CDZ A Comprehensive Look At The Uneven Playing Field

[westwall]

Or the welfare system incentivizes out of wedlock births. When I was first starting out in the workforce as a teen, I encountered a lot of old blacks about to retire who came from huge families--10,12, 16 kids--and the parents had been together so something changed in the black community that started destroying many black nuclear families. Maybe it is welfare. Maybe it is something else IDK.

Right, it can't be 300 years of slavery, 100 years of disenfranchisement from society and the polls, along with 45 years of systematically patrolling slums to arrest black men for working the one occupation that many of them have access to thanks to racist restrictive residential covenants, etc. It has to be welfare.

If you thought about your line of reasoning for longer than 10 seconds, you'd see how flawed it is.

Look at Africa dude. The continent is one of the wealthiest on the planet and it is primarily a festering poophole. It ain't slavery from over 100 years ago that is keeping the black people down, it is their leaders (who profit from the misery) who benefit from keeping them culturally, and socially backwards. Get the blacks out of their self imposed ghetto's and they blossom.

That is true, blacks who have made it to the suburbs are substantially better off than inner city blacks.

And until about a generation ago, there were concerted, blatant attempts by governments, realtors, and private citizens to ensure that blacks were never given the chance to settle outside of the inner city, no matter their means.

1920s–1948: Racially Restrictive Covenants

...And then people got tired of spending hours each day commuting to the city and decided they'd rather live downtown. Then what happened? The working/lower middle class blacks who owned their inner city homes right in the heart of the city saw young professionals move into their neighborhoods, along with the subway being built, and their property taxes rose beyond what they could afford to pay, forcing them to sell and move from their very conveniently located homes. This tended to happen to older, retired black folks who'd worked their whole lives to pay off the mortgage and being retired had no means of generating increased income flows to pay the far higher property taxes wrought by white folks moving into the neighborhood.

The neighborhoods weren't unsafe or unclean. They weren't run down. They were just populated most often by folks having modest means. This happened in D.C. in neighborhoods that have for over a century been black "society" neighborhoods and were in the 1990s and early 2000s populated by the retired doctors, lawyers and so on within the black community. These were "nice" people who owned nice homes (4K to 8K sq. foot homes), who made nice livings (for black folks of their day) but they were living on retirement incomes based on 1980s and before 21st century costs of living, and even for people such as that white folks moving in made it too expensive to stay.

Now one may say that the whole matter is just supply and demand, and one would be right. There's nothing especially wrong with that. So where's the "unevenness of the playing field" in the story? It's found in the fact that the only thing that changed was that white folks moved into the neighborhood and that alone is all that changed, aside, of course, from the huge leap in property values that accompanied white folks moving in.

Why should a home be worth more, thus command more in property tax, because white folks live in it or somewhere near it? The house didn't change. The neighborhood and its amenities didn't change. Occupancy rates didn't change. And you know doggone well the houses those retired folks were living in didn't change.

Note:

In D.C. property taxes aren't directly correlated/proportional to market prices, but if the market price goes up enough, the assessed value will also go up and then the property tax does too. Accordingly, there're a few year's lag between when prices jump and taxes jump.​

I think your choice of using DC only reinforces what I have been saying. Their government bureaucracy is mostly made up of blacks, and they have been a progressive stronghold for decades.

Just sayin...

 

[Fair&Balanced]

Right, it can't be 300 years of slavery, 100 years of disenfranchisement from society and the polls, along with 45 years of systematically patrolling slums to arrest black men for working the one occupation that many of them have access to thanks to racist restrictive residential covenants, etc. It has to be welfare.

If you thought about your line of reasoning for longer than 10 seconds, you'd see how flawed it is.

Look at Africa dude. The continent is one of the wealthiest on the planet and it is primarily a festering poophole. It ain't slavery from over 100 years ago that is keeping the black people down, it is their leaders (who profit from the misery) who benefit from keeping them culturally, and socially backwards. Get the blacks out of their self imposed ghetto's and they blossom.

That is true, blacks who have made it to the suburbs are substantially better off than inner city blacks.

And until about a generation ago, there were concerted, blatant attempts by governments, realtors, and private citizens to ensure that blacks were never given the chance to settle outside of the inner city, no matter their means.

1920s–1948: Racially Restrictive Covenants

...And then people got tired of spending hours each day commuting to the city and decided they'd rather live downtown. Then what happened? The working/lower middle class blacks who owned their inner city homes right in the heart of the city saw young professionals move into their neighborhoods, along with the subway being built, and their property taxes rose beyond what they could afford to pay, forcing them to sell and move from their very conveniently located homes. This tended to happen to older, retired black folks who'd worked their whole lives to pay off the mortgage and being retired had no means of generating increased income flows to pay the far higher property taxes wrought by white folks moving into the neighborhood.

The neighborhoods weren't unsafe or unclean. They weren't run down. They were just populated most often by folks having modest means. This happened in D.C. in neighborhoods that have for over a century been black "society" neighborhoods and were in the 1990s and early 2000s populated by the retired doctors, lawyers and so on within the black community. These were "nice" people who owned nice homes (4K to 8K sq. foot homes), who made nice livings (for black folks of their day) but they were living on retirement incomes based on 1980s and before 21st century costs of living, and even for people such as that white folks moving in made it too expensive to stay.

Now one may say that the whole matter is just supply and demand, and one would be right. There's nothing especially wrong with that. So where's the "unevenness of the playing field" in the story? It's found in the fact that the only thing that changed was that white folks moved into the neighborhood and that alone is all that changed, aside, of course, from the huge leap in property values that accompanied white folks moving in.

Why should a home be worth more, thus command more in property tax, because white folks live in it or somewhere near it? The house didn't change. The neighborhood and its amenities didn't change. Occupancy rates didn't change. And you know doggone well the houses those retired folks were living in didn't change.

Note:

In D.C. property taxes aren't directly correlated/proportional to market prices, but if the market price goes up enough, the assessed value will also go up and then the property tax does too. Accordingly, there're a few year's lag between when prices jump and taxes jump.​

I think your choice of using DC only reinforces what I have been saying. Their government bureaucracy is mostly made up of blacks, and they have been a progressive stronghold for decades.

Just sayin...

Yep EVERY single one of these cities that have failed their black citizens has been under Democrat control , not for years, but for DECADES. At this point, their failure is a self fulfilling prophecy.

 

[Meathead]

It's not genetics. It is social pressure (from their supposed friendly leadership) that keeps them where they are.

I differ. It is not a problem endemic to the US. Wherever blacks are found inhabiting the same lands with other races, they are invariably at the very bottom of all socioeconomic criteria. It is just a fact, and polical correctness be damned.

There simply isn't any other explanation which doesn't involve unbelievably convoluted reasoning.

