proud of his bad self. Soon, he was doing time.
Several years ago I met a young couple filled with liberal idealism and verve who just arrived in our metropolitan area. They informed me that they chose to buy a home in a lower class neighborhood near downtown (not Houston) so their children could experience the rich diversity of the surrounding area. Not being one to call a man a fool to his face, I managed some remark such as “That’s interesting”.
Well, this wide eyed quest for diversity lasted about a year before they moved. They discovered they didn’t want their kids exposed to the type of diversity the neighborhood offered in abundance: crude behavior and language, not to mention the crime and depravity (and that was just the school atmosphere).
I’m old enough to remember when poor didn’t mean criminal but all too often it does in cities.
In my informed opinion, it’s impossible to live in Houston and NOT be miserable, regardless of income.
Sorry, but Texas heat is enough without high humidity, traffic gridlock, and dirty air.
But Houston does have jobs. Only reason to stay there.
This is a plea for one of two things - to either hand those who cannot afford luxuries more, or to take away luxuries from those who can afford them.
Once upon a time, living within one’s means was an admired trait in this country. Now, “moving on up” (I hope Sherman Hemsley has reached a lofty new place!) is being supplanted with “give it to me for free”, despite that “free” means stealing from those who have earned it.
How many rich athletes live in the Ghetto’s???
Barkley?
Shaq””
Magic Johnson?
Tiger Woods???
How about Bill Gates?
This is beyond stupid.
What’s next? Assignment by the government to be told WHERE you are going to live?
Who writes this garbage? My neighborhood is economically mixed, and we have the gangsta graffiti on the fences of nice houses to prove it! One of west Houston’s larger gang battles was fought in front of my house a few weeks back. At least 88 gun shots were fired, judging by the spent brass that the police picked up. It sounded like a war. Yet, it never made the news that I am aware of.
Well, yes. Rich folks don’t live in trailer parks, and poor folks don’t live in mansions - unless they’re getting Section 8.
They could have walked it by now.
Have the Pew people FReepmail me and I’ll introduce them to Chicago-style segregation.
It’s one of the little problems Obama never had time to clean up before becoming President.
Thank Obama, though, at least the water levels in Lake Michigan are falling.
I thought Houston recently passed zoning restrictions. I was sorry to see that because it is the last bastion of big city zoning liberty left.
Take a look at any major city and see what zoning restrictions have done.
I recently heard a proposal to add additional “states” here in America. You’d carve out large urban areas and their surrounding counties. They would then receive statehood.
This would allow conservative areas to remain conservative while liberal areas remained liberal. I know it would work well in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois.
Had you heard of something like this?
Not surprising - productive citizens with a strong work ethic tent to live around those of similar persuasion, just as freeloading lazy deadbeats tend to migrate towards others with similar traits.
From a commenter’s review of “Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities”
Stanley Kurtz
“Kurtz details how Obama has long believed that the residents who fled the cities are racists and need to be dragged back into the cities to help solve the problems festering there. If Obama’s plans for this forced redistribution became common knowledge, then it would be cause his re-election campaign to crash and burn.
Six short and to-the-point chapters entitled “Abolish the Suburbs, Manhattanizing America, In Up to His Eyeballs, Saul Alinsky Radical, A Suburb of the Mind, Redistribution Revolution, Fooled, Ruled, and Schooled” and “Obama in a New Light” plus lots of sources and notes and a good index make up the guts of this tome.
For those naïve suburban voters who have only been paying attention to mainstream media, if following the news at all, they don’t realize that the so-called trillion-dollar stimulus plan was really just a poverty program that was intentionally mis-named to fool the voters. That’s why it had almost no effect and certainly produced no improvements.
For more than two decades, Obama and his fellow radical community activists, agitators have been working toward punishing all those people who voted with their feet and fled the cities and left them filled with only poor and minority residents. “Suburbs are for sellouts...For Obama, the suburbs are a defect in the very structure of American life. That is why the president backs his old friends’ movement to abolish them.”
