Pricing out the Poor - Deliberately

In the 80's New York had a massive crime problem. It was so bad that people were leaving in droves. The New York council finally solved the problem but they did so, in part, in an interesting way. They created laws that deliberately increased the cost of housing, and quite drastically. The effect was that the criminal class was (largely) priced out of New York. They moved on to cheaper 'victim' cities elsewhere.

This is what happens when you need to discriminate but can't, due to given anti-discrimination laws. You have to use indirect methods to discriminate, which may be much more destructive than just kicking the criminal class out of town outright, via force.

However, inflating the cost of housing to drive out criminals does nothing for general prosperity. Yet if it's the string in the bow that you must use to master a greater priority, then you will use it. To say, I myself would rather live in my car than tolerate a gang moving in next door. Social discomfort is amongst the worst kinds of discomfort. It's serious.

In Houston for example, which offers truly affordable housing and is the most prosperous city in America, the crime rate is steadily increasing because the city is comparatively attractive to the criminal class. Houston is beginning to suffer from toxic immigration because being attractive to poor people means attracting poor people, who are far more likely to be criminal as a statistical group.

Now, if Houston were allowed to be racist and make the law of "no blacks allowed" then this would largely solve the problem, albeit in a blunt and ugly way. This is because it's a fact that blacks, as a group, are far more likely to be criminal and create problems as compared to others. Indeed, William Levitt, who innovated the affordable post WW2 suburbs, did not sell the houses within his developments to blacks. This was not because he was a racist, but simply because the white people of the time did not want to live amongst blacks; and so, in response to consumer demand, he restricted access to whites only to keep the sale price up. Back in the 1940's and 50's people were ruthless. Racism kept the crime down, but again in an ugly and crude way.

On a more subtle level the same thing happens in Australasia today. Australians as a whole are somewhat openly racist (in culture - not media) and they have a reputation for it. Likewise, they suppress Polynesian immigration from New Zealand as Polynesians are afraid to move to Australia out of fear of open rejection. If Australians were not openly racist, I would say Brisbane would be the largest Polynesian city in the world - not Auckland. Again, as a group Polynesians are much more likely to be problematic than others coming from New Zealand. The blunt tool of racism keeps Australia's immigration problems (potential and real) in check.

Now let's go back to the New York example. Respecting how serious the need for social discrimination is--relating to criminals and the grossly uncouth--we might recognize, if I may speculate, the real heart of the drive towards engineering housing unaffordability. It might ultimately be nothing much more than a crude tool to preserve an idealised social atmosphere, as every district is forced to compete with other districts, and even nations, to keep the criminal class away of their areas.

Ok. Now look at Australia today. They have urban land containment policy in place that makes housing outrageously expensive, as restricted land supply forces land prices up to the point of ridiculous. If New Zealand did not play the same game (and it does) and retained affordable housing, then New Zealand would be a magnet for the least ideal people that Australia has to offer. So maybe it's so that New Zealand employs Rural Urban Boundaries, like Australia, specifically to inflate housing costs to in turn block [toxic] Australian immigration?

I have long preached that if we go back to affordable housing policy, then we may also need to adjust immigration controls to block unwanted people. But the problem is, in today's world that's difficult to do because it's just so easy to be accused of racism and "discrimination" by the political hit-squad of our time (that is, the extremist-Left) if you dared move in this direction. And to aggravate the problem further, the upper middle-classes are not too concerned about bad immigration because they, personally, do not have to deal with it. They work and live in areas well isolated from the criminal class in any circumstance. Alas, it's easy to have a nice opinion on immigration when you don't have to eat your own cake.

The great losers of the modern game are those struggling to buy a home, and especially the non-criminal poor. People with more limited means are deprived of an affordable house, and people who are somewhat poor yet civilized are nonetheless forced to live amongst dangerous and depressing people. I'm not a fan of any of this.

There's a better solution to this difficult problem. We can allow new, private developments to be built, where the residents have the power to filter people in and out of their areas at their discretion, using online video interviews. This way if someone has tattoos all over their face and speaks with hostile tension, people will be free to act on the obvious where our legal systems would otherwise not. This can give people affordable housing and a good social climate combined. We would just have to stand up to the extremist-Left, who will naturally try to stop it in the name of their simplistic idea of 'rights'.

I have written about this before. See link Here.

New Zealand would also need to revise immigration policy with Australia, when and if it introduces affordable housing. This is sensitive, but do-able and necessary.

                                               -Andrew Atkin

Addition: Levittown - Achieving affordable housing.