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If you look deep enough into the history of any modestly large Amercian city (pop. 250,000 +) and it's surrounding suburbs, you will see a metro area that was a

If you look deep enough into the history of any modestly large Amercian city (pop. 250,000 +) and it's surrounding suburbs, you will see a metro area that was and still is being shaped by race. It's not a surprise that SF's first zoning law was a veiled attempt at curbing Chinese immigrants, it's not a surprise that when the highways were built in Portland, OR the mostly black neighborhoods in NE Portland were razed to make room for cars. Here is a quote from a recent Cupertino City Council meeting where new apartments, with a % allocated to affordable house, were up for discussion: “The idea of Cupertino is to have people living here that are educated with degrees. Bringing this in would bring a lot of probably lower income people, and that would definitely bring down our median average household income.” American urban policy is filled with slight of hand comments and maneuvers just like this. A poster has been down-voted to oblivion for pointing out the hypocrisy that the bluest states have the most un-affordable housing, but I do think there is a thread here which highlights the hypocrisy of those who virtue signal for equality but advocate for policies that secure their wealth and make it almost impossible for lower income folks to survive.

sol_remmy 8y ago
> If you look deep enough into the history of any modestly large Amercian city Sadly this is true for any multicultural city in any country of the world
badpun 8y ago
> “The idea of Cupertino is to have people living here that are educated with degrees. Bringing this in would bring a lot of probably lower income people, and that would definitely bring down our median average household income.” > American urban policy is filled with slight of hand comments and maneuvers just like this. How do you know they don't actually mean it? People can be as biased against low income neighbors as against neighbors of races different than their own.
- 40acres 8y ago
  On an individual basis, you really don't know, this is why to come to a conclusion that policy methods are discriminatory you need to look at large scale patterns. This shows a bit with regard to voter rights in America. If you look at the history, most state level voter laws are designed in a way to suppress the vote -- but these laws are championed as ways to "stop voter fraud" among other things. The individual who made this comment may or may not have racial bias, but I'd love to see how the Cupertino city council has dealt with other policies which may change the racial make up of the city in the past.
- epistasis 8y ago
  Race and low income are inextricably linked because of racist past policies, which fund schools vastly differently based on property values, which provides very different access to education, which provides very different access to opportunities in the future. This particular commenter? I think they were 14 and just really stupid (edit: according to the Cupertino mayor, who was asked about a similar comment at 45:45 here [1]). So maybe not racist. But having spent enough time talking to adults who also talk like this, if you talk long enough the racist undertones become overtones. It's baked into our society, so though it's completely unacceptable to reveal these racist attitudes, the classist attitudes are slightly more acceptable. It's definitely a dogwhistle to others, even if this particular commenter was not intentionally dogwhistling. [1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/gimme-shelter-the-california-housing-crisis-podcast/id1280087136?mt=2&i=1000420161841 https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/gimme-shelter-the-califo...
  - badpun 8y ago
    > This particular commenter? I think they were 14 and just really stupid. So maybe not racist. But having spent enough time talking to adults who also talk like this, if you talk long enough the racist undertones become overtones. It's baked into our society, so though it's completely unacceptable to reveal these racist attitudes, the classist attitudes are slightly more acceptable. I'm not from America, and my own country is 99.9% white, so this is all foreign and very interesting for me. I'm wondering to what degree racism is about the actual race (physical traits) and to what degree about the socioeconomic traits that correlate with race. For example, I wonder if a typical white racist person would stil prefer a white drug addict or criminal as a neighbor over say someone like president Obama.
    - epistasis 8y ago
