It's not about them being a drain on the _city_ resources, but undesirable beneficiaries of the wealthier denizens' "resource pool".
I'm not arguing in favor of the OP's point or against yours: it's much less economics driven and much more socioeconomic status driven. People don't want to share their neighborhoods with those less well off than them because they want to feel metrically superior wherever possible ("I can afford to live here and they can't") and they don't want to "bring down property values" because there's someone that doesn't meet their vision of "minimum acceptable wealth" living withing a stone's throw of themselves.
Rich enough to feel they’re above a mere apartment[1], not rich enough to afford a condo.
[1] american also seem obsessed with the idea that houses are for owning and apartments are for renting. Having grown up in buildings full of people/families owning their apartments and sharing costs of building upkeep, I never understood this. Maybe the co-op approach is a remnant of socialism and I’m the weird one.
Personally I’d much prefer to own a nice flat downtown than to waste my life commuting.
Sharing space with the hoi polloi is half the fun of living in a city anyway. Gives your neighborhood some character, interesting people to talk to and to see out and about.
Nothing worse than a neighborhood full of your average middle class suburbanite to drain all the life out of a place. I’ll never forget how utterly terrible living in Menlo Park was. shudder
Edit: sorry that is probably offtopic. My initial point was that real estate is actually more expensive closer to city centers. Maybe “the rich” aren’t so rich after all.
I have grabbed three quick images to show you why I moved further away - after spending my whole life in urban areas.
The cookie-cutter typical suburbs of most mid-tier US cities though? I cannot imagine a worse combination of all the bad things from rural living, combined with all the bad things from urban living. Utterly soulless, and I feel actively depressed if I must spend more than a day or two stuck in one.
My personal theory is that the social strife we are increasingly seeing in the US is due to the breakdown in the sense of community nationwide. I posit that suburbinification was by far the largest driver of this. This is bad enough, but when you realize 90% of the suburbs in the US are unsustainable subsidies for middle class folks it gets even harder to swallow.
Getting out was great. It's not realistic for many, but it has been fantastic. The comment mentioned moving further afield, beyond suburbia, so I wasn't entirely sure what was meant.
I'm about 25 miles from a village with 1200 residents. I'm in a pn unincorporated township that has six residences and a couple of hunting camps. Once the locals (I call them the village people) get to know and accept you, I've never seen a greater sense of community.
I suspect you're onto something with the sense of community. Even the unpopular people here, of which there are a few - some self-selecting for the role, wouldn't be allowed to go hungry or homeless. In my township, there is no crime and everyone knows where my keys are, just in case the door is locked.
In the village? Well, there are minor property crimes at the rate of maybe two a month. Most of those can be attributed to tourists. There are only 1200 residents but they may swell to ten times that many people during the height if tourist season.
The sense of community is not something I'd experienced elsewhere. Ever. Even as a child, my family moved a lot due to my father being in the military. It was unfamiliar feeling and very disconcerting at times - but it is something I've come to cherish.
This is the first time I've really felt at home.
You know you're an accepted member of the community when they are telling you the gossip and it is no longer about you. It has its charms.
I don't have words for it, but the sense of community really does have an overall effect on the people. There is true compassion, even when it isn't a crisis. It doesn't take a flood to make people help their neighbors.
I strongly suspect you're not something with that.
And for me, a "cookie-cutter" suburb like Plano, TX is utter paradise. We're all different.
I don't believe in a soul, and I've never understood what anybody has meant when they complain about something being "soulless". And I've never been interested in being part of a community.
I want to live in a single-family home with a yard, little undeveloped space, six-lane arterials on a grid, strip malls at every intersection, at least one hole-in-the-wall Asian restaurant in every strip mall (Plano is a very ethnically-diverse cookie-cutter suburb), etc. That's my dream town.
2m from my house: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/Ixelles_...
15m from it: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/13/Br... http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Lw2dPOfarIk/VjD8K-tXApI/AAAAAAAAOy...
25m from it: https://i1.wp.com/www.zonienwoud.be/wp-content/uploads/2015/... https://c2.staticflickr.com/2/1369/5154609222_5837e11ab5_b.j... https://urbanfragment.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/forc3aat-d...
What you're not seeing is I've got about 3200 acres of mountainous woodland. I can have a few hundred people on my lawn, complete with live music, and the nearest neighbor will only hear it because they joined us.
That's the difference. I'm more likely to see a moose than I am to see a stranger.
And that's why I moved away from urban/suburban areas. As near as I can tell, more wealthy/rich people are doing much the same. In the ten years since I bought the property, the cost of land has skyrocketed. People are buying remote and moving well past suburbia.
Comparatively speaking, I bought the property at a very low price. What I paid ~$500/acre for is now three to four times the price - in just a decade.
...but now that you (and everyone else) owns that land - no one else (unless you let them, or there's some kind of government-mandated form of easement to allow for it) can use that land: They can't hunt on it, they can't fish on it, they can't go off-roading on it - they can't even hike on it and enjoy nature.
So in other words, it's a classic case of "I've got mine..."
I don't blame you for this - if I had the wherewithal I'd do the same. Heck, as it is (for my budget), my wife and I have been talking about moving out of the city and on to a plot of land (much smaller - even with the cheapest land we couldn't afford 3200 acres - not to mention any upkeep or whatnot, nor taxes). Not that we dislike our neighbors or anything, we're just getting to a point not liking the bustle of the city as much. Our greater concern is more of "how long will it take to reach a hospital for an emergency" (well, that and high-speed internet access - but even that is becoming both less of an issue, as well as something I am beginning to wonder if it might be better to be without).
But more and more, these spaces which used to be public property are becoming private, and rarely do the owners (whether individuals or corporations) allow for any others to set foot on the property, at least legally. I guess, though, that this isn't anything new.
The public was using the land before my name was on the deed. I have a legal right, but not an ethical right, to prohibit reasonable use.
Instead of signs that say no trespassing, there are signs with my phone number, marked trails, and parking.
It is absolutely beautiful. It was comparatively inexpensive and you can hike all day and still be on my property.
At the rate similar land is selling, and the single occupancy homes going in, it appears that more monied people are moving in.
However, a million dollars will buy you a couple hundred acres here AND allow you to build a nice house on it. If you're patient, you can get the land much cheaper. I bought during the recession and the land was auctioned by a paper company that was going out of business. I pretty much stole it.
I do see the appeal of urban living and I can find beauty in the structure. What I really appreciate is the combination of aesthetics, tranquility, and privacy.
On the subject of privacy, I am able to be more private in my location than I am if I lived in a city. However, the trade off is anonymity. I can be much more anonymous in an urban area.
Definitions follow:
I can pee on my lawn and nobody will know. If I pee on someone else's lawn, they will know exactly who I am.
I'm not a hermit, I have an active social life and a girlfriend. But, I do enjoy the solitude and tranquility. I also enjoy the furry woodland critters and the lifestyle that I can have here. (I can't really hunt moose in Manhattan and it's doubtful that I'd see one on my lawn.)
I "commute" about 15-30 minutes away to my job (software engineer) where my employer is located in an industrial business park area, on the more outer edge of the city (but not the extreme outer edge).
My last three or four employers have been like this mostly, but this one has been the closest to home, and it is pretty nice not having to drive so far for a change.
EDIT: I see your ninja edit but it's inconsistent. Either poor people are a drain on resources that the middle class wants to avoid or they're a great profit centre for the municipality.