In Africa the problem is nutrition. The wealthy elite get the food they need so their kids develop normally. They in turn make sure that they stay at the top of the heap by making sure that their citizens are kept poor and dumb. It is a vicious circle that has very little to do with genetics. If they get the nutrition they need when they are kids they are every bit as smart as any of the white people out there. They just are. But political corruption, that has been going on for centuries now, is the tool to keep them under control.

The same thing is happening here in the US. Our schools are crap, they teach our kids nothing useful because it is well known that dumb people are easier to control.

You would have to buy into a global conspiracy of keeping blacks down with Twinkies. The black diaspora is not confined to the US, but elsewhere where there is no significant history of oppression/racism and few Twinkies, yet black failure is uniform.

As I said, convoluted theories on a global scale bring to mind the Elders of Zion and other such nonsense.

 

[Fair&Balanced]

It's not genetics. It is social pressure (from their supposed friendly leadership) that keeps them where they are.

I differ. It is not a problem endemic to the US. Wherever blacks are found inhabiting the same lands with other races, they are invariably at the very bottom of all socioeconomic criteria. It is just a fact, and polical correctness be damned.

There simply isn't any other explanation which doesn't involve unbelievably convoluted reasoning.

In Africa the problem is nutrition. The wealthy elite get the food they need so their kids develop normally. They in turn make sure that they stay at the top of the heap by making sure that their citizens are kept poor and dumb. It is a vicious circle that has very little to do with genetics. If they get the nutrition they need when they are kids they are every bit as smart as any of the white people out there. They just are. But political corruption, that has been going on for centuries now, is the tool to keep them under control.

The same thing is happening here in the US. Our schools are crap, they teach our kids nothing useful because it is well known that dumb people are easier to control.

You would have to buy into a global conspiracy of keeping blacks down with Twinkies. The black diaspora is not confined to the US, but elsewhere where there is no significant history of oppression/racism, yet the facts a re the same.

As I said, convoluted theories on a global scale bring to mind the Elders of Zion and other such nonsense.

You are just wrong. American Negroes as a whole are FAR behind their worldwide counterparts in comparison to their peers within their own country.

 

[westwall]

It's not genetics. It is social pressure (from their supposed friendly leadership) that keeps them where they are.

I differ. It is not a problem endemic to the US. Wherever blacks are found inhabiting the same lands with other races, they are invariably at the very bottom of all socioeconomic criteria. It is just a fact, and polical correctness be damned.

There simply isn't any other explanation which doesn't involve unbelievably convoluted reasoning.

In Africa the problem is nutrition. The wealthy elite get the food they need so their kids develop normally. They in turn make sure that they stay at the top of the heap by making sure that their citizens are kept poor and dumb. It is a vicious circle that has very little to do with genetics. If they get the nutrition they need when they are kids they are every bit as smart as any of the white people out there. They just are. But political corruption, that has been going on for centuries now, is the tool to keep them under control.

The same thing is happening here in the US. Our schools are crap, they teach our kids nothing useful because it is well known that dumb people are easier to control.

You would have to buy into a global conspiracy of keeping blacks down with Twinkies. The black diaspora is not confined to the US, but elsewhere where there is no significant history of oppression/racism and few Twinkies, yet black failure is uniform.

As I said, convoluted theories on a global scale bring to mind the Elders of Zion and other such nonsense.

That is all completely untrue. In the UK the black populations have done very well. They too were originally slaves (though the Brits got rid of that horrible institution sooner than we did) but once they were free they blossomed. They didn't have the race whores profiting from their misery as exists here.

 

[Fair&Balanced]

It's not genetics. It is social pressure (from their supposed friendly leadership) that keeps them where they are.

I differ. It is not a problem endemic to the US. Wherever blacks are found inhabiting the same lands with other races, they are invariably at the very bottom of all socioeconomic criteria. It is just a fact, and polical correctness be damned.

There simply isn't any other explanation which doesn't involve unbelievably convoluted reasoning.

In Africa the problem is nutrition. The wealthy elite get the food they need so their kids develop normally. They in turn make sure that they stay at the top of the heap by making sure that their citizens are kept poor and dumb. It is a vicious circle that has very little to do with genetics. If they get the nutrition they need when they are kids they are every bit as smart as any of the white people out there. They just are. But political corruption, that has been going on for centuries now, is the tool to keep them under control.

The same thing is happening here in the US. Our schools are crap, they teach our kids nothing useful because it is well known that dumb people are easier to control.

You would have to buy into a global conspiracy of keeping blacks down with Twinkies. The black diaspora is not confined to the US, but elsewhere where there is no significant history of oppression/racism and few Twinkies, yet black failure is uniform.

As I said, convoluted theories on a global scale bring to mind the Elders of Zion and other such nonsense.

That is all completely untrue. In the UK the black populations have done very well. They too were originally slaves (though the Brits got rid of that horrible institution sooner than we did) but once they were free they blossomed. They didn't have the race whores profiting from their misery as exists here.

Absolutely, Al Sharpton has arguably been worse for black Americans than slavery ever was.

Of course, the awful truth is that blacks are STILL slaves in this country. They just don't realize it..

 

[Meathead]

You are just wrong. American Negroes as a whole are FAR behind their worldwide counterparts in comparison to their peers within their own country.

I've no idea what that means.

Are you're suggesting that blacks in the US are further behind whites in other reaches of the globe despite 50 years of Great Society/Affirmative Action programs and the like?

 

[westwall]

You are just wrong. American Negroes as a whole are FAR behind their worldwide counterparts in comparison to their peers within their own country.

I've no idea what that means.

Are you're suggesting that blacks in the US are further behind whites in other reaches of the globe despite 50 years of Great Society/Affirmative Action programs and the like?

Yes.

 

[Fair&Balanced]

You are just wrong. American Negroes as a whole are FAR behind their worldwide counterparts in comparison to their peers within their own country.

I've no idea what that means.

Are you're suggesting that blacks in the US are further behind whites in other reaches of the globe despite 50 years of Great Society/Affirmative Action programs and the like?

I'm stating a fact. Blacks in America are further behind their peers than blacks in other countries are .

Take England, for example. Do they have the ghettos filled with blacks who can't even read that we have?

Our problem with blacks is unique. we need unique solutions

 

[320 Years of History]

Here is a very well researched, data driven look at how things just aren't the same for people of color when it comes to upward mobility and wealth creation.

The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today

It would be great if at least one person is able to learn something from this info. In so many ways....the path toward prosperity is much more difficult for black Americans.

The average black family would be indeed unable to build the wealth of their white or East-Asian counterparts in the US or anywhere else in the world. Time is not a factor and genetics are a bitch.

Red:
Excuse the hell outta me??? WTF?

By what bizarre stretch of the imagination do you come to think that?