      In my experience, with something that extreme %99.999 of people prefer Obama over the white drug addict. But racism is on a spectrum, it's not a yes/no thing. Most of the existing racism is far more subtle, like fears over foreigners, or the different and the new. The full-on give-me-white-drug-addict-over Obama is usually only constrained to the super rare neo-Nazi breed of racism. Different cultures are also quite shocking. So even if that new family that moved in makes just as much money, has just as much education, but cooks different foods that smell funny to you, or talks in different ways, or puts on different displays, that can greatly impact acceptance. I mean, I can't say that I don't have some racist attitudes, because over my life time I've discovered that some things that I thought were perfectly reasonable non-racial preferences end up getting really intertwined. Especially because I grew up in a very white area, with almost no history of the racial prejudices that affect parts of the US, I didn't understand how racism played out until I was in an area with more diversity, and it was a learning process to even spot it, or figure out what was insulting or derogatory, since I had so little experience with it. But because so much of the racism is not the neo-Nazi type, is more subtle and probably less conscious, it's important to not be too moralizing about it, because moralizing just entrenches it. Instead of beating someone up over it, it's far better to show how the attitude has negative effects, and how there can be positive effects from not having that attitude. Of course, when people are speaking in codes, like they do in these meetings about "preserving neighborhood character," all that goes out the window. The article goes through lots of great examples of how even in the past, the racism was perpetuated with the cover of other excuses.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Well for one as soon as a counter example to what they nominally are complaining about comes up they suddenly break out in "no not like that". If they can never be pleased when their nominal reasons are satisfied and/or their web of objections are inconsistent it is clear something else is at play and that something else is usually racism. Look at Harvard and their shifting metrics for instance among others. At first the standardized tests were there for quality nominally for "the right people" for instance including deliberate cultural bias to the country club set as a shibboleth - even the most well read student in the "classics curriculum" wouldn't really know small sailcraft vocabulary and practical nautical backgrounds long moved onto motorboats. Then Jews started doing too good on them and they started adding other criteria like being "well rounded". For instance, wealthy asians move in and they now complain about it being "unaffordable" despite previous issues with affordable housing. I have heard about California public transit upgrades facing resistance with obvious dogwhistle opposition about how train lines will bring in crime. When a train is a goddamn terrible escape vehicle given its linearity and predictability even without it featuring its own police force. Meanwhile and anyone with a truck and crowbar can reach and burglarize and moving truck rentals are both cheap and good camouflage.
  - masonic 8y ago
    a train is a goddamn terrible escape vehicle BART trains, especially in the East Bay, have harbored mass robberies and takeovers multiple times.
jiveturkey 8y ago
> “The idea of Cupertino is to have people living here that are educated with degrees. Bringing this in would bring a lot of probably lower income people, and that would definitely bring down our median average household income.” Doesn't seem covertly racist to me, but maybe I choose not to see it. It's bad enough on its face so no need to add racism really. A: they don't like poor people B: they don't want poor people living near them C: they want to prop up home values and this would limit that D: they feel comfortable speaking for cupertino as a whole, so probably a long time resident. Cupertino is overwhelmingly asian, 63% vs 32% in the county. Cupertino is a very wealthy town (rank 11th nationally in its size range). I think it's completely understandable, without introducing race, that anyone in a wealthy town doesn't want poor people bringing down the neighborhood. (Not saying it is or isn't correct or moral.) Also just want to point out that Cupertino is not urban.
- bigdubs 8y ago
  The dirty secret is that socioeconomic status and race are very related.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Related but not very. There are plenty of poor white people in the USA, trailer park trash and red neck being the slurs often used. And outside of the US, it can be totally separated. In China, for example, many of the poor people are ethnic han.
    - Retric 8y ago
      Poor white people are significantly less likely to live in cities. This has widespread impact, for example urban populations have more frequent police contact. ex: "Poor African Americans are four times more likely than poor whites to live in the central city, and twenty five times more likely to live in high-poverty neighborhoods." https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/67111/407425-Poor-People-and-Poor-Neighborhoods-in-The-Washington-Metropolitan-Area.pdf https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/67111/...
