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You are conflating so many issues here. 1) your experience in DC - you are ignoring the whole history of segregation and white flight and residual racism that m

by dmode 7y ago

You are conflating so many issues here. 1) your experience in DC - you are ignoring the whole history of segregation and white flight and residual racism that makes DC what it is. These are not issues in central Texas 2) what you experienced about big box store and middle class people is not unique to Texas and is as common in Virginia or New Jersey or Sacramento 3)Have you double clicked your experience as it relates to deep social issues - Texas has the lowest rate of insured for example. Or protections against LGBT rights or incarceration rates ? 4) California housing is the opposite of central planning. It is an outcome of intense democracy and a patch work of very local zoning laws. Thus you will cities like Dublin and Hayward that build a lot, while other cities like Palo Alto which doesn’t build anything

rayiner 7y ago
> 1) your experience in DC - you are ignoring the whole history of segregation and white flight and residual racism that makes DC what it is. These are not issues in central Texas Yes, DC has a very dark past in that regard, but decades of progressivism hasn't fixed anything. And the most recent trend in the city has been yuppies who vote the right way and say the right things pushing out all the people of color, leaving a starkly segregated and stratified society. Meanwhile, given what's going on at the border, I don't think it's accurate to say that Texas doesn't have its own issues with respect to disenfranchised demographic groups. But the combination of cheap housing and plentiful jobs is allowing broad-based prosperity in Texas. > Have you double clicked your experience as it relates to deep social issues - Texas has the lowest rate of insured for example. Or protections against LGBT rights or incarceration rates ? There is a place to talk about social issues, but that's not what I'm talking about here. The material prosperity of the people in the middle is a really important thing too. Indeed, that is deeply inter-connected with social justice issues, such as how easy it is for immigrants to assimilate into the country and establish themselves. Speaking as an immigrant myself, what was important to my family when we were first starting out wasn't the incarceration rate, or how our neighbors felt about people from Muslim countries like the one we came from. It was the fact that, on a middle class income, without my mom working, we could afford a decent house in a good school district. That's something that Texas delivers on, and that results in tangible prosperity even (especially?) among immigrant groups. The median income for a hispanic household is just 2% higher in California than Texas, but the median house in California costs 3 times as much. If I were in my parents' shoes, trying to pick a place in this country to get started, I'd pick the suburbs of Houston or Dallas over the suburbs of San Francisco in a hearbeat. It wouldn't even be a question. > California housing is the opposite of central planning. It is an outcome of intense democracy and a patch work of very local zoning laws. That it's the product of democracy and local zoning laws doesn't mean it's not central planning. Californians have used democracy to create a zoning system that forces construction into centrally planned models. You can't renovate your house or build a new one (or, god forbid, turn your single family home into an apartment building) without going through a central bureaucracy. That bureaucracy considers things like the "zoning plan" and the "character of the neighborhood." That's central planning!
- deleted 7y ago
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by dmode 7y ago

rayiner 7y ago

> 1) your experience in DC - you are ignoring the whole history of segregation and white flight and residual racism that makes DC what it is. These are not issues in central Texas Yes, DC has a very dark past in that regard, but decades of progressivism hasn't fixed anything. And the most recent trend in the city has been yuppies who vote the right way and say the right things pushing out all the people of color, leaving a starkly segregated and stratified society. Meanwhile, given what's going on at the border, I don't think it's accurate to say that Texas doesn't have its own issues with respect to disenfranchised demographic groups. But the combination of cheap housing and plentiful jobs is allowing broad-based prosperity in Texas. > Have you double clicked your experience as it relates to deep social issues - Texas has the lowest rate of insured for example. Or protections against LGBT rights or incarceration rates ? There is a place to talk about social issues, but that's not what I'm talking about here. The material prosperity of the people in the middle is a really important thing too. Indeed, that is deeply inter-connected with social justice issues, such as how easy it is for immigrants to assimilate into the country and establish themselves. Speaking as an immigrant myself, what was important to my family when we were first starting out wasn't the incarceration rate, or how our neighbors felt about people from Muslim countries like the one we came from. It was the fact that, on a middle class income, without my mom working, we could afford a decent house in a good school district. That's something that Texas delivers on, and that results in tangible prosperity even (especially?) among immigrant groups. The median income for a hispanic household is just 2% higher in California than Texas, but the median house in California costs 3 times as much. If I were in my parents' shoes, trying to pick a place in this country to get started, I'd pick the suburbs of Houston or Dallas over the suburbs of San Francisco in a hearbeat. It wouldn't even be a question. > California housing is the opposite of central planning. It is an outcome of intense democracy and a patch work of very local zoning laws. That it's the product of democracy and local zoning laws doesn't mean it's not central planning. Californians have used democracy to create a zoning system that forces construction into centrally planned models. You can't renovate your house or build a new one (or, god forbid, turn your single family home into an apartment building) without going through a central bureaucracy. That bureaucracy considers things like the "zoning plan" and the "character of the neighborhood." That's central planning!

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]