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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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We’ve been essentially ethnically cleansed out of NYC.

NYC is still plurality white and I know plenty of people living there who love the life. This "ethnic cleansing" does not seem to impact them.

sick and tired of being exposed to gun violence in Chicago.

Chicago sucked even worse in the "good old days!"

San Francisco is a boring Asian town now which use to be like the people from Full House. Besides the quality and safety of our cities declining we’ve made it worse by not building housing in our cities

This is what people want! So many American voters want the NIMBYism, and the boring sprawl culture. We don't build because citizens are constantly opposing new construction. I think it's lame too, but it's obvious that people genuinely disagree and love extreme sprawl without construction. You can see this with your own eyes if you visit any local city council meeting when new construction comes up as a topic.

and also subsidizing immigrants so that you either need to make 7-figures or live on welfare to live in a big city.

The main form of federal welfare that helps with housing is section 8, and those are highly limited. It also only applies to renters (therefore about 2/3rds of people are not applicable at all), and only 12% of renters have it. Other things like project based rentals are even less common.

But also you don't need seven figures. The median household income in my state's big city of Charlotte is ~83k. Not even six figures. Given that is the median, plenty of people live with less than that.

The fact that the American Dream of living in a big city doesn’t exists anymore Akshually does mean immigration sucks and black crime killed neighborhoods. So sure America is great if you want to live in a 5k sq foot house with a giant truck far enough away from any immigrants to not deal with them, but if you actually want to live in an community then the American Dream dead.

The American dream is an immigrant concept! The dream is coming to the land of opportunity, working hard and building up your life through your sweat and tears because of our historical libertarian freedom loving meritocratic ideals. Crime rates are also misleading, they are hyperlocalized. Unless you hang out on the kill streets (and if you're not a useless loser working part time at a McDonald's, you should be able to avoid it) then you avoid most crime.

People like Jensen Huang, a Taiwanese immigrant from a middle class family, Jan Kuom, a Ukranian immigrant raised in poverty, or Hamdi Ulukaya whose family were Kurdish dairy farmers before moving are living proof it still exists. You just need to be worth something. Stuff like the many Indian and Chinese immigrant workers in tech companies is lower level examples of this too. In the US if you can't make something of yourself and you want to, it's because you suck. It hurts to hear the truth, but it is the truth.

It just better not living around immigrants in ways not captured by GDP goes up.

Nope, GDP is the best metric and is great in part because of basic mathematics https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-boring-reason-gdp-is-inevitable

But why even throw in a random complaint about GDP to begin with except to signal economic illiteracy?

“ So many American voters want the NIMBYism”

  • this occurred post WW2 after a great migration and what was termed as “White Flight”. It’s basically impossible at this point to discern whether it occurred because of technology or crime. The urban schools became ghettoized which meant you have to pay private school tuition which meant making a lot of money. Cheap urban living became non-existent.

Is Charlotte a big city? I haven’t lived there in 20 years but I thought it was car-centric sprawl.

Chicago also wasn’t a shithole until posts 2016. They did effective segregation before then so the bulk of the crime was contained to neighborhoods avoided.