Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Why are 55+ communities allowed? What are the perceived benefits of 55+ communities? https://x.com/LeahRain77/status/2079094767233745170 has blown up on X and I know I've seen 55+ communities when searching for houses. They usually come up on searches as less expensive and I guess I assumed they were assisted living facilities but looking at today's drama that's not the case.
It's weird to me that people are getting so offended at the idea of an almost-30 year old woman can continue living in the same home she lived in before her father passed away. What is at stake here to these people that is worth the expense of suing a woman out of her house?
We should probably allow more forms of HOA segregation and not less. Keeping a community 55+ means you get to live around people who are all likewise retired who can come over and play at 1 pm on a Tuesday. It means the community can focus on building infrastructure that is specifically beneficial to your age group. The pickleball court doesn’t have any young people dominating games. When you were in college would you want a 40 year old guy who works for Deloitte living in your dorm? No.
Should we have Catholic only neighborhoods? Cultural goods can be rivalrous. If a neighborhood is only Catholic then you can build your Church a 5 min walk from everyone’s house. The local restaurants can have very good fried fish because their neighborhood is loaded with people who eat only fish on Fridays.
From first principles segregation can have a lot of beneficial effects. If Chicago could ban black people from a specific neighborhood then the public school in that neighborhood would become very good and no one would feel pressure to pay for private schools. And then no risks of gun violence.
So yes I am a big believer that people should have a right to associate with whoever they want to. And this includes entering contracts to exclude outsiders.
This is getting into why this might have been a culture war topic instead of small scale questions, but I am curious. Why did this exception make it through the Fair Housing Act but not others?
I don't think this story would upset me much if it was fairly applied, so that I could join a Catholic HOA, like you said. Would be really cool to live in a community where a church and Catholic School were within walking distance and we had Corpus Christi processions and Christmas Caroling right outside my house. But, we don't' live in that world, we live in the Fair Housing world. So, why did old (not even that old) people get an exception?
Any small question can usually be merged into a larger more culture war question and in this case it’s legally allowing segregation…..is good?
My guess is old people doesn’t cut racial lines at all and every race has old people. A Catholic HOA would essentially be excluding blacks. There is an Islamic group I believe attempting this is Texas but then Trump heard about it and shut it down. In America Islamic enclaves are definitely not popular and even a Catholic enclave feels a little un-American.
I was watching a video on Twitter of a Muslim complaining that the Halal section was tiny compared to the rest of the meat section. Cultural goods in a community are rivals. There is only so much shelf space and built environment. If you want to live in your culture then you kind of do need segregation and exclude other cultures from the built environment.
Segregation reinvented thru first principles.
Not really. Old people are far whiter than the US as a whole and even the median black American is 12 years younger than their white counterpart. For Hispanics, that median is 19 years younger. One would expect the whiteness of 55+ communities to face DEI's ire, but then there's the argument that Boomer and Gen X whites were mostly exempted from DEI in the first place in exchange for cooperation.
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