
Increased resident participation in planning produces extreme wealth segregation [pdf] - randycupertino
http://www.its.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2015/10/PB-Income-Segregation-and-Land-Use.pdf
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JBReefer
The findings confirm what people who talk about urban planning say, but it
never seems to trickle into the wider world. You still hear people say that we
have to restrict growth to keep costs down, widen highways to reduce traffic,
etc. even though those ideas are thoroughly discredited.

It's incredibly disheartening.

~~~
randycupertino
What made me extremely disheartened in my neighbors was joining Nextdoor.com
and seeing what the majority of my neighbors thought was "bad" for our
neighborhood. They literally complained about loud birds in the morning and
tried to organize a protest against a stop sign due to fears of "increased
urbanization." Also lord forbid you sit in your car while Mexican, very
suspicious circumstances!! Turns out it was just dudes eating lunch in their
truck between jobs. This is in the Bay Area Peninsula.

~~~
pnathan
Nextdoor is much the same in Seattle; not as asinine in my area, but... heh...
yeah. It generally represents the distillation of NIMBYism.

~~~
randycupertino
Yeah. I was actually __shocked __that they were bothering to try and organize
a protest against a stop sign- at an intersection where there are always
accidents from people not merging correctly! - of all things. Unhappily for
them, the stop sign was ultimately installed.

~~~
moonchrome
Wonder how effective that turned out to be in preventig accidents. I don't
drive so I really have no clue but a stop sign seems like something that
wouldn't influence me much - then again that's mostly why I don't want to
learn how to drive :)

~~~
selestify
Do you not know that you're required by law to come to a complete stop before
a stop sign? It's legally not up to you how much a stop sign "influences" you.

~~~
moonchrome
From what I've seen when I pay attention to someone driving it seems more of a
judgment call - but then again I don't usually pay attention because I find
driving boring.

It obviously sets the rules so you can assign blame easier but is it really
effective as a prevention tool ?

~~~
selestify
> it seems more of a judgment call

Ummmm maybe things are different where you live, but I certainly hope whoever
drives you around doesn't drive near where I live. Here it's definitely not a
"judgment call" and people will be quite angry if you ignore stop signs.

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sandworm101
>>> Such restrictions do not appear to lead directly to the concentration of
poverty but rather to the concentration of affluence, a finding which adds
important nuance to the way in which exclusionary zoning techniques isolate
the poor.

Is it any great surprise that wealthier people are also more mobile?

>> Cities that have more separate regulatory oversight mechanisms are more
segregated.

I wonder how much time the author has spent in zoning meetings. These days
nearly everything requires some sort of rezoning, variance or special permit.
So it's all about developers with the savvy to get such things from whatever
board/counsel is in charge. Developers are only interested in high-value/high-
profit developments. So what gets built is expensive. It's no great social
mystery.

~~~
ams6110
Yes it's quite amusing where I live. The local planning board wants
"affordable housing" as a component of everything, but they are so
micromanaging and require so many repeated applications and presentations
(often which are sent back with comments like "windows need to be bigger").
Thus we have large, expensive developments because anything "affordable" would
never meet all the criteria on appearance, building materials, etc., and the
only developers who can get anything approved are ones with enough wealth to
fund the team and the time needed to navigate this process.

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eibrahim
I am not sure how I feel about this. Now that I have a family and children, I
want to live in an area where my neighbors are at the same socioeconomic
level. I don't want my neighbor to be way richer or way poorer than we are. I
don't see how that is bad, wrong or racist!!!

~~~
hyperpape
Stop and think of it not in terms or whether it reflects badly on you but on
the consequences for society. There is nothing good that can be said for
creating enclaves of poverty.

