JoeB131
Diamond Member
he government are not the landlords who don't keep up property or let vacant properties sit while writing depreciation off on their taxes. 15 years ago, I worked in a hood with a church-created CDC and they tried to buy some community eyesores from white owners who lived in the suburbs. In one case an owner was asking for 60,000 dollars for a building that had no roof, all the windows were gone, the inside was rubble and the only thing that could be done to that building was tear it down. We offered to get an appraiser and we would pay the appraised value. He didn't want to do that because he knew that the building would not be appraised at anywhere near 60,000. Over the years I have driven by that area and the eyesore still stands. And that eyesore, owned by a white man in the suburbs is reducing the property value in that community. So fuck Ray.
It sounds to me like the solution to that would be to appeal to the zoning board and have that building condemned.
I do see the other end of it, though. Condo complex I recently moved out of has 30 or so section 8 families out of 256 units. Essentially, some investors picked up the properties when the prices bottomed out in the 2008 crash, and they rent them out to some people who are crowding five people into a one bedroom apartment. The Condo board tried to pass a limit on occupancy, and they threatened to sue. Last year, the ownership voted overwealmingly to take a buy out from an investor, and guess who is suing in court to block the sale? Yup. The same investors who don't live on the property.
We were seeing the local PD out there about once a week, usually breaking up a domestic.
NOw, this isn't a racial thing, because some of the offending idiots were white, Hispanic, one was even south Asian, where the cops were coming out once a week, and then we had a bad smell coming out of the apartment we thought was decomp. (Fortunately, it was only food they left in the fridge before the power was shut off.)
Section 8 might be a better policy than the high-rise projects... but still have a lot of problems.
And most white people didn't notice that almost 95 percent of the protests had no violence or damage. Many that did, the damage was done by whites. Police were not overwhelmed because they were still shooting and killing unarmed blacks. Trump was soundly defeated.
Trump was hardly "soundly defeated" if it took until Saturday to confirm that Biden won. And frankly, people have every reason to be concerned about the riots.
I have another friend of mine, a gay Hispanic woman, who I recently found out voted for Trump in the last election, because she thought that he was better for the economy and because some of the things that Democrats said during the election kind of frightened her. (IT doesn't help her current girlfriend is a Republican).
The question is not what black peoples goals are. The question is when will whites decide to take the responsibility they have to fix the damage created by the continuing racism that some still today are inflicting on communities of color instead of pretending racism doesn't exist now and that they are being blamed for stuff they did not do?
I guess the problem is, do you believe in collective guilt? I could argue that my family on my father's side were German immigrants, and my family on my mothers side were poor Missouri dirt farmers. None of them owned slaves, none of them really benefited from Jim Crow.
Of course, our history IS full of racial injustices, and we really do need to fix that. Which is why I support affirmative action, even though I once lost out on an opportunity to someone who was utterly unqualified for the job. (This woman actually had the nerve to call me at home after my contract ended on how to do an aspect of her job. I politely told her since I was no longer being paid and shouldn't have access to confidential company data, I really couldn't help her.)