MarkHaversham wrote:
Not true. Social Security virtually eliminated the epidemic of poverty among the elderly almost overnight. There's no reason we couldn't do the same for younger people, except that we don't want to.
You're rejecting my argument by explaining why my argument is true? Very confusing.
Are you saying that Social Security is an individual action, not a grand plan? I guess I misread your statement.
leeharveyawesome wrote:Mark, may I ask what general vicinity you live? Is it high-poverty? If not, do you consider yourself to be part of the problem?
leeharveyawesome wrote:^ Sorry, I'm not sure I understand. Do you live in a high-poverty area?
No I don't.
Oh that sucks, sorry to hear. Don’t feel too guilty about it. It’s a free country and you can live anywhere you want. Maybe you had no choice. Who knows, if you work hard enough perhaps you can arrange to have a large subsidized housing development built right there in your own little neighborhood and achieve that perfect harmonious balance you so desire. It’s never too late to do the right thing.
Or easier yet, maybe you can move to my street. Get this, it’s low-income. You know how I know it’s low-income besides the gunshots? Crazy story. I discovered that the house I was going to buy no matter what had been declared to be in a “low-income” area at some point by some agency (pretty random if you ask me because it’s pretty nice but what else can you expect from these type of agencies they are clueless). So I was able to get a discounted interest rate and no PMI! (tip for potential city homebuyers, make sure to check to see if your potential property is in a “low-income” area. You’d be surprised at what they call low-income in 2015; the bank might hook you up!). I’m getting off-base……
So check out this conundrum. I don’t know whether to congratulate myself for being middle-class and breaking up a dangerously concentrated low-income area or to hate myself for being an evil gentrifier who probably displaced someone. It’s nuts isn’t it!??!
My point is that faculty-lounge master plans have hard time working in the real world with real people. Personal resonsibility goes the furthest in this country (the greatest poverty lifter ever with a pretty decent safety net btw). I've found this out the hard way myself but I guess that's why America is so amazing and terrifying at the same time. I’ll just leave at it that cause I could go on for hours maybe even days or weeks. Have a good one Mark Haversham!
leeharveyawesome wrote:
Oh that sucks, sorry to hear. Don’t feel too guilty about it. It’s a free country and you can live anywhere you want. Maybe you had no choice. Who knows, if you work hard enough perhaps you can arrange to have a large subsidized housing development built right there in your own little neighborhood and achieve that perfect harmonious balance you so desire. It’s never too late to do the right thing.
Or easier yet, maybe you can move to my street. Get this, it’s low-income. You know how I know it’s low-income besides the gunshots? Crazy story. I discovered that the house I was going to buy no matter what had been declared to be in a “low-income” area at some point by some agency (pretty random if you ask me because it’s pretty nice but what else can you expect from these type of agencies they are clueless). So I was able to get a discounted interest rate and no PMI! (tip for potential city homebuyers, make sure to check to see if your potential property is in a “low-income” area. You’d be surprised at what they call low-income in 2015; the bank might hook you up!). I’m getting off-base……
So check out this conundrum. I don’t know whether to congratulate myself for being middle-class and breaking up a dangerously concentrated low-income area or to hate myself for being an evil gentrifier who probably displaced someone. It’s nuts isn’t it!??!
My point is that faculty-lounge master plans have hard time working in the real world with real people. Personal resonsibility goes the furthest in this country (the greatest poverty lifter ever with a pretty decent safety net btw). I've found this out the hard way myself but I guess that's why America is so amazing and terrifying at the same time. I’ll just leave at it that cause I could go on for hours maybe even days or weeks. Have a good one Mark Haversham!
I'm glad you're happy with your purchase, but I bought a house in a walkable suburb because I want to encourage that sort of thing. I can't personally solve every problem in the world; I can't afford to buy that many houses.
Nor did I ever suggest that non-poor people not moving to the city are personally at fault. Rather, the solution requires cooperation and incentivization at the government level. Your post is basically a testament to your inability or unwillingness to consider collective action as anything other than the sum of individual actions, to likewise be judged as the sum of individual actions. In reality, it's perfectly legitimate to say that individuals moving to nicer neighborhoods out west are not individually bad people, but that our collective incentivization of capital flight is bad.
For a more proveable, mathematical example, consider the paradox of thrift that was so decisively illustrated by the recent Great Recession (or the older Great Depression), in which millions of people created tremendous worldwide suffering merely by judiciously saving their money to solidify their financial standing. Unemployment skyrocketed, not because of millions of people rediscovering their lazy vices, but because of a resurgence of thrifty virtue. So in reality, sometimes two wrongs really do make a right (and vice versa).