• You do realize that some 90% or more of member of the black middle class and black wealthy segments of the population today are at best two generations away from having existed in abject poverty?

Yes, there is a small segment of the black population -- folks like Charlene Jarvis and Flaxie Pinkett -- who came from inarguably middle class backgrounds and who've thrived. However, most successful blacks whom one sees today did not issue from such privileged (for having been black) beginnings.

I don't know whom you have in mind when you made the remark you did above, but your having made it rejects the accomplishments of millions of average black folks who have gone to school, done well and succeeded in America in spite of the societal, structural and systemic challenges of doing so and that accrued solely from their ethnicity.

• Uniondale, NY
• Hillcrest, NY
• Oak Bluffs, MA (not exactly a black neighborhood, but where upper middle class blacks have summered for over a century)
• Friendly, MD
• Mitchellville/Woodmore, MD
• Kettering, MD
• "Gold Coast", DC
• North Portal, DC
• Hillcrest, DC
• Fort Washington, MD
• Ladera, CA
• Calabasas, CA
• Multiple neighborhoods in and around Atlanta and most major cities in the country.

Just how do you think the black folks in those communities managed to move from their working class and poor beginnings to where they are now? Surely you don't think the current black middle class is merely and overwhelmingly inherited wealth and examples of exceptional rather than average folks doing well?

 

[Meathead]

It's not genetics. It is social pressure (from their supposed friendly leadership) that keeps them where they are.

I differ. It is not a problem endemic to the US. Wherever blacks are found inhabiting the same lands with other races, they are invariably at the very bottom of all socioeconomic criteria. It is just a fact, and polical correctness be damned.

There simply isn't any other explanation which doesn't involve unbelievably convoluted reasoning.

In Africa the problem is nutrition. The wealthy elite get the food they need so their kids develop normally. They in turn make sure that they stay at the top of the heap by making sure that their citizens are kept poor and dumb. It is a vicious circle that has very little to do with genetics. If they get the nutrition they need when they are kids they are every bit as smart as any of the white people out there. They just are. But political corruption, that has been going on for centuries now, is the tool to keep them under control.

The same thing is happening here in the US. Our schools are crap, they teach our kids nothing useful because it is well known that dumb people are easier to control.

You would have to buy into a global conspiracy of keeping blacks down with Twinkies. The black diaspora is not confined to the US, but elsewhere where there is no significant history of oppression/racism and few Twinkies, yet black failure is uniform.

As I said, convoluted theories on a global scale bring to mind the Elders of Zion and other such nonsense.

That is all completely untrue. In the UK the black populations have done very well. They too were originally slaves (though the Brits got rid of that horrible institution sooner than we did) but once they were free they blossomed. They didn't have the race whores profiting from their misery as exists here.

If you bothered to research it, you would find that blacks fair little better in Britain and once again are at the bottom of the socioeconomic totem pole.

This is off set somewhat by a brain-drain from former colonies that exceeds that of the US relative to raw numbers.

Blacks in Britain have more health issues, higher crime rates and less economic and educational achievement than their counterparts of other races.

They are indeed not the happy and prosperous people you seem to envision.

 

[Meathead]

Here is a very well researched, data driven look at how things just aren't the same for people of color when it comes to upward mobility and wealth creation.

The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today

It would be great if at least one person is able to learn something from this info. In so many ways....the path toward prosperity is much more difficult for black Americans.

The average black family would be indeed unable to build the wealth of their white or East-Asian counterparts in the US or anywhere else in the world. Time is not a factor and genetics are a bitch.

Red:
Excuse the hell outta me??? WTF?

By what bizarre stretch of the imagination do you come to think that?

• You do realize that some 90% or more of member of the black middle class and black wealthy segments of the population today are at best two generations away from having existed in abject poverty?

Yes, there is a small segment of the black population -- folks like Charlene Jarvis and Flaxie Pinkett -- who came from inarguably middle class backgrounds and who've thrived. However, most successful blacks whom one sees today did not issue from such privileged (for having been black) beginnings.

I don't know whom you have in mind when you made the remark you did above, but your having made it rejects the accomplishments of millions of average black folks who have gone to school, done well and succeeded in America in spite of the societal, structural and systemic challenges of doing so and that accrued solely from their ethnicity.

• Uniondale, NY
• Hillcrest, NY
• Oak Bluffs, MA (not exactly a black neighborhood, but where upper middle class blacks have summered for over a century)
• Friendly, MD
• Mitchellville/Woodmore, MD
• Kettering, MD
• "Gold Coast", DC
• North Portal, DC
• Hillcrest, DC
• Fort Washington, MD
• Ladera, CA
• Calabasas, CA
• Multiple neighborhoods in and around Atlanta and most major cities in the country.

Just how do you think the black folks in those communities managed to move from their working class and poor beginnings to where they are now? Surely you don't think the current black middle class is merely and overwhelmingly inherited wealth and examples of exceptional rather than average folks doing well?

Spare us the platitudes, please! We were talking about the average black family, such as it is.

 

[320 Years of History]

Right, it can't be 300 years of slavery, 100 years of disenfranchisement from society and the polls, along with 45 years of systematically patrolling slums to arrest black men for working the one occupation that many of them have access to thanks to racist restrictive residential covenants, etc. It has to be welfare.

If you thought about your line of reasoning for longer than 10 seconds, you'd see how flawed it is.

Look at Africa dude. The continent is one of the wealthiest on the planet and it is primarily a festering poophole. It ain't slavery from over 100 years ago that is keeping the black people down, it is their leaders (who profit from the misery) who benefit from keeping them culturally, and socially backwards. Get the blacks out of their self imposed ghetto's and they blossom.

That is true, blacks who have made it to the suburbs are substantially better off than inner city blacks.

And until about a generation ago, there were concerted, blatant attempts by governments, realtors, and private citizens to ensure that blacks were never given the chance to settle outside of the inner city, no matter their means.

1920s–1948: Racially Restrictive Covenants

...And then people got tired of spending hours each day commuting to the city and decided they'd rather live downtown. Then what happened? The working/lower middle class blacks who owned their inner city homes right in the heart of the city saw young professionals move into their neighborhoods, along with the subway being built, and their property taxes rose beyond what they could afford to pay, forcing them to sell and move from their very conveniently located homes. This tended to happen to older, retired black folks who'd worked their whole lives to pay off the mortgage and being retired had no means of generating increased income flows to pay the far higher property taxes wrought by white folks moving into the neighborhood.

The neighborhoods weren't unsafe or unclean. They weren't run down. They were just populated most often by folks having modest means. This happened in D.C. in neighborhoods that have for over a century been black "society" neighborhoods and were in the 1990s and early 2000s populated by the retired doctors, lawyers and so on within the black community. These were "nice" people who owned nice homes (4K to 8K sq. foot homes), who made nice livings (for black folks of their day) but they were living on retirement incomes based on 1980s and before 21st century costs of living, and even for people such as that white folks moving in made it too expensive to stay.