thousandautumns 8y ago
Interestingly, this isn't restricted to white people. I recently listened to an episode of a podcast (Planet Money, iirc), about housing prices and NIMBYism, and some pro-housing activists attended some council meetings in a largely Latino neighborhood in the Bay Area, and were met with lots of hostility as new developments were seen as leading to gentrification and destroying the Hispanic culture of the neighborhood.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  It's not really the same thing when you are worried about gentrification. While culture is a part of it, the biggest issue is that many do not own in poorer neighborhoods. They rent. And they know that gentrification will slowly push them all from their homes as rents creep upward. So, it's not that white people will ruin the Hispanic culture, it's that having no Hispanic residents will ruin the Hispanic culture.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    Even when they do own, property taxes can often force them to sell at a discount to avoid disastrously high tax bills. This was part of the selling point of Prop 13 iirc, although certainly not the real purpose.
qubax 8y ago
> you will see a metro area that was and still is being shaped by race. In NYC, a major example is Robert Moses' Cross Bronx Expressway which "conveniently" cut through large swathes of minority neighborhoods. But it's not just the metro area. It's the entire country if you consider the extermination of the natives and the formation of the reservations ( easily the poorest regions of the western world today ). > A poster has been down-voted to oblivion for pointing out the hypocrisy that the bluest states have the most un-affordable housing Sad to say, that's to be expected. I had someone go through my history and downvote all of the comments. It's strange that people are so invested.
0xcafecafe 8y ago
Second that. Here in Atlanta, the expansion of the Marta (basically the metro train) to suburban neighborhoods is held up due to similar issues.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
davidw 8y ago
No one has mentioned "The Color of Law" yet, so here it is: https://amzn.to/2IjeIhi https://amzn.to/2IjeIhi It's an entire book dedicated to this hypothesis, with a bunch of evidence. It's difficult reading because it pisses you off to hear about how horrible people were (and are), but it's a very good book.
smsm42 8y ago
> Bringing this in would bring a lot of probably lower income people, and that would definitely bring down our median average household income. Isn't that a mathematical truism? If you build lower priced housing, then people with less income would be able to afford it. If people with less income buy these houses, average income among house owners would necessarily decrease - that's what the average means!
rayiner 8y ago
Get on dcurbanmom or the city-data forums for "blue" cities and see how much coded racism there is. E.g. in these threads about a new elementary school in Southwest D.C.: http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/500311.page; http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/500311.page; http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/495190.page http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/495190.page.
- tptacek 8y ago
  Those threads are amazing. I live on the border between a middle-class overwhelmingly AA Chicago neighborhood and one of the wealthier Chicago suburbs, and you'd think you'd get stuff like this on all the forums, but I've never seen anything like this before in any forum.
purplezooey 8y ago
I can't believe somebody actually said that in public. (referring to Cupertino comment). They should be ashamed.
- briandear 8y ago
  “One resident said he feared low-income, high-density housing would bring in “uneducated” people. “A lot of other residents and I are concerned that this would make the current residents of Cupertino uncomfortable, and would split our city in half,” he said.” ..it was far worse that you could imagine. It was something like a 9 hour meeting https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/09/19/differences-of-opinion-emerge-about-the-future-of-vallco-at-tuesday-night-meeting/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/09/19/differences-of-opinio...
matchbok 8y ago
One could argue that these progressive "affordable" housing initiative actually make the problem worse. This is a supply problem, plain and simple. Every major city has huge zoning roadblocks and "affordable" regulations that constrain supply. The programs in question (inclusionary zoning) are stupid expensive, and yet provide basically a lottery of a few hundred subsidized units a year.
BurningFrog 8y ago
As dumb as that Cupertino quote was, remember that it was just one person who was behind it, and went viral just because it was that dumb.
village-idiot 8y ago
Pretty much all of America has a race problem, it’s just that the actual symptoms vary by geography.