St. Louis doesn't have a higher crime rate because it randomly happened upon a greater number of lazy people without a sense of personal responsibility. It has a higher crime rate because our mishandled institutions and deletrious incentives contribute to higher crime.
I think you might be misinterpreting what Mark is saying.
He's not specifically calling anyone out for where they live or suggesting subsidized housing be built on every third lot in everyone's neighborhood.
He's simply explaining how we got to where we are and offering an idealistic and impractical solution as an illustration of what we're not and what principle's we need to utilize moving forward to solve our problems.
At least that's how I take it.
The main point here is wealth distribution. We need to increase policies that do it on a small scale. That's how you'll ultimately see large scale change down the line.
I fully agree with Pat who mentioned education, but the caveat there is that it goes hand in hand with wealth distribution. Better education is typically tied to wealth. Not that wealthy people are smarter or even necessarily that wealthy schools are better (although there's probably some truth there). But wealthy people—due to multiple factors—tend to make for better schools. And so if you can increase the wealth in a given area by distributing it amongst less wealthy areas, you're going to ultimately increase the quality and performance of those schools.
That's assuming everyone with money doesn't just ship their kids off to private school to avoid the neighborhood school. Which we know does happen often.
leeharveyawesome wrote:
Oh that sucks, sorry to hear. Don’t feel too guilty about it. It’s a free country and you can live anywhere you want. Maybe you had no choice. Who knows, if you work hard enough perhaps you can arrange to have a large subsidized housing development built right there in your own little neighborhood and achieve that perfect harmonious balance you so desire. It’s never too late to do the right thing.
Or easier yet, maybe you can move to my street. Get this, it’s low-income. You know how I know it’s low-income besides the gunshots? Crazy story. I discovered that the house I was going to buy no matter what had been declared to be in a “low-income” area at some point by some agency (pretty random if you ask me because it’s pretty nice but what else can you expect from these type of agencies they are clueless). So I was able to get a discounted interest rate and no PMI! (tip for potential city homebuyers, make sure to check to see if your potential property is in a “low-income” area. You’d be surprised at what they call low-income in 2015; the bank might hook you up!). I’m getting off-base……
So check out this conundrum. I don’t know whether to congratulate myself for being middle-class and breaking up a dangerously concentrated low-income area or to hate myself for being an evil gentrifier who probably displaced someone. It’s nuts isn’t it!??!
My point is that faculty-lounge master plans have hard time working in the real world with real people. Personal resonsibility goes the furthest in this country (the greatest poverty lifter ever with a pretty decent safety net btw). I've found this out the hard way myself but I guess that's why America is so amazing and terrifying at the same time. I’ll just leave at it that cause I could go on for hours maybe even days or weeks. Have a good one Mark Haversham!
I'm glad you're happy with your purchase, but I bought a house in a walkable suburb because I want to encourage that sort of thing. I can't personally solve every problem in the world; I can't afford to buy that many houses.
Nor did I ever suggest that non-poor people not moving to the city are personally at fault. Rather, the solution requires cooperation and incentivization at the government level. Your post is basically a testament to your inability or unwillingness to consider collective action as anything other than the sum of individual actions, to likewise be judged as the sum of individual actions. In reality, it's perfectly legitimate to say that individuals moving to nicer neighborhoods out west are not individually bad people, but that our collective incentivization of capital flight is bad.
For a more proveable, mathematical example, consider the paradox of thrift that was so decisively illustrated by the recent Great Recession (or the older Great Depression), in which millions of people created tremendous worldwide suffering merely by judiciously saving their money to solidify their financial standing. Unemployment skyrocketed, not because of millions of people rediscovering their lazy vices, but because of a resurgence of thrifty virtue. So in reality, sometimes two wrongs really do make a right (and vice versa).
St. Louis doesn't have a higher crime rate because it randomly happened upon a greater number of lazy people without a sense of personal responsibility. It has a higher crime rate because our mishandled institutions and deletrious incentives contribute to higher crime.
I recognize how our collective incentivization of capital flight is bad but I don't understand why you can't recognize that our collective disincentivization of our poor people is bad as well. Or maybe you do. An incentive is an incentive is an incentive.
MarkHaversham wrote:
Not true. Social Security virtually eliminated the epidemic of poverty among the elderly almost overnight. There's no reason we couldn't do the same for younger people, except that we don't want to.
You're rejecting my argument by explaining why my argument is true? Very confusing.