Now one may say that the whole matter is just supply and demand, and one would be right. There's nothing especially wrong with that. So where's the "unevenness of the playing field" in the story? It's found in the fact that the only thing that changed was that white folks moved into the neighborhood and that alone is all that changed, aside, of course, from the huge leap in property values that accompanied white folks moving in.

Why should a home be worth more, thus command more in property tax, because white folks live in it or somewhere near it? The house didn't change. The neighborhood and its amenities didn't change. Occupancy rates didn't change. And you know doggone well the houses those retired folks were living in didn't change.

Note:

In D.C. property taxes aren't directly correlated/proportional to market prices, but if the market price goes up enough, the assessed value will also go up and then the property tax does too. Accordingly, there're a few year's lag between when prices jump and taxes jump.​

I think your choice of using DC only reinforces what I have been saying. Their government bureaucracy is mostly made up of blacks, and they have been a progressive stronghold for decades.

Just sayin...

They certainly do with regard to blacks lacking the freedom live where they wanted. My earlier post sought to amplify your "red" comment and offer some context and history to the conversation based on my knowledge of what transpired in D.C. There's more to the story, of course. Blacks were and often enough continue to be forced to live "wherever," that is until whites want to live there, whereupon blacks then get forced out.

Years ago, for example, it was blacks being forced to live in interstitial dwellings, carriage and storage houses basically. In some cases, they lived in the English basements. (One can see the access to one at the front of the grey rowhouse pictured earlier.) The reason for that was, of course, practical. Slave owners and later white employers wanted their servants close at hand and having no means of their own, those black folks lived in the alley buildings behind their bosses' homes. At that point in time, blacks didn't own the buildings; they merely lived there.

Later, after slavery's end and when first emerged a semblance of a black middle class, blacks who mustered the money to buy a home were forced to live in the city because they were denied the opportunity to live in the "streetcar suburbs" like Chevy Chase. A tiny number of blacks, Frederick Douglass for one, managed to move to "suburbs" of their own on the South side of the city after the restrictive covenants (I presume these are what you had in mind in your earlier post) were lifted.

Frederick Douglass House, D.C.​

More recently, as described in my earlier post, after having found contentment living in the city where blacks had been obliged to live, whites have come to want to live there and blacks who've lived there for ages are being driven out by forces that are neither rational nor equitable. Thus in examining the history of black housing in D.C. one finds several stories. One of them is that of how middle class blacks' quest to enjoy that part of the American Dream given by home ownership variously has been the story of how whites have shifted the declination of the playing field to suit them, overtly at first via restrictive covenants and insidiously by dint of nothing other than being present in our white skin.

(And no, I don't think the covert unleveling of the playing field in the dimension discussed above is a deliberate action on the part of white folks who just want to live downtown. I just think that a lot of whites aren't aware of the actual impact they have, how and why they have it. I'd like to think that if more whites understood it, they'd be more vocal and strident about acting to end it, but I don't know....)


Purple:
I'm not sure what this has to do with my comments or the history of events I described. Perhaps it has to do with an aspect of the thread discussion upon which I've not remarked? Are you entreating me to discuss a topic other than the story of blacks and their housing situation (in D.C?) over time? I'm just not sure where the "purple" remark came from vis a vis my initial reply to you....

 

[320 Years of History]

Here is a very well researched, data driven look at how things just aren't the same for people of color when it comes to upward mobility and wealth creation.

The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today

It would be great if at least one person is able to learn something from this info. In so many ways....the path toward prosperity is much more difficult for black Americans.

The average black family would be indeed unable to build the wealth of their white or East-Asian counterparts in the US or anywhere else in the world. Time is not a factor and genetics are a bitch.

Red:
Excuse the hell outta me??? WTF?

By what bizarre stretch of the imagination do you come to think that?

• You do realize that some 90% or more of member of the black middle class and black wealthy segments of the population today are at best two generations away from having existed in abject poverty?

Yes, there is a small segment of the black population -- folks like Charlene Jarvis and Flaxie Pinkett -- who came from inarguably middle class backgrounds and who've thrived. However, most successful blacks whom one sees today did not issue from such privileged (for having been black) beginnings.

I don't know whom you have in mind when you made the remark you did above, but your having made it rejects the accomplishments of millions of average black folks who have gone to school, done well and succeeded in America in spite of the societal, structural and systemic challenges of doing so and that accrued solely from their ethnicity.

• Uniondale, NY
• Hillcrest, NY
• Oak Bluffs, MA (not exactly a black neighborhood, but where upper middle class blacks have summered for over a century)
• Friendly, MD
• Mitchellville/Woodmore, MD
• Kettering, MD
• "Gold Coast", DC
• North Portal, DC
• Hillcrest, DC
• Fort Washington, MD
• Ladera, CA
• Calabasas, CA
• Multiple neighborhoods in and around Atlanta and most major cities in the country.

Just how do you think the black folks in those communities managed to move from their working class and poor beginnings to where they are now? Surely you don't think the current black middle class is merely and overwhelmingly inherited wealth and examples of exceptional rather than average folks doing well?

Spare us the platitudes, please! We were talking about the average black family, such as it is.

Red:
That's of whom I wrote too. Those D.C. area neighborhoods and Oak Bluffs I know quite well. I know that when you look at certain photos of those places you'll see what appear to be very grand homes, but I also know that while that grandeur is there, it's the exception more so than the rule. Those are very middle class, "average" people neighborhoods. Neighborhoods lived in overwhelmingly by nurses, police lieutenants and sergeants, small business owners, teachers, mid level office workers, and so on. So what, pray tell, is non-average about those sorts of folks? Is it your view that because they have achieved a middle class lifestyle in the U.S. that by definition they are not "average folks?"

Yes, there are subdivisions in the places I noted above that have million dollar and up homes and they too are black neighborhoods.

 

[westwall]

Look at Africa dude. The continent is one of the wealthiest on the planet and it is primarily a festering poophole. It ain't slavery from over 100 years ago that is keeping the black people down, it is their leaders (who profit from the misery) who benefit from keeping them culturally, and socially backwards. Get the blacks out of their self imposed ghetto's and they blossom.

That is true, blacks who have made it to the suburbs are substantially better off than inner city blacks.

And until about a generation ago, there were concerted, blatant attempts by governments, realtors, and private citizens to ensure that blacks were never given the chance to settle outside of the inner city, no matter their means.