~~~
brbsix
As a parent, you have an obligation to provide your child with the best,
safest, environment that you are reasonably able to provide. More upscale
neighborhoods generally have better schools, activities, opportunities, and so
forth. It is absolute madness to disregard this solely because of some vague,
unknown societal effects hypothesized in a policy paper.

~~~
tobbyb
And rightly so. But are poor people not allowed or entitled to have the same
level of safety and benefits for their family like everyone else, or is it ok
to associate and tar an entire socioeconomic group with crime and drugs as
some seem to do and leave them to their fate? How is this an egalitarian,
equal or democratic society that discriminates against kids even before they
are born?

Poor people have no choice but to live with it while the more resourceful can
afford to isolate and protect themselves but that's not an equal society or
one that aspires to be one. No one can advocate that one should not try to get
the best for themselves and their children but the if the bare basics of
education, healthcare and safety are reliant on socio economic background that
there is little incentive for those in power who are always from a privileged
socioeconomic background to actually provide meaningful equality beyond
posturing.

I think there is a danger of an exclusionary way of thinking that encourages
ghettos and the kind of entitled thinking often seen here itself on hacker
news that presumes in spite of all these disadvantages somehow all these
children should compete fairly and succeed with their more privileged
counterparts and if they don't and get stuck in a cycle of poverty they only
have themselves to blame.

This kind of thinking leads to a bigoted society, and you then can't complain
when you or your children are similarly excluded by those from a higher
social-economic background in neighborhoods and other aspects of life, when
not possible legally by financial or social means. This doesn't produce an
enlightened and egalitarian society, you reap what you sow.

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eanzenberg
Correlation =/= causation. High-end housing located within poorer
neighborhoods is priced lower because home-buyers value those units less than
the same house located within richer neighborhoods.

As a thought exercise, create 100 towns with different distributions between
wealthy and poor areas and price the homes in your head. The random
distributions are related to what the article would describe as "resident
participation".

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bpchaps
I love this sort of non-intuitive research.

My neighborhood built a fancy public-funded park last year. It's amazing and
all, but it cost an absolute fortune to build, especially when considering the
park two blocks down! It's completely unbelievable that so much time and
energy went into this park. Hell, once the park was finished, a two million
dollar house was built right next to it. Go figure. It's completely feel-good
civics and it seems to be getting harder and hard to explain why things like
this are very bad for communities overall.

Silly anecdote - at the opening of the park's construction, there was a giant
pile of puke on the sidewalk where the park's staff put a tent. When walking
past them, my dog tries to eat the puke, the head of staff comes up to me and
makes a comment about how he's probably just eating a brownie. Disregarding
the chocolate nonchalance, she was completely oblivious to the giant vomit
stain two feet aware from her until I corrected her. Talk about not seeing the
trees from the forest.

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newfrontier
The communist underpinnings of this study are laughable. The author is
attempting to assert that the quality of life of people in the nicer areas of
town would be enhanced by mixing in lower socio-economic groups. That's
funny... none of the people in the nicer areas believe a shred of that, else
they'd move to the other areas of town. Beyond that, the author's solution to
this imagined problem is to _dismantle_ the things that make the nice part of
town the nice part of town. Perhaps we should get rid of nice hotels and
restaurants, while we're at it.

Wealth is not a resource, it's an indicator. It's directly related to a
person's integrity, drive, ingenuity, intelligence, education, and physical
capabilities. There are people that have genuinely been kicked in the teeth by
life, but we have never lived in an era of greater opportunity in the US.

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cylinder
So why is Houston so economically segregated?

~~~
surfmike
Very valid comment. It is quite segregated (goo.gl/MbPC5N).

After a bit of research, it seems that maybe Houston does have something like
zoning after all. Apparently, there are lot size restrictions, density
restrictions, buffering ordinances, and private "deed restrictions" which
limit the types of business that can be in a neighborhood.

From an article about Houston: "Instead, it’s the communities with the time,
resources and political clout that essentially have the power to restrict
development within their borders. That pushes it to other areas without a
meaningful discussion of the citywide implications.

The result: as Houston becomes more dense, not all places will change equally.
“We’re coming up with rules to make Houston liberalized in terms of density
and development … but giving particular neighborhoods tools to opt out,” Festa
said."

[http://goo.gl/cTMO2d](http://goo.gl/cTMO2d)