Are you saying that Social Security is an individual action, not a grand plan? I guess I misread your statement.
leeharveyawesome wrote:Mark, may I ask what general vicinity you live? Is it high-poverty? If not, do you consider yourself to be part of the problem?
No to all three?
Social Security did not eliminate poverty among the elderly overnight. It was a grand plan, but it had very modest effects. It kept the old from starving, but not much more. It was part of a much larger movement toward pensions that DID have a real effect on poverty of the elderly over generations through many different institutions.
I fully agree with Pat who mentioned education, but the caveat there is that it goes hand in hand with wealth distribution. Better education is typically tied to wealth. Not that wealthy people are smarter or even necessarily that wealthy schools are better (although there's probably some truth there). But wealthy people—due to multiple factors—tend to make for better schools. And so if you can increase the wealth in a given area by distributing it amongst less wealthy areas, you're going to ultimately increase the quality and performance of those schools.
Wealth distribution in schools has to be a deliberate act, and as I've read about concentrated poverty, it seems that there is a tipping point around 20% of neighborhood residents living below the poverty line, at which problems become very difficult to solve. I've read the same thing about student bodies. Somewhere around 20% of students living in poverty, there start to be real challenges with student achievement, and past 40% or so, it's almost impossible for a school to really function properly. Nothing to do with the teachers or facilities or funding. It's all about student family and neighborhood demographics. So in my opinion, the city should take a different approach to how it deals with student demographics. Take race out of the picture, and work on getting as many schools as possible below 20% of students living in poverty.
^So from that perspective, the City is screwed. We either have to ship in a bunch of wealthy people or ship out a bunch of poor people? I get your point onecity, but it paints a pretty bleak picture for city folk.
We have to look at practical ways of solving the problem. We're not going to redistribute wealth. Especially not on the scale we're discussing. The county isn't going to take on a bunch of housing projects or other programs for those who are poor (see Oakville). People of wealth aren't going to move into dense poor neighborhoods anytime soon.
So where does that leave us? We have to bring the poor up. We're not going to do it by "osmosis" (through mixing poor and wealthy people). We have to work harder and put more resources into educating the poorer people in our city as I described earlier. We are making progress. The SLPS is making headway on getting schools accredited and doing so with the limitations they have. That's a good sign. But we need to do more. Kids are only in school maybe 6-8 hours a day? We need to have programs, facilities, whatever to teach and educate those kids outside of that time frame. We need to have free community college or trade schooling for the jobless in our city. We need better transit.
Basically we need to remove any obstacle a poor person might have to a better life. Getting to school. Educational reinforcement outside of school. Access to furthering education to be competitive. Access to their potential job.
Big picture, I'm suggesting the city take a different view of the current situation. It does no one any favors if all the district's schools, in trying to balance districtwide demographics, have student bodies over the 20% poor tipping point.
For the sake of argument, say 45% of the district's students live below the poverty line. If you assume that the district generally tries to balance that out across the district, no schools will have a functional level of poverty, therefore few, if any, academically minded students will find themselves in an attractive academic environment.
My understanding is that 45% poverty may just as well be 80% or 100% poverty. So in the name of districtwide uniformity you can make all the schools poor learning environments. Or, knowing there isn't much practical difference between 45% and 100% poverty, the district could focus on getting a 15% poverty rate in 1/2 of its schools, while limiting the number of bad schools by making them poorer than average. I'm just pulling numbers out of the air to illustrate the point, but you get the idea.
In doing so, the district could also dial in teaching, scheduling, disciplinary and extracurricular practices to the distinct needs of these different types of student bodies. In the low income schools, smaller class sizes, more professional mentoring opportunities, uniforms, longer school days, community services like meals and counseling services, more focus on socialization/conflict resolution, and shorter, more frequent breaks to minimize exposure to their homes and neighborhoods. In the higher income schools, little emphasis on standardized testing, no uniforms, shorter school days and longer breaks, larger class sizes. Because the two groups have different needs.
I think this would fuel a virtuous cycle of 1) kids in rough areas getting more personal guidance and probably a better shot at having a future, and probably a measurable reduction in crime over time; 2) getting more affluent families to either come to or stay invested in the city past their kids' early childhood through a more predictable and hassle-free school situation, which improves the overall income mix in the city, and overall adds to the economy of the city over time.
I fully agree with Pat who mentioned education, but the caveat there is that it goes hand in hand with wealth distribution. Better education is typically tied to wealth. Not that wealthy people are smarter or even necessarily that wealthy schools are better (although there's probably some truth there). But wealthy people—due to multiple factors—tend to make for better schools. And so if you can increase the wealth in a given area by distributing it amongst less wealthy areas, you're going to ultimately increase the quality and performance of those schools.