1920s–1948: Racially Restrictive Covenants

...And then people got tired of spending hours each day commuting to the city and decided they'd rather live downtown. Then what happened? The working/lower middle class blacks who owned their inner city homes right in the heart of the city saw young professionals move into their neighborhoods, along with the subway being built, and their property taxes rose beyond what they could afford to pay, forcing them to sell and move from their very conveniently located homes. This tended to happen to older, retired black folks who'd worked their whole lives to pay off the mortgage and being retired had no means of generating increased income flows to pay the far higher property taxes wrought by white folks moving into the neighborhood.

The neighborhoods weren't unsafe or unclean. They weren't run down. They were just populated most often by folks having modest means. This happened in D.C. in neighborhoods that have for over a century been black "society" neighborhoods and were in the 1990s and early 2000s populated by the retired doctors, lawyers and so on within the black community. These were "nice" people who owned nice homes (4K to 8K sq. foot homes), who made nice livings (for black folks of their day) but they were living on retirement incomes based on 1980s and before 21st century costs of living, and even for people such as that white folks moving in made it too expensive to stay.

Now one may say that the whole matter is just supply and demand, and one would be right. There's nothing especially wrong with that. So where's the "unevenness of the playing field" in the story? It's found in the fact that the only thing that changed was that white folks moved into the neighborhood and that alone is all that changed, aside, of course, from the huge leap in property values that accompanied white folks moving in.

Why should a home be worth more, thus command more in property tax, because white folks live in it or somewhere near it? The house didn't change. The neighborhood and its amenities didn't change. Occupancy rates didn't change. And you know doggone well the houses those retired folks were living in didn't change.

Note:

In D.C. property taxes aren't directly correlated/proportional to market prices, but if the market price goes up enough, the assessed value will also go up and then the property tax does too. Accordingly, there're a few year's lag between when prices jump and taxes jump.​

I think your choice of using DC only reinforces what I have been saying. Their government bureaucracy is mostly made up of blacks, and they have been a progressive stronghold for decades.

Just sayin...

They certainly do with regard to blacks lacking the freedom live where they wanted. My earlier post sought to amplify your "red" comment and offer some context and history to the conversation based on my knowledge of what transpired in D.C. There's more to the story, of course. Blacks were and often enough continue to be forced to live "wherever," that is until whites want to live there, whereupon blacks then get forced out.

Years ago, for example, it was blacks being forced to live in interstitial dwellings, carriage and storage houses basically. In some cases, they lived in the English basements. (One can see the access to one at the front of the grey rowhouse pictured earlier.) The reason for that was, of course, practical. Slave owners and later white employers wanted their servants close at hand and having no means of their own, those black folks lived in the alley buildings behind their bosses' homes. At that point in time, blacks didn't own the buildings; they merely lived there.

Later, after slavery's end and when first emerged a semblance of a black middle class, blacks who mustered the money to buy a home were forced to live in the city because they were denied the opportunity to live in the "streetcar suburbs" like Chevy Chase. A tiny number of blacks, Frederick Douglass for one, managed to move to "suburbs" of their own on the South side of the city after the restrictive covenants (I presume these are what you had in mind in your earlier post) were lifted.

Frederick Douglass House, D.C.​

More recently, as described in my earlier post, after having found contentment living in the city where blacks had been obliged to live, whites have come to want to live there and blacks who've lived there for ages are being driven out by forces that are neither rational nor equitable. Thus in examining the history of black housing in D.C. one finds several stories. One of them is that of how middle class blacks' quest to enjoy that part of the American Dream given by home ownership variously has been the story of how whites have shifted the declination of the playing field to suit them, overtly at first via restrictive covenants and insidiously by dint of nothing other than being present in our white skin.

(And no, I don't think the covert unleveling of the playing field in the dimension discussed above is a deliberate action on the part of white folks who just want to live downtown. I just think that a lot of whites aren't aware of the actual impact they have, how and why they have it. I'd like to think that if more whites understood it, they'd be more vocal and strident about acting to end it, but I don't know....)


Purple:
I'm not sure what this has to do with my comments or the history of events I described. Perhaps it has to do with an aspect of the thread discussion upon which I've not remarked? Are you entreating me to discuss a topic other than the story of blacks and their housing situation (in D.C?) over time? I'm just not sure where the "purple" remark came from vis a vis my initial reply to you....

For the longest time those who could, left the inner cities for a better atmosphere. The advent of the car allowed that to happen. The effort to reclaim the inner cities is driven by the youth market who don't want to commute any longer and by the progressives themselves who wish to concentrate the populations in the city cores to supposedly combat green house gases. You're hoist on your own petard.

 

[Fair&Balanced]

That is true, blacks who have made it to the suburbs are substantially better off than inner city blacks.

And until about a generation ago, there were concerted, blatant attempts by governments, realtors, and private citizens to ensure that blacks were never given the chance to settle outside of the inner city, no matter their means.

1920s–1948: Racially Restrictive Covenants

...And then people got tired of spending hours each day commuting to the city and decided they'd rather live downtown. Then what happened? The working/lower middle class blacks who owned their inner city homes right in the heart of the city saw young professionals move into their neighborhoods, along with the subway being built, and their property taxes rose beyond what they could afford to pay, forcing them to sell and move from their very conveniently located homes. This tended to happen to older, retired black folks who'd worked their whole lives to pay off the mortgage and being retired had no means of generating increased income flows to pay the far higher property taxes wrought by white folks moving into the neighborhood.

The neighborhoods weren't unsafe or unclean. They weren't run down. They were just populated most often by folks having modest means. This happened in D.C. in neighborhoods that have for over a century been black "society" neighborhoods and were in the 1990s and early 2000s populated by the retired doctors, lawyers and so on within the black community. These were "nice" people who owned nice homes (4K to 8K sq. foot homes), who made nice livings (for black folks of their day) but they were living on retirement incomes based on 1980s and before 21st century costs of living, and even for people such as that white folks moving in made it too expensive to stay.

Now one may say that the whole matter is just supply and demand, and one would be right. There's nothing especially wrong with that. So where's the "unevenness of the playing field" in the story? It's found in the fact that the only thing that changed was that white folks moved into the neighborhood and that alone is all that changed, aside, of course, from the huge leap in property values that accompanied white folks moving in.

Why should a home be worth more, thus command more in property tax, because white folks live in it or somewhere near it? The house didn't change. The neighborhood and its amenities didn't change. Occupancy rates didn't change. And you know doggone well the houses those retired folks were living in didn't change.

Note:

In D.C. property taxes aren't directly correlated/proportional to market prices, but if the market price goes up enough, the assessed value will also go up and then the property tax does too. Accordingly, there're a few year's lag between when prices jump and taxes jump.​

I think your choice of using DC only reinforces what I have been saying. Their government bureaucracy is mostly made up of blacks, and they have been a progressive stronghold for decades.

Just sayin...