sol_remmy 8y ago

> If you look deep enough into the history of any modestly large Amercian city Sadly this is true for any multicultural city in any country of the world

badpun 8y ago

> “The idea of Cupertino is to have people living here that are educated with degrees. Bringing this in would bring a lot of probably lower income people, and that would definitely bring down our median average household income.” > American urban policy is filled with slight of hand comments and maneuvers just like this. How do you know they don't actually mean it? People can be as biased against low income neighbors as against neighbors of races different than their own.

40acres 8y ago
On an individual basis, you really don't know, this is why to come to a conclusion that policy methods are discriminatory you need to look at large scale patterns. This shows a bit with regard to voter rights in America. If you look at the history, most state level voter laws are designed in a way to suppress the vote -- but these laws are championed as ways to "stop voter fraud" among other things. The individual who made this comment may or may not have racial bias, but I'd love to see how the Cupertino city council has dealt with other policies which may change the racial make up of the city in the past.
epistasis 8y ago
Race and low income are inextricably linked because of racist past policies, which fund schools vastly differently based on property values, which provides very different access to education, which provides very different access to opportunities in the future. This particular commenter? I think they were 14 and just really stupid (edit: according to the Cupertino mayor, who was asked about a similar comment at 45:45 here [1]). So maybe not racist. But having spent enough time talking to adults who also talk like this, if you talk long enough the racist undertones become overtones. It's baked into our society, so though it's completely unacceptable to reveal these racist attitudes, the classist attitudes are slightly more acceptable. It's definitely a dogwhistle to others, even if this particular commenter was not intentionally dogwhistling. [1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/gimme-shelter-the-california-housing-crisis-podcast/id1280087136?mt=2&i=1000420161841 https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/gimme-shelter-the-califo...
- badpun 8y ago
  > This particular commenter? I think they were 14 and just really stupid. So maybe not racist. But having spent enough time talking to adults who also talk like this, if you talk long enough the racist undertones become overtones. It's baked into our society, so though it's completely unacceptable to reveal these racist attitudes, the classist attitudes are slightly more acceptable. I'm not from America, and my own country is 99.9% white, so this is all foreign and very interesting for me. I'm wondering to what degree racism is about the actual race (physical traits) and to what degree about the socioeconomic traits that correlate with race. For example, I wonder if a typical white racist person would stil prefer a white drug addict or criminal as a neighbor over say someone like president Obama.
  - epistasis 8y ago
    In my experience, with something that extreme %99.999 of people prefer Obama over the white drug addict. But racism is on a spectrum, it's not a yes/no thing. Most of the existing racism is far more subtle, like fears over foreigners, or the different and the new. The full-on give-me-white-drug-addict-over Obama is usually only constrained to the super rare neo-Nazi breed of racism. Different cultures are also quite shocking. So even if that new family that moved in makes just as much money, has just as much education, but cooks different foods that smell funny to you, or talks in different ways, or puts on different displays, that can greatly impact acceptance. I mean, I can't say that I don't have some racist attitudes, because over my life time I've discovered that some things that I thought were perfectly reasonable non-racial preferences end up getting really intertwined. Especially because I grew up in a very white area, with almost no history of the racial prejudices that affect parts of the US, I didn't understand how racism played out until I was in an area with more diversity, and it was a learning process to even spot it, or figure out what was insulting or derogatory, since I had so little experience with it. But because so much of the racism is not the neo-Nazi type, is more subtle and probably less conscious, it's important to not be too moralizing about it, because moralizing just entrenches it. Instead of beating someone up over it, it's far better to show how the attitude has negative effects, and how there can be positive effects from not having that attitude. Of course, when people are speaking in codes, like they do in these meetings about "preserving neighborhood character," all that goes out the window. The article goes through lots of great examples of how even in the past, the racism was perpetuated with the cover of other excuses.
Nasrudith 8y ago
Well for one as soon as a counter example to what they nominally are complaining about comes up they suddenly break out in "no not like that". If they can never be pleased when their nominal reasons are satisfied and/or their web of objections are inconsistent it is clear something else is at play and that something else is usually racism. Look at Harvard and their shifting metrics for instance among others. At first the standardized tests were there for quality nominally for "the right people" for instance including deliberate cultural bias to the country club set as a shibboleth - even the most well read student in the "classics curriculum" wouldn't really know small sailcraft vocabulary and practical nautical backgrounds long moved onto motorboats. Then Jews started doing too good on them and they started adding other criteria like being "well rounded". For instance, wealthy asians move in and they now complain about it being "unaffordable" despite previous issues with affordable housing. I have heard about California public transit upgrades facing resistance with obvious dogwhistle opposition about how train lines will bring in crime. When a train is a goddamn terrible escape vehicle given its linearity and predictability even without it featuring its own police force. Meanwhile and anyone with a truck and crowbar can reach and burglarize and moving truck rentals are both cheap and good camouflage.
- masonic 8y ago
  a train is a goddamn terrible escape vehicle BART trains, especially in the East Bay, have harbored mass robberies and takeovers multiple times.

jiveturkey 8y ago

> “The idea of Cupertino is to have people living here that are educated with degrees. Bringing this in would bring a lot of probably lower income people, and that would definitely bring down our median average household income.” Doesn't seem covertly racist to me, but maybe I choose not to see it. It's bad enough on its face so no need to add racism really. A: they don't like poor people B: they don't want poor people living near them C: they want to prop up home values and this would limit that D: they feel comfortable speaking for cupertino as a whole, so probably a long time resident. Cupertino is overwhelmingly asian, 63% vs 32% in the county. Cupertino is a very wealthy town (rank 11th nationally in its size range). I think it's completely understandable, without introducing race, that anyone in a wealthy town doesn't want poor people bringing down the neighborhood. (Not saying it is or isn't correct or moral.) Also just want to point out that Cupertino is not urban.

