By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, September 03, 2013
One of the many unintended consequences of the political
crusade for increased homeownership among minorities, and low-income people in
general, has been a housing boom and bust that left many foreclosed homes that
had to be rented, because there were no longer enough qualified buyers.
The repercussions did not stop there. Many homeowners
have discovered that when renters replace homeowners as their neighbors, the
neighborhood as a whole can suffer.
The physical upkeep of the neighborhood, on which
everyone's home values depend, tends to decline. "Who's going to paint the
outside of a rented house?" one resident was quoted as saying in a recent
New York Times story.
Renters also tend to be of a lower socioeconomic level
than homeowners. They are also less likely to join neighborhood groups, including
neighborhood watches to keep an eye out for crime. In some cases, renters have
introduced unsavory or illegal activities into family-oriented communities of
homeowners that had not had such activities before.
None of this should be surprising. Individuals and groups
of all sorts have always differed from one another in many ways, throughout
centuries of history and in countries around the world. Left to themselves,
people tend to sort themselves out into communities of like-minded neighbors.
This has been so obvious that only the intelligentsia
could misconstrue it -- and only ideologues could devote themselves to
crusading against people's efforts to live and associate with other people who
share their values and habits.
Quite aside from the question of whose values and habits
may be better is the question of the effects of people living cheek by jowl
with other people who put very different values on noise, politeness, education
and other things that make for good or bad relations between neighbors. People
with children to protect are especially concerned about who lives next door or
down the street.
But such mundane matters often get brushed aside by
ideological crusaders out to change the world to fit their own vision. When the
world fails to conform to their vision, then it seems obvious to the ideologues
that it is the world that is wrong, not that their vision is uninformed or
unrealistic.
One of the political consequences of such attitudes is
the current crusade of Attorney General Eric Holder to force various
communities to become more "inclusive" in terms of which races and
classes of people they contain.
Undaunted by a long history of disasters when third
parties try to mix and match people, or prescribe what kind of housing is best,
they act as if this time it has to work.
It doesn't matter how many government housing projects
that began with lofty rhetoric and heady visions have ended with these
expensive projects being demolished with explosives, in the wake of social
catastrophes that made these places unlivable.
To those with the crusading mentality, failure only means
that they should try, try again -- at other people's expense, including not
only the taxpayers but also those who lives have been disrupted, or even made
miserable and dangerous, by previous bright ideas of third parties who pay no
price for being wrong.
This headstrong dogmatism and grab for power is not
confined to housing. Attorney General Holder is also taking legal action
against the state of Louisiana for having so many charter schools, on grounds
that these schools do not mix and match the races the way that public schools
are supposed to.
The fact that those charter schools which are successful
in educating low-income and minority students that the public schools fail to
educate are giving these youngsters a shot at a decent life that they are not
likely to get elsewhere does not deter the ideological crusaders.
Nor does it deter the politicians who are serving the
interests of the teachers' unions, who see public schools as places to provide
jobs for their members, even if that means a poor education and poor prospects
in life for generations of minority students.
All this ideological self-indulgence and cynical
political activity is washed down with lofty rhetoric about
"compassion," "inclusion" and the like.
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