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The effects of living in a poor neighborhood

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Re: The effects of living in a poor neighborhood

#111

One of the comments I get people who visit India (I'm Indian) is that how is there a slum next to a swanky high rise or classy residential/commercial areas (at least in most big cities). I don't really have an explanation for this (lack of space, cheap labor etc.), but the more I read about economic segregation in the US the more I'm convinced that the inadvertent mixed income neighborhoods in India could be a soluti…

Isn't that exactly how things are built in many of the larger US cities?

Luxury High rises are built in the middle of poor areas all the time. And all of the affordable housing city rules make it that something like 15-20% of new units in said high rise have to go to affordable housing, etc.

So you have a bunch of poor families who luck out and get to live in a million dollar 2 bedroom with free concierge service, which happen to be surrounded by homeless people.

Re: The effects of living in a poor neighborhood

#112
post #76

Why blacks are not doing well? Because they were from Africa, but new immigrants from Africa came to US earn a pretty decent life quickly than those have been here centuries ago. Because they're minority, but other minorities such as the Jews and Asians are working hard and earning a decent life here. Because of less chance to get education, but you have affirmative action that you can get into decent college at a hu…

The discrimination against other minorities is nothing like the discrimination blacks have faced and still face. I am white and I got half asian kids, but when I talk to a white mom with half black kids, the kind of stuff her kids has to deal with is nothing like what I deal with. Or rather I don't deal with anything.

Affirmative action can't compensate, when most of your success in life depends on what happens the early years of your life. If you spend all your first years in shitty schools, shitty preschool and shitty neighborhoods, some late in life Affirmative action isn't going to make any difference.

Re: The effects of living in a poor neighborhood

#113

One of the comments I get people who visit India (I'm Indian) is that how is there a slum next to a swanky high rise or classy residential/commercial areas (at least in most big cities). I don't really have an explanation for this (lack of space, cheap labor etc.), but the more I read about economic segregation in the US the more I'm convinced that the inadvertent mixed income neighborhoods in India could be a soluti…

"If you don't live around people who are less fortunate than you, how can you understand their plight and their point of view?" Great observation. I suspect the reason this viewpoint is less prevalent in the Western "OR" compared to the Eastern, "AND" , styles of thinking.

I think this varies with western countries. As a Norwegian I could not fail to notice the extreme segregation of housing based on income and function in the US. You have very large areas in the US with housing which seems to fall within a very narrowly defined price range.

Now we don't have slums in the middle of wealthy areas in Norway (well we don't really have slums so that is another point), but middle class or working class and the rich can be living close to each other.

A strange thing about the US I find is that despite being so seemingly free wheeling capitalist where everything is supposed to go, it seems overly regulated and planned with respect to what sort of housing can go where. There are so many large homogenous clusters. You would expect a very free market to be far more chaotic in what gets built where.

I find this important as the argument in the US seems often be that people decide their own lot in life because in the US the market decides everything. Yet the outcomes seems far more political, and less meritocratic than one might assume.

Re: The effects of living in a poor neighborhood

#114
post #76

Why blacks are not doing well? Because they were from Africa, but new immigrants from Africa came to US earn a pretty decent life quickly than those have been here centuries ago. Because they're minority, but other minorities such as the Jews and Asians are working hard and earning a decent life here. Because of less chance to get education, but you have affirmative action that you can get into decent college at a hu…

The original blacks who came to the US were not immigrants, they were slaves. For one thing there might be a bias in immigrants that doesn't apply to slaves, like having a certain education or wealth (immigrating tends to cost money). And immigrants are free to buy books, slaves presumably weren't. I agree it is probably a culture thing, but society as a whole created that culture.

People often disregard this very important point. The original free blacks of the north did quite well. Noticeably better than the Irish e.g. Black culture in the north got destroyed when the large migration of former slaves migrated north. They took with them a bad culture. Slaves learn quickly e.g. that putting in an extra effort is never good for you. It doesn't pay of.

Adam Smith remarked hundreds of years ago how slave labour is very inefficient because nobody works efficient or hard when they don't do it out of free will and their own benefit but rather to the benefit of others. Roman agriculture suffered immensely for this in the latter years as slave estates started taking over.

So black in the south had grown up over generations in a culture which did not reward hard work and which actively discouraged education.

It seems rather offensive when people casually just say the poor work ethic and attitudes towards education among many blacks in the US is their communities problem. How about white people's responsibility for creating this culture in the first place?

It is like abusing a person for years and then as soon as you stop the abuse you expect the person to instantly become and upstanding citizen.

Re: The effects of living in a poor neighborhood

#115
post #76

Why blacks are not doing well? Because they were from Africa, but new immigrants from Africa came to US earn a pretty decent life quickly than those have been here centuries ago. Because they're minority, but other minorities such as the Jews and Asians are working hard and earning a decent life here. Because of less chance to get education, but you have affirmative action that you can get into decent college at a hu…

"I might be missing something else."

