Re:Let's build houses for people, not cars
by rland on Wednesday August 28, 2019 @01:35PM
(#20822045)
That is something we do. Almost all cities, even very progressive ones, have a long history of redlining, which is still being dismantled today. The biases are racial and on income, which are strongly commingled from even heavier handed discrimination in the past.
The current separation of rich white and poor black/brown absolutely did not and does not fall out of a free market without consistent, long term, and deliberate racial action. Frankly, this is completely ignored by most neoliberal treatments of the housing issue.
This isn't something we do, it's something that falls out of a free real estate market. Money either finds itself and accumulates, making prices soar, or it flees the whole area throwing prices through the floor.
There is no magical world where the forces of supply and demand just happen to create income-diverse neighborhoods. We have to force that to happen if we want it.
Ultimately this, like every other problem resulting from income inequality, must be resolved by fixing the inequality, not by forcing people to live next to people they don't want to live next to.