They certainly do with regard to blacks lacking the freedom live where they wanted. My earlier post sought to amplify your "red" comment and offer some context and history to the conversation based on my knowledge of what transpired in D.C. There's more to the story, of course. Blacks were and often enough continue to be forced to live "wherever," that is until whites want to live there, whereupon blacks then get forced out.

Years ago, for example, it was blacks being forced to live in interstitial dwellings, carriage and storage houses basically. In some cases, they lived in the English basements. (One can see the access to one at the front of the grey rowhouse pictured earlier.) The reason for that was, of course, practical. Slave owners and later white employers wanted their servants close at hand and having no means of their own, those black folks lived in the alley buildings behind their bosses' homes. At that point in time, blacks didn't own the buildings; they merely lived there.

Later, after slavery's end and when first emerged a semblance of a black middle class, blacks who mustered the money to buy a home were forced to live in the city because they were denied the opportunity to live in the "streetcar suburbs" like Chevy Chase. A tiny number of blacks, Frederick Douglass for one, managed to move to "suburbs" of their own on the South side of the city after the restrictive covenants (I presume these are what you had in mind in your earlier post) were lifted.

Frederick Douglass House, D.C.​

More recently, as described in my earlier post, after having found contentment living in the city where blacks had been obliged to live, whites have come to want to live there and blacks who've lived there for ages are being driven out by forces that are neither rational nor equitable. Thus in examining the history of black housing in D.C. one finds several stories. One of them is that of how middle class blacks' quest to enjoy that part of the American Dream given by home ownership variously has been the story of how whites have shifted the declination of the playing field to suit them, overtly at first via restrictive covenants and insidiously by dint of nothing other than being present in our white skin.

(And no, I don't think the covert unleveling of the playing field in the dimension discussed above is a deliberate action on the part of white folks who just want to live downtown. I just think that a lot of whites aren't aware of the actual impact they have, how and why they have it. I'd like to think that if more whites understood it, they'd be more vocal and strident about acting to end it, but I don't know....)


Purple:
I'm not sure what this has to do with my comments or the history of events I described. Perhaps it has to do with an aspect of the thread discussion upon which I've not remarked? Are you entreating me to discuss a topic other than the story of blacks and their housing situation (in D.C?) over time? I'm just not sure where the "purple" remark came from vis a vis my initial reply to you....

For the longest time those who could, left the inner cities for a better atmosphere. The advent of the car allowed that to happen. The effort to reclaim the inner cities is driven by the youth market who don't want to commute any longer and by the progressives themselves who wish to concentrate the populations in the city cores to supposedly combat green house gases. You're hoist on your own petard.

That's true, Hipsters have made it "cool" to renovate inner cities. That of course is going to raise the value of inner city properties, that's not racism, that's economics.

 

[GaryDog]

That is true, blacks who have made it to the suburbs are substantially better off than inner city blacks.

And until about a generation ago, there were concerted, blatant attempts by governments, realtors, and private citizens to ensure that blacks were never given the chance to settle outside of the inner city, no matter their means.

1920s–1948: Racially Restrictive Covenants

...And then people got tired of spending hours each day commuting to the city and decided they'd rather live downtown. Then what happened? The working/lower middle class blacks who owned their inner city homes right in the heart of the city saw young professionals move into their neighborhoods, along with the subway being built, and their property taxes rose beyond what they could afford to pay, forcing them to sell and move from their very conveniently located homes. This tended to happen to older, retired black folks who'd worked their whole lives to pay off the mortgage and being retired had no means of generating increased income flows to pay the far higher property taxes wrought by white folks moving into the neighborhood.

The neighborhoods weren't unsafe or unclean. They weren't run down. They were just populated most often by folks having modest means. This happened in D.C. in neighborhoods that have for over a century been black "society" neighborhoods and were in the 1990s and early 2000s populated by the retired doctors, lawyers and so on within the black community. These were "nice" people who owned nice homes (4K to 8K sq. foot homes), who made nice livings (for black folks of their day) but they were living on retirement incomes based on 1980s and before 21st century costs of living, and even for people such as that white folks moving in made it too expensive to stay.

Now one may say that the whole matter is just supply and demand, and one would be right. There's nothing especially wrong with that. So where's the "unevenness of the playing field" in the story? It's found in the fact that the only thing that changed was that white folks moved into the neighborhood and that alone is all that changed, aside, of course, from the huge leap in property values that accompanied white folks moving in.

Why should a home be worth more, thus command more in property tax, because white folks live in it or somewhere near it? The house didn't change. The neighborhood and its amenities didn't change. Occupancy rates didn't change. And you know doggone well the houses those retired folks were living in didn't change.

Note:

In D.C. property taxes aren't directly correlated/proportional to market prices, but if the market price goes up enough, the assessed value will also go up and then the property tax does too. Accordingly, there're a few year's lag between when prices jump and taxes jump.​

I think your choice of using DC only reinforces what I have been saying. Their government bureaucracy is mostly made up of blacks, and they have been a progressive stronghold for decades.

Just sayin...

They certainly do with regard to blacks lacking the freedom live where they wanted. My earlier post sought to amplify your "red" comment and offer some context and history to the conversation based on my knowledge of what transpired in D.C. There's more to the story, of course. Blacks were and often enough continue to be forced to live "wherever," that is until whites want to live there, whereupon blacks then get forced out.

Years ago, for example, it was blacks being forced to live in interstitial dwellings, carriage and storage houses basically. In some cases, they lived in the English basements. (One can see the access to one at the front of the grey rowhouse pictured earlier.) The reason for that was, of course, practical. Slave owners and later white employers wanted their servants close at hand and having no means of their own, those black folks lived in the alley buildings behind their bosses' homes. At that point in time, blacks didn't own the buildings; they merely lived there.

Later, after slavery's end and when first emerged a semblance of a black middle class, blacks who mustered the money to buy a home were forced to live in the city because they were denied the opportunity to live in the "streetcar suburbs" like Chevy Chase. A tiny number of blacks, Frederick Douglass for one, managed to move to "suburbs" of their own on the South side of the city after the restrictive covenants (I presume these are what you had in mind in your earlier post) were lifted.

Frederick Douglass House, D.C.​

More recently, as described in my earlier post, after having found contentment living in the city where blacks had been obliged to live, whites have come to want to live there and blacks who've lived there for ages are being driven out by forces that are neither rational nor equitable. Thus in examining the history of black housing in D.C. one finds several stories. One of them is that of how middle class blacks' quest to enjoy that part of the American Dream given by home ownership variously has been the story of how whites have shifted the declination of the playing field to suit them, overtly at first via restrictive covenants and insidiously by dint of nothing other than being present in our white skin.