Wealth distribution in schools has to be a deliberate act, and as I've read about concentrated poverty, it seems that there is a tipping point around 20% of neighborhood residents living below the poverty line, at which problems become very difficult to solve. I've read the same thing about student bodies. Somewhere around 20% of students living in poverty, there start to be real challenges with student achievement, and past 40% or so, it's almost impossible for a school to really function properly. Nothing to do with the teachers or facilities or funding. It's all about student family and neighborhood demographics. So in my opinion, the city should take a different approach to how it deals with student demographics. Take race out of the picture, and work on getting as many schools as possible below 20% of students living in poverty.
Wealth redistribution in the U.S. is almost always an unintentional,l or at least hidden, effect of seemingly 'neutral' policies. The only way for St. Louis City to lessen the concentration of poverty is for poor people to leave St. Louis City. One troubled municipality cannot possible even begin to contemplate open and systematic wealth redistribution. If St. Louis City is to succeed, it has to be realistic.
leeharveyawesome wrote:
I recognize how our collective incentivization of capital flight is bad but I don't understand why you can't recognize that our collective disincentivization of our poor people is bad as well. Or maybe you do. An incentive is an incentive is an incentive.
I'm exhausted......
I guess it depends on what you mean by "collective disincentivization of our poor people".
MatthewHall wrote:
Wealth redistribution in the U.S. is almost always an unintentional,l or at least hidden, effect of seemingly 'neutral' policies. The only way for St. Louis City to lessen the concentration of poverty is for poor people to leave St. Louis City. One troubled municipality cannot possible even begin to contemplate open and systematic wealth redistribution. If St. Louis City is to succeed, it has to be realistic.
Yeah, this is one of those things where regional cooperation would go a long way toward helping he situation (and not wanting to be on the hook to help is one of the things preventing regional cooperation).
moorlander wrote:I think this is a really good idea. 5 security cameras being installed downtown and downtown west in April. CID plans to install 30 in the next 2 yrs.
^In addition to those, there will be cameras installed the length of Leonor K Sullivan as part of the Arch grounds riverfront project. Eventually they will be tied into the SLPD network, I believe. Maybe even NPS as well.
Sad state of affairs when you see the headline "Police say individuals in triple shooting were acquainted" and you don't know which recent triple shooting incident it is referring to.
leeharveyawesome wrote:
I recognize how our collective incentivization of capital flight is bad but I don't understand why you can't recognize that our collective disincentivization of our poor people is bad as well. Or maybe you do. An incentive is an incentive is an incentive.
I'm exhausted......
I guess it depends on what you mean by "collective disincentivization of our poor people".
MatthewHall wrote:
Wealth redistribution in the U.S. is almost always an unintentional,l or at least hidden, effect of seemingly 'neutral' policies. The only way for St. Louis City to lessen the concentration of poverty is for poor people to leave St. Louis City. One troubled municipality cannot possible even begin to contemplate open and systematic wealth redistribution. If St. Louis City is to succeed, it has to be realistic.
Yeah, this is one of those things where regional cooperation would go a long way toward helping he situation (and not wanting to be on the hook to help is one of the things preventing regional cooperation).
Any move toward "regional cooperation" will only be possible when St. Louis City is in a sufficiently improved bargaining position with the county and other municipalities to give them a reason to negotiate anything in the first place. You don't tell an emotionally troubled person to immediately run out and magically overcome their problems, you build up their confidence and emotional stability. Only when they are on a more sure footing do you suggest that they get to work on the financial challenges of their life. St. Louis is a "troubled city." It's the fault of St. Louis County and other governments beyond, including the state and feds, that it's troubled, but it's still building itself up.
jstriebel wrote:St. Louis County is pretty troubled itself. But the impacts of it's trouble haven't hit yet, so not enough people see it that way.
MUCH less so. No one is perfectly together. It's all relative. If St. Louis' central corridor has a good decade THEN St. Louis City might be able get enough interest in real sharing of services and development agendas.
Suspect the nice folks in STL Hills will be calling for the demolition of all 4-family rentals along Jamieson now. Am I right? Or, am I right? The only question is, what will they do with all the vacant lots?
I live off Jamieson just a block away in Lindenwood Park, and there are a lot of people that would like to destroy all the apartments along Jamieson and Chippewa. The ones on Chippewa are actually worse.
leeharveyawesome wrote:
Oh that sucks, sorry to hear. Don’t feel too guilty about it. It’s a free country and you can live anywhere you want. Maybe you had no choice. Who knows, if you work hard enough perhaps you can arrange to have a large subsidized housing development built right there in your own little neighborhood and achieve that perfect harmonious balance you so desire. It’s never too late to do the right thing.
