I sometimes wonder why smalltown America prefers "trailer parks" over small-to-midsized apartments.
It's a lot harder to make a snap judgement regarding a person's socio-economic status if they live in an unremarkable apartment. If someone lives in a trailer park or a terrifying drug-infested cinder-block shithole, though, you can make some guesses about them right away.
I snark, but I'm also serious. An awful lot of lower-middle-class suburbanites see large, inexpensive housing complexes (be they trailer parks or low-rise apartment buildings) as systems for isolating lower-class people from the surrounding neighborhood.
I would expect a really small apartment building project, well-integrated with my neighborhood, to face grassroots opposition. Some of the suburban governments I've lived under actually planned to demolish well-kept, inexpensive, functioning apartments and replace them with expensive single-family houses. There is more than a hint of racism bound up in this, and this seems so obvious to me that I'm surprised the article didn't even broach the possibility.
There's nothing racist about demolishing apartments. It's stupid because it segregates the rich from the poor, but it has more to do with socioeconomic status than race.
Because of its brevity, my story is stripped of context here. In context: 1) this was just one of many such moves on the part of the city government 2) it was very much in line with the prejudices loudly and unashamedly expressed by many in the once-very-white suburb 3) these moves got underway only after non-whites began moving to the city in significant numbers and therefore clearly were not about economic status at all. (That is, the city didn't want to knock down the affordable housing when it was full of low-income white people.)
When I was 20 years younger, I might well have made the argument you're making. But I would have been wrong.
It's a lot harder to make a snap judgement regarding a person's socio-economic status if they live in an unremarkable apartment. If someone lives in a trailer park or a terrifying drug-infested cinder-block shithole, though, you can make some guesses about them right away.
I snark, but I'm also serious. An awful lot of lower-middle-class suburbanites see large, inexpensive housing complexes (be they trailer parks or low-rise apartment buildings) as systems for isolating lower-class people from the surrounding neighborhood.
I would expect a really small apartment building project, well-integrated with my neighborhood, to face grassroots opposition. Some of the suburban governments I've lived under actually planned to demolish well-kept, inexpensive, functioning apartments and replace them with expensive single-family houses. There is more than a hint of racism bound up in this, and this seems so obvious to me that I'm surprised the article didn't even broach the possibility.