Under guidance from a racism task force set up by the city’s mayor, Austin, TX is thinking about creating a $600 million fund that would be used to buy back houses from gentrified areas and turn it into public affordable housing for minorities – including those who were originally displaced by the gentrification.
According to The New Statesman, the task force’s report “is expected to be a jumping-off point as the city wrestles with issues of racial and economic segregation.”
The task force was originally created in response to issues of police brutality, but the final list of 237 recommendations is largely centered around the subjects of housing and education for minorities.
From The New Statesman:
The report recommends raising $600 million for affordable housing by implementing a “linkage fee” on developers of $2 per square foot of new construction. It also asks the city to use public-owned property to build homes for low income, minority, former East Austin residents who want to return and allow housing including mobile homes or tiny homes on the land.
Other recommendations offered by the task force include: Having the city provide tax payment assistance to homeowners, hiring minority teachers in groups and then providing them with special housing, and giving financial incentives to real estate agents who “proclaim Austin values of integration, diversity, and inclusion.”
So…what happens when you move all of these low-income minorities back into the gentrified, white neighborhoods? The rich folks are going to smile gladly as their property values plummet and gangsters start slinging drugs at little Jimmy’s bus stop? Of course not. They’ll sell off their houses, move to the next neighborhood, and the whole cycle will repeat.
This is why it’s a bad idea for the government to start trying to “fix” society with all their little rules and regulations. It doesn’t work. You’re never in a million years going to convince rich whites to live in subpar conditions with an ad campaign about the magic of diversity. Hell, the people funding the campaign will be the first to hightail it out of these neighborhoods.
Why? Because while the “solution” to these problems is to address societal racism, societal racism has almost nothing to do with the problems themselves. To the extent that they are problems at all, they are problems of class disparity, crime, and culture. Clue: Rich whites don’t have any problem living next door to rich blacks. Let them build a trailer park next to their gated community, though, and see what happens.
Democrats are right when they say that forced segregation is a bad idea. What they don’t get is that forced integration is the flipside of the same rotten coin.