(And no, I don't think the covert unleveling of the playing field in the dimension discussed above is a deliberate action on the part of white folks who just want to live downtown. I just think that a lot of whites aren't aware of the actual impact they have, how and why they have it. I'd like to think that if more whites understood it, they'd be more vocal and strident about acting to end it, but I don't know....)


Purple:
I'm not sure what this has to do with my comments or the history of events I described. Perhaps it has to do with an aspect of the thread discussion upon which I've not remarked? Are you entreating me to discuss a topic other than the story of blacks and their housing situation (in D.C?) over time? I'm just not sure where the "purple" remark came from vis a vis my initial reply to you....

For the longest time those who could, left the inner cities for a better atmosphere. The advent of the car allowed that to happen. The effort to reclaim the inner cities is driven by the youth market who don't want to commute any longer and by the progressives themselves who wish to concentrate the populations in the city cores to supposedly combat green house gases. You're hoist on your own petard.

We get it. Democrats and liberals are responsible for all the ills of all people. Sheesh

 

[westwall]

And until about a generation ago, there were concerted, blatant attempts by governments, realtors, and private citizens to ensure that blacks were never given the chance to settle outside of the inner city, no matter their means.

1920s–1948: Racially Restrictive Covenants

...And then people got tired of spending hours each day commuting to the city and decided they'd rather live downtown. Then what happened? The working/lower middle class blacks who owned their inner city homes right in the heart of the city saw young professionals move into their neighborhoods, along with the subway being built, and their property taxes rose beyond what they could afford to pay, forcing them to sell and move from their very conveniently located homes. This tended to happen to older, retired black folks who'd worked their whole lives to pay off the mortgage and being retired had no means of generating increased income flows to pay the far higher property taxes wrought by white folks moving into the neighborhood.

The neighborhoods weren't unsafe or unclean. They weren't run down. They were just populated most often by folks having modest means. This happened in D.C. in neighborhoods that have for over a century been black "society" neighborhoods and were in the 1990s and early 2000s populated by the retired doctors, lawyers and so on within the black community. These were "nice" people who owned nice homes (4K to 8K sq. foot homes), who made nice livings (for black folks of their day) but they were living on retirement incomes based on 1980s and before 21st century costs of living, and even for people such as that white folks moving in made it too expensive to stay.

Now one may say that the whole matter is just supply and demand, and one would be right. There's nothing especially wrong with that. So where's the "unevenness of the playing field" in the story? It's found in the fact that the only thing that changed was that white folks moved into the neighborhood and that alone is all that changed, aside, of course, from the huge leap in property values that accompanied white folks moving in.

Why should a home be worth more, thus command more in property tax, because white folks live in it or somewhere near it? The house didn't change. The neighborhood and its amenities didn't change. Occupancy rates didn't change. And you know doggone well the houses those retired folks were living in didn't change.

Note:

In D.C. property taxes aren't directly correlated/proportional to market prices, but if the market price goes up enough, the assessed value will also go up and then the property tax does too. Accordingly, there're a few year's lag between when prices jump and taxes jump.​

I think your choice of using DC only reinforces what I have been saying. Their government bureaucracy is mostly made up of blacks, and they have been a progressive stronghold for decades.

Just sayin...

They certainly do with regard to blacks lacking the freedom live where they wanted. My earlier post sought to amplify your "red" comment and offer some context and history to the conversation based on my knowledge of what transpired in D.C. There's more to the story, of course. Blacks were and often enough continue to be forced to live "wherever," that is until whites want to live there, whereupon blacks then get forced out.

Years ago, for example, it was blacks being forced to live in interstitial dwellings, carriage and storage houses basically. In some cases, they lived in the English basements. (One can see the access to one at the front of the grey rowhouse pictured earlier.) The reason for that was, of course, practical. Slave owners and later white employers wanted their servants close at hand and having no means of their own, those black folks lived in the alley buildings behind their bosses' homes. At that point in time, blacks didn't own the buildings; they merely lived there.

Later, after slavery's end and when first emerged a semblance of a black middle class, blacks who mustered the money to buy a home were forced to live in the city because they were denied the opportunity to live in the "streetcar suburbs" like Chevy Chase. A tiny number of blacks, Frederick Douglass for one, managed to move to "suburbs" of their own on the South side of the city after the restrictive covenants (I presume these are what you had in mind in your earlier post) were lifted.

Frederick Douglass House, D.C.​

More recently, as described in my earlier post, after having found contentment living in the city where blacks had been obliged to live, whites have come to want to live there and blacks who've lived there for ages are being driven out by forces that are neither rational nor equitable. Thus in examining the history of black housing in D.C. one finds several stories. One of them is that of how middle class blacks' quest to enjoy that part of the American Dream given by home ownership variously has been the story of how whites have shifted the declination of the playing field to suit them, overtly at first via restrictive covenants and insidiously by dint of nothing other than being present in our white skin.

(And no, I don't think the covert unleveling of the playing field in the dimension discussed above is a deliberate action on the part of white folks who just want to live downtown. I just think that a lot of whites aren't aware of the actual impact they have, how and why they have it. I'd like to think that if more whites understood it, they'd be more vocal and strident about acting to end it, but I don't know....)


Purple:
I'm not sure what this has to do with my comments or the history of events I described. Perhaps it has to do with an aspect of the thread discussion upon which I've not remarked? Are you entreating me to discuss a topic other than the story of blacks and their housing situation (in D.C?) over time? I'm just not sure where the "purple" remark came from vis a vis my initial reply to you....

For the longest time those who could, left the inner cities for a better atmosphere. The advent of the car allowed that to happen. The effort to reclaim the inner cities is driven by the youth market who don't want to commute any longer and by the progressives themselves who wish to concentrate the populations in the city cores to supposedly combat green house gases. You're hoist on your own petard.

We get it. Democrats and liberals are responsible for all the ills of all people. Sheesh

Not all. Just most. Dude I'm a liberal Democrat. I love helping people and the government has a place in that. The problem is progressives want government to be the end all and be all of human life. This is a sort of thinking that is unfortunate because they invariably grab up all of the available resources and leave none to do beneficial work as they have to take care of the bureaucrats who are supposed to run the programs.

 

[GaryDog]

...And then people got tired of spending hours each day commuting to the city and decided they'd rather live downtown. Then what happened? The working/lower middle class blacks who owned their inner city homes right in the heart of the city saw young professionals move into their neighborhoods, along with the subway being built, and their property taxes rose beyond what they could afford to pay, forcing them to sell and move from their very conveniently located homes. This tended to happen to older, retired black folks who'd worked their whole lives to pay off the mortgage and being retired had no means of generating increased income flows to pay the far higher property taxes wrought by white folks moving into the neighborhood.