bigdubs 8y ago
The dirty secret is that socioeconomic status and race are very related.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  Related but not very. There are plenty of poor white people in the USA, trailer park trash and red neck being the slurs often used. And outside of the US, it can be totally separated. In China, for example, many of the poor people are ethnic han.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Poor white people are significantly less likely to live in cities. This has widespread impact, for example urban populations have more frequent police contact. ex: "Poor African Americans are four times more likely than poor whites to live in the central city, and twenty five times more likely to live in high-poverty neighborhoods." https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/67111/407425-Poor-People-and-Poor-Neighborhoods-in-The-Washington-Metropolitan-Area.pdf https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/67111/...

thousandautumns 8y ago

Interestingly, this isn't restricted to white people. I recently listened to an episode of a podcast (Planet Money, iirc), about housing prices and NIMBYism, and some pro-housing activists attended some council meetings in a largely Latino neighborhood in the Bay Area, and were met with lots of hostility as new developments were seen as leading to gentrification and destroying the Hispanic culture of the neighborhood.

jjeaff 8y ago
It's not really the same thing when you are worried about gentrification. While culture is a part of it, the biggest issue is that many do not own in poorer neighborhoods. They rent. And they know that gentrification will slowly push them all from their homes as rents creep upward. So, it's not that white people will ruin the Hispanic culture, it's that having no Hispanic residents will ruin the Hispanic culture.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  Even when they do own, property taxes can often force them to sell at a discount to avoid disastrously high tax bills. This was part of the selling point of Prop 13 iirc, although certainly not the real purpose.

qubax 8y ago

> you will see a metro area that was and still is being shaped by race. In NYC, a major example is Robert Moses' Cross Bronx Expressway which "conveniently" cut through large swathes of minority neighborhoods. But it's not just the metro area. It's the entire country if you consider the extermination of the natives and the formation of the reservations ( easily the poorest regions of the western world today ). > A poster has been down-voted to oblivion for pointing out the hypocrisy that the bluest states have the most un-affordable housing Sad to say, that's to be expected. I had someone go through my history and downvote all of the comments. It's strange that people are so invested.

0xcafecafe 8y ago

Second that. Here in Atlanta, the expansion of the Marta (basically the metro train) to suburban neighborhoods is held up due to similar issues.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

davidw 8y ago

No one has mentioned "The Color of Law" yet, so here it is: https://amzn.to/2IjeIhi https://amzn.to/2IjeIhi It's an entire book dedicated to this hypothesis, with a bunch of evidence. It's difficult reading because it pisses you off to hear about how horrible people were (and are), but it's a very good book.

smsm42 8y ago

> Bringing this in would bring a lot of probably lower income people, and that would definitely bring down our median average household income. Isn't that a mathematical truism? If you build lower priced housing, then people with less income would be able to afford it. If people with less income buy these houses, average income among house owners would necessarily decrease - that's what the average means!

rayiner 8y ago

Get on dcurbanmom or the city-data forums for "blue" cities and see how much coded racism there is. E.g. in these threads about a new elementary school in Southwest D.C.: http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/500311.page; http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/500311.page; http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/495190.page http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/495190.page.

tptacek 8y ago
Those threads are amazing. I live on the border between a middle-class overwhelmingly AA Chicago neighborhood and one of the wealthier Chicago suburbs, and you'd think you'd get stuff like this on all the forums, but I've never seen anything like this before in any forum.

purplezooey 8y ago

I can't believe somebody actually said that in public. (referring to Cupertino comment). They should be ashamed.

briandear 8y ago
“One resident said he feared low-income, high-density housing would bring in “uneducated” people. “A lot of other residents and I are concerned that this would make the current residents of Cupertino uncomfortable, and would split our city in half,” he said.” ..it was far worse that you could imagine. It was something like a 9 hour meeting https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/09/19/differences-of-opinion-emerge-about-the-future-of-vallco-at-tuesday-night-meeting/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/09/19/differences-of-opinio...

matchbok 8y ago

One could argue that these progressive "affordable" housing initiative actually make the problem worse. This is a supply problem, plain and simple. Every major city has huge zoning roadblocks and "affordable" regulations that constrain supply. The programs in question (inclusionary zoning) are stupid expensive, and yet provide basically a lottery of a few hundred subsidized units a year.

BurningFrog 8y ago

As dumb as that Cupertino quote was, remember that it was just one person who was behind it, and went viral just because it was that dumb.

village-idiot 8y ago

Pretty much all of America has a race problem, it’s just that the actual symptoms vary by geography.