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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37952 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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There are certainly red flags indicating that he is not a particularly rigorous thinker. Eg:

Landlords in poorer areas earn “basically double” those in more affluent districts . . . There are caveats: the relationship is not true in a few top cities, such as New York ...

If you are worried about housing affordability, the opposite of NYC is presumptively a good thing. And if landlords can make more money renting to poor people, that is good, because it encourages building more housing in poor areas, or building a building with many small apartments, rather than a handful of giant apartments, as often happens in Manhatten.

He lived on a mobile home park in Milwaukee — about 130 trailers in “a really poor place in a really poor city”. Desmond calculated that the owner earned about $447,000 a year after expenses. “That blew me away. His tenants are getting by on $600-$700 a month.”

Assuming his numbers are correct, it actually a good thing that people with income of $700 per month can afford housing, and it is a good thing that someone can earn a living providing it to them.

And it turned out that the mum had just died, and after the funeral the kids just went on living in the house. Mattresses on the floor, eating what they could. They just evicted the kids. Put the kids out, called social services, put their stuff on the curb, changed the locks, moved to the next house. That’s a level of deprivation that I never experienced — a level of cruelty.”

It is cruel to refer orphans who are "eating what they could" to social services?

The poor might have cheap consumer goods, but rents are more expensive and prison more pervasive. In the US of the 1930s and 1940s, “eviction was often a very rare, ...

If you are even hinting that the poor were better-off in the 1930s, ie, the Great Depression, something has gone wrong.

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