The neighborhoods weren't unsafe or unclean. They weren't run down. They were just populated most often by folks having modest means. This happened in D.C. in neighborhoods that have for over a century been black "society" neighborhoods and were in the 1990s and early 2000s populated by the retired doctors, lawyers and so on within the black community. These were "nice" people who owned nice homes (4K to 8K sq. foot homes), who made nice livings (for black folks of their day) but they were living on retirement incomes based on 1980s and before 21st century costs of living, and even for people such as that white folks moving in made it too expensive to stay.

Now one may say that the whole matter is just supply and demand, and one would be right. There's nothing especially wrong with that. So where's the "unevenness of the playing field" in the story? It's found in the fact that the only thing that changed was that white folks moved into the neighborhood and that alone is all that changed, aside, of course, from the huge leap in property values that accompanied white folks moving in.

Why should a home be worth more, thus command more in property tax, because white folks live in it or somewhere near it? The house didn't change. The neighborhood and its amenities didn't change. Occupancy rates didn't change. And you know doggone well the houses those retired folks were living in didn't change.

Note:

In D.C. property taxes aren't directly correlated/proportional to market prices, but if the market price goes up enough, the assessed value will also go up and then the property tax does too. Accordingly, there're a few year's lag between when prices jump and taxes jump.​

I think your choice of using DC only reinforces what I have been saying. Their government bureaucracy is mostly made up of blacks, and they have been a progressive stronghold for decades.

Just sayin...

They certainly do with regard to blacks lacking the freedom live where they wanted. My earlier post sought to amplify your "red" comment and offer some context and history to the conversation based on my knowledge of what transpired in D.C. There's more to the story, of course. Blacks were and often enough continue to be forced to live "wherever," that is until whites want to live there, whereupon blacks then get forced out.

Years ago, for example, it was blacks being forced to live in interstitial dwellings, carriage and storage houses basically. In some cases, they lived in the English basements. (One can see the access to one at the front of the grey rowhouse pictured earlier.) The reason for that was, of course, practical. Slave owners and later white employers wanted their servants close at hand and having no means of their own, those black folks lived in the alley buildings behind their bosses' homes. At that point in time, blacks didn't own the buildings; they merely lived there.

Later, after slavery's end and when first emerged a semblance of a black middle class, blacks who mustered the money to buy a home were forced to live in the city because they were denied the opportunity to live in the "streetcar suburbs" like Chevy Chase. A tiny number of blacks, Frederick Douglass for one, managed to move to "suburbs" of their own on the South side of the city after the restrictive covenants (I presume these are what you had in mind in your earlier post) were lifted.

Frederick Douglass House, D.C.​

More recently, as described in my earlier post, after having found contentment living in the city where blacks had been obliged to live, whites have come to want to live there and blacks who've lived there for ages are being driven out by forces that are neither rational nor equitable. Thus in examining the history of black housing in D.C. one finds several stories. One of them is that of how middle class blacks' quest to enjoy that part of the American Dream given by home ownership variously has been the story of how whites have shifted the declination of the playing field to suit them, overtly at first via restrictive covenants and insidiously by dint of nothing other than being present in our white skin.

(And no, I don't think the covert unleveling of the playing field in the dimension discussed above is a deliberate action on the part of white folks who just want to live downtown. I just think that a lot of whites aren't aware of the actual impact they have, how and why they have it. I'd like to think that if more whites understood it, they'd be more vocal and strident about acting to end it, but I don't know....)


Purple:
I'm not sure what this has to do with my comments or the history of events I described. Perhaps it has to do with an aspect of the thread discussion upon which I've not remarked? Are you entreating me to discuss a topic other than the story of blacks and their housing situation (in D.C?) over time? I'm just not sure where the "purple" remark came from vis a vis my initial reply to you....

For the longest time those who could, left the inner cities for a better atmosphere. The advent of the car allowed that to happen. The effort to reclaim the inner cities is driven by the youth market who don't want to commute any longer and by the progressives themselves who wish to concentrate the populations in the city cores to supposedly combat green house gases. You're hoist on your own petard.

We get it. Democrats and liberals are responsible for all the ills of all people. Sheesh

Not all. Just most. Dude I'm a liberal Democrat. I love helping people and the government has a place in that. The problem is progressives want government to be the end all and be all of human life. This is a sort of thinking that is unfortunate because they invariably grab up all of the available resources and leave none to do beneficial work as they have to take care of the bureaucrats who are supposed to run the programs.

That's a complete straw-man argument. And the inefficiency argument goes double for private businesses, who more often than not are the ones contracting with the government, and wasting public money. I have zero confidence in the private sector, for example, to wholly handle necessary public services like health care and policing. There will be horrific inequality and inefficiency, and this has been proven in many countries in South America where we sent in specially trained capitalists to de-nationalize every aspect of govt industry, to horrifying results. Not to mention it's been demonstrated by the insane amount of waste generated by Blackwater and Halliburton, et al, during the Iraq War.

 

[GaryDog]

Here is a very well researched, data driven look at how things just aren't the same for people of color when it comes to upward mobility and wealth creation.

The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today

It would be great if at least one person is able to learn something from this info. In so many ways....the path toward prosperity is much more difficult for black Americans.

The average black family would be indeed unable to build the wealth of their white or East-Asian counterparts in the US or anywhere else in the world. Time is not a factor and genetics are a bitch.

Red:
Excuse the hell outta me??? WTF?

By what bizarre stretch of the imagination do you come to think that?

• You do realize that some 90% or more of member of the black middle class and black wealthy segments of the population today are at best two generations away from having existed in abject poverty?

Yes, there is a small segment of the black population -- folks like Charlene Jarvis and Flaxie Pinkett -- who came from inarguably middle class backgrounds and who've thrived. However, most successful blacks whom one sees today did not issue from such privileged (for having been black) beginnings.

I don't know whom you have in mind when you made the remark you did above, but your having made it rejects the accomplishments of millions of average black folks who have gone to school, done well and succeeded in America in spite of the societal, structural and systemic challenges of doing so and that accrued solely from their ethnicity.

• Uniondale, NY
• Hillcrest, NY
• Oak Bluffs, MA (not exactly a black neighborhood, but where upper middle class blacks have summered for over a century)
• Friendly, MD
• Mitchellville/Woodmore, MD
• Kettering, MD
• "Gold Coast", DC
• North Portal, DC
• Hillcrest, DC
• Fort Washington, MD
• Ladera, CA
• Calabasas, CA
• Multiple neighborhoods in and around Atlanta and most major cities in the country.

Just how do you think the black folks in those communities managed to move from their working class and poor beginnings to where they are now? Surely you don't think the current black middle class is merely and overwhelmingly inherited wealth and examples of exceptional rather than average folks doing well?

Spare us the platitudes, please! We were talking about the average black family, such as it is.

I'm seriously beginning to think that this forum is simply a meetup for Klan members.