“’We are battling apartheid in America.’ So said Obama’s onetime organizing mentor Mike Kruglik in 2005, explaining the philosophy behind his crusade for regional equity. At the the time, Kruglik was directing the regionalist efforts of the Gamaliel Foundation, a national network of community organizations that Obama himself had helped launch in the mid-1980s. Today Kruglik leads the Gamailied offshoot Building One American, which fights for regionalism in partnerships with the Obama White House, although few Americans have any idea that this is the case.”
To the radicals, those suburban racists deserve to have their wealth taken away from them and given to the less fortunate but Obama can’t publicly proclaim the details of the regulations to abolish the suburbs because, “Much of Obama’s base, to say nothing of independents, would be alienated by the regionalist agenda; this explains the president’s reticence. Openness about his antisuburban goals would expose Obama as standing to the left of many of his supporters. Middle-class African Americans and modestly successful suburbanites now disposed to vote for the president might think twice if they knew what Obama had in store for them.”
“Kruglik and Obama plan to overcome this liability by splitting the suburbs against themselves, creating an alliance between cities and the relatively less well-off inner-ring suburbs.”
They hope to achieve this basic change in America by expanding cities into regions that will all come under the control of the nearest cities. Obama and his allies consider everything about the suburbs to be bad. That’s where the money has fled. That’s where the SUV’s and autos pollute the environment. That’s where valuable farmland and forests are absorbed to build more urban sprawl. The suburbanites need to be dragged back into the cities and their love affair with the car crushed.
Mass transit is intended to stop the building of highways in order to help eliminate the use of automobiles. The health care laws are really designed to help bring about the redistribution of wealth from the suburbs to the poor.
This is an important goal of Obama and the leftists and if Obama serves another term, he will be able to punish the middle and upper class residents living outside the problems of American cities.
Kurtz was blunt about what this book was intended for. He wants to awaken the voting taxpayers to the hidden agenda that is being concealed from them. He wants this information to become the coffin nails in the upcoming Presidential election because Obama can’t win the next election without the suburban voters being ignorant of his planned power grabs.
He also knows that this information will be totally ignored and hidden from the general public by the so-called mainstream media that has so much invested in the candidate they foisted upon the nation to prove that they weren’t racists. Now they don’t want to admit what they did and how much damage it has already done to the nation.”
http://www.amazon.com/Spreading-Wealth-Robbing-Suburbs-Cities/dp/1595230920/ref=pd_rhf_cr_s_cp_7_nr
And from D’Souza’s next book’s inside flap:
“CAN AMERICA SURVIVE FOUR MORE YEARS OF BARACK OBAMA?
No, because America as we know it—wealthy, powerful, assertive—is not what Obama wants. He wants a smaller America, a poorer America, and America unable to exert its will, and America happy to be one that other nations might rise—all in the name of global fairness. To Obama, the hated “one percent” isn’t just wealthy Americans; it is America itself. In Obama’s view, America needs to be taken down a notch.
That is the startling conclusion of bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza. Building on his previous bestseller on Barack Obama, The Roots of Obama’s Rage—which Newt Gingrich called, “Stunning…the most profound insight I have read in the last six years”—D’Souza shows how Obama’s goal to downsize America is in plain sight but ignored by everyone.
D’Souza lays out what Obama plans to do in a second administration—a makeover of America so drastic that the “shining city on a hill” will become a shantytown in a rather dangerous global village.
In Obama’s America you’ll learn:
How Obama plans to use debt as a weapon of economic mass destruction to downsize the United States
How a second Obama term could be fatal to Isreal—and to American interests in the Middle East
A superpower disarmed: why drastic defense cuts are only the beginning
How Obama plans to make us more dependent on foreign energy suppliers
What the world will be like when America is a debt-ridden, second-tier economy and other countries, like China, India, and even Brazil, are wealthier and dominant
“Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream”
Dinesh D’Souza
http://www.amazon.com/Obamas-America-Unmaking-American-Dream/dp/1596987782/ref=pd_rhf_dp_s_cp_2_nr
Also suggest looking up Mike Kruglik, Building One America, Gamliel Foundation and regionalization
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