The whole "centuries of brutal slavery" thing is an obvious and rather curious omission in your list.

Re: The effects of living in a poor neighborhood

#116
post #76

Why blacks are not doing well? Because they were from Africa, but new immigrants from Africa came to US earn a pretty decent life quickly than those have been here centuries ago. Because they're minority, but other minorities such as the Jews and Asians are working hard and earning a decent life here. Because of less chance to get education, but you have affirmative action that you can get into decent college at a hu…

"I might be missing something else." The whole "centuries of brutal slavery" thing is an obvious and rather curious omission in your list.

Also, the hundred years of overt discrimination and decades of covert discrimination that followed that.

Re: The effects of living in a poor neighborhood

#117
post #111

One of the comments I get people who visit India (I'm Indian) is that how is there a slum next to a swanky high rise or classy residential/commercial areas (at least in most big cities). I don't really have an explanation for this (lack of space, cheap labor etc.), but the more I read about economic segregation in the US the more I'm convinced that the inadvertent mixed income neighborhoods in India could be a soluti…

Isn't that exactly how things are built in many of the larger US cities? Luxury High rises are built in the middle of poor areas all the time. And all of the affordable housing city rules make it that something like 15-20% of new units in said high rise have to go to affordable housing, etc. So you have a bunch of poor families who luck out and get to live in a million dollar 2 bedroom with free concierge service, wh…

With the exception of NYC (maybe to an extent SF) I can't think of any other city where people exclusively live in high rises or buildings.

Most cities have a small cluster of high rises downtown (usually commercial and a small number of residential buildings) and most people live in suburbs with single family homes. Unless I'm hallucinating, that's how I've seen in most US cities I've been to.

Re: The effects of living in a poor neighborhood

#118
post #76

Why blacks are not doing well? Because they were from Africa, but new immigrants from Africa came to US earn a pretty decent life quickly than those have been here centuries ago. Because they're minority, but other minorities such as the Jews and Asians are working hard and earning a decent life here. Because of less chance to get education, but you have affirmative action that you can get into decent college at a hu…

Yes slavery and unfairly treated in the past combined are hurting blacks very much, but we can't go back and change history. My point is that new immigrants came here with nothing can earn a decent life with hard working , put education first etc, why local blacks can not reboot themselves gradually over these years? I am just thinking without a grass root level from within to change the culture, it will be very difficult to better the situation.

Especially in the hi-tech era, without proper education, the only thing left will be extreme riot, or live on food stamp for life.

I have been thinking about adopting a black kid myself, to give him/her the best education possible and the culture I believe in, I may do that sometime.

Re: The effects of living in a poor neighborhood

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Section 8 vouchers are a means-tested benefit program where the net benefit decreases with outside income, and, as such, create a disincentive (especially since people qualified for them also, nearly invariably, are on other means-tested benefit programs whose benefits also decline with additional income -- sometimes, in aggregate, leading to a greater than 1:1 decline in benefits compared to increased income) to pro…

This is the thing I really don't get about UBI. It really, really doesn't remove means testing. Your tax burden is still means based, and that determines whether your ubi is net positive or net negative. So again, your net benefit decreases with increased outside income, because you're paying more in taxes.

> This is the thing I really don't get about UBI. It really, really doesn't remove means testing. Your tax burden is still means based

There's a degree to which this is true, but there is a radical difference between tax system "means testing" and that with existing means-tested public benefit programs. With existing poverty support programs, its quite possible to lose nearly (and in some cases even more than) $1 in public benefits for each $1 in outside income (and much more at certain breakpoints), and to do so while your total income is under the federal poverty level.

OTOH with stae and federal income and payroll taxes together, you can -- in a relatively high income tax state like California -- currently reach a maximum marginal rate (including the employer share of medicare taxes, and assuming that payroll taxable income and income taxable income are equal, which both overstates the tax rate on nominal income and ignores minor differences between the income those two taxes apply to) of 55.8%, but it takes $1 million in taxable income to reach that point (some UBI proposals would add higher maximum marginal rates, at even higher income levels.)

So, sure, the tax system reduces the incentive for earning additional income, especially at higher income levels; the problem UBI address is that existing poverty support programs do much more to reduce the benefit for earning additional -- or even any non-benefit -- income, and they do it at poverty levels.

(And, on top of that, they add -- with each program -- additional layers of bureaucracy to enforce those rules, rather than letting the tax system be the single point in which means are considered.)

Re: The effects of living in a poor neighborhood

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Section 8 vouchers are a means-tested benefit program where the net benefit decreases with outside income, and, as such, create a disincentive (especially since people qualified for them also, nearly invariably, are on other means-tested benefit programs whose benefits also decline with additional income -- sometimes, in aggregate, leading to a greater than 1:1 decline in benefits compared to increased income) to pro…

UBI will only increase the amount of syringes I have to pick up in my backyards.

There is a significant difference between asserting something and providing other people a reason to believe it.
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