Or easier yet, maybe you can move to my street. Get this, it’s low-income. You know how I know it’s low-income besides the gunshots? Crazy story. I discovered that the house I was going to buy no matter what had been declared to be in a “low-income” area at some point by some agency (pretty random if you ask me because it’s pretty nice but what else can you expect from these type of agencies they are clueless). So I was able to get a discounted interest rate and no PMI! (tip for potential city homebuyers, make sure to check to see if your potential property is in a “low-income” area. You’d be surprised at what they call low-income in 2015; the bank might hook you up!). I’m getting off-base……
So check out this conundrum. I don’t know whether to congratulate myself for being middle-class and breaking up a dangerously concentrated low-income area or to hate myself for being an evil gentrifier who probably displaced someone. It’s nuts isn’t it!??!
My point is that faculty-lounge master plans have hard time working in the real world with real people. Personal resonsibility goes the furthest in this country (the greatest poverty lifter ever with a pretty decent safety net btw). I've found this out the hard way myself but I guess that's why America is so amazing and terrifying at the same time. I’ll just leave at it that cause I could go on for hours maybe even days or weeks. Have a good one Mark Haversham!
I'm glad you're happy with your purchase, but I bought a house in a walkable suburb because I want to encourage that sort of thing. I can't personally solve every problem in the world; I can't afford to buy that many houses.
Nor did I ever suggest that non-poor people not moving to the city are personally at fault. Rather, the solution requires cooperation and incentivization at the government level. Your post is basically a testament to your inability or unwillingness to consider collective action as anything other than the sum of individual actions, to likewise be judged as the sum of individual actions. In reality, it's perfectly legitimate to say that individuals moving to nicer neighborhoods out west are not individually bad people, but that our collective incentivization of capital flight is bad.
For a more proveable, mathematical example, consider the paradox of thrift that was so decisively illustrated by the recent Great Recession (or the older Great Depression), in which millions of people created tremendous worldwide suffering merely by judiciously saving their money to solidify their financial standing. Unemployment skyrocketed, not because of millions of people rediscovering their lazy vices, but because of a resurgence of thrifty virtue. So in reality, sometimes two wrongs really do make a right (and vice versa).
St. Louis doesn't have a higher crime rate because it randomly happened upon a greater number of lazy people without a sense of personal responsibility. It has a higher crime rate because our mishandled institutions and deletrious incentives contribute to higher crime.
I got super high for a few days and contemplated your answer so here goes. I find it weird that you are able to find a bureaucratic or some social construct answer for crime and homicide whilst never mentioning anything to do personal choices of human beings or otherwise never mentioning the role that that an actual human has to do with their actions. It's super weird to me.
Your answer was incredibly literate. I'll be honest. I had to google "deletrious" just be sure. Turns out I knew what it generally meant but that's beside the point. I'm also fairly certain you didn't copy and paste that from an online academic journal. Well done. I give you an A-.
I think we have a few issues though. Given your belief that the some sort of social construct or bureaucratic structure has a direct result in human behavior then please share what makes Asians better at math and science because we all want to know? Take the last 5000 homicides in the City of St. Louis. If 4950 of the 5000 are from one group of people then I think we have problem larger than capital flight or tax code or a bad teacher problem. The percentage is just too insane to ignore. I know this a painful contemplation. I don't like it either and I don't let it effect my daily life.
Steep some tea and take the dog for a walk in your walkable suburb. You're naïve and don't know nothin' about the hood.
And with that I guess I'll just pretty much log off forever.
leeharveyawesome wrote:
I got super high for a few days and contemplated your answer so here goes.
First thing, I need to get me whatever you're smoking (or shooting up?) if you're getting high for days on end...
I think we have a few issues though. Given your belief that the some sort of social construct or bureaucratic structure has a direct result in human behavior then please share what makes Asians better at math and science because we all want to know? Take the last 5000 homicides in the City of St. Louis. If 4950 of the 5000 are from one group of people then I think we have problem larger than capital flight or tax code or a bad teacher problem. The percentage is just too insane to ignore. I know this a painful contemplation. I don't like it either and I don't let it effect my daily life.
Why waste words with all this prevarication and insinuation? You can just come right out and say you think black people are inherently/culturally predisposed to be less intelligent and/or engage in criminal activity. At the very least it'd save you some typing.
