Why Walkable Communities Will Always Become Either Slums Or Playgrounds For The Idle Rich

Another great morsel from The Fourth Checkraise:

Sometime during the last winter I was having dinner at one downtown Toronto food court before teaching that night, and two tables over there was a mother sitting with her six-year-old. As I was biting into my burger, I overheard her telling the kid that she is sorry that they live here where there are very few kids to play with. Of course they could move to Jane & Finch where there are plenty of kids, but "they would shoot you there!" Good thing I wasn't drinking anything at that moment. It was amusing to see the middle class exodus from the city again captured so succinctly. As Joel Kotkin and many others have explained, the "creative" places beloved by the SWPL urban liberals tend to be horrible places to raise families, as evidenced around here by the fact that Toronto actually has to shut down schools despite growing population. It's really quite simple: for an area to be suitable for families, real estate must be affordable (very few middle class people will raise kids in places where a one bedroom costs half a mil), but on the other hand, you need thick insulation from the underclass, especially for your kids. These two requirements contradict each other in cities, and as Half Sigma once pointed out, together they entail that "walkable communities" will always become either slums or playgrounds for the idle rich.

Comments

[Sparticus]

And yet, once upon a time--within living memory for some--walkable communities were the norm. Perhaps they had some support with streetcars and busses, but affordable walkable communities can exist.

What's different now? Lots, but here are the most salient points:

1. The rise of liberalism and its soft on crime/hard on justice attitudes means that criminals have fewer disincentives. Liberalism also relativizes crime, so that now it's no longer the criminals' fault that they commit crime: it's their environment that's to blame.

2. Massive, unsustainable levels of immigration, especially from the Third World, has not only greatly increased the demand for housing, but has also simultaneously decreased societal trust of strangers and increased crime (because blacks, Hispanics, and SE Asians--the Third World immigrants--are more prone to crime than whites or NE Asians).

There's more, but that's just off the top of my head.