a strong town or city needs mixed income housing, it reduces crime rate and gives those on the lower end more pride in their homes while those that are on the higher end can help control the crime level by having neighbourhood watch, talking with people and so forth. Having segregated neighbourhoods encourage tribalism and you can't have that in a unified nation "oh he's from New York! New York is dirty" "oh watch out, he's from Chicago!" It can also benefit from helping the poor get around by extending services and the more affluent using them and therefore demanding better amenities - you can't get away with a sign on a post with rich areas and say "bus comes... whenever, good luck". What the more wealthy don't understand is that those that are less wealthy are needed because they work in areas that they wouldn't want to work doing the things that aren't dangerous but highly repetitive and... boring but still can't be replaced yet. I live in Australia, a suburb here that is mixed income, there's a medium shopping center down the road with a costco, the only one in the state and I like it because it's beautiful, I'm low income - below poverty and I keep the place clean and tidy, my neighbours hate it because they hate change but in reality they will like it because it's improvements that are necessary... like graffiti removal, improving lighting and the gates, putting down mulch, etc. But they still love me because... I don't do crime, I'm not a pest... I'm happy - I'm happy being poor and I'm happy without taking your stuff, I gone through hell just to afford a bargain bin second hand bike and to fix it up so I can have transport, I struggled because I don't need to steal to do anything, I don't need to cause damage to other's property because... you don't take a turd in your own back yard... and the habit sticks to other places you go... I welcome other people, even if they don't have the same colour skin as me, because they still have family values and... many of them adopt me as family.
My only question is this; do people tend to self-segregate in a given urban center? I feel that, and this is just through my understanding and experience of American and midwestern urban centers, people, especially upper class white Americans, tend to not be comfortable with diversity and integration of different socioeconomic groups in a given dense area. This even calls back to some of the approaches taken by the lead Urban designers of the 20th century including Le Corbusier, and how their developments aspired to have a diverse selection of people in one roof, and how most of them failed. Is this understanding flawed in some way? Or if there is some truth to it, is there methods or systems that can be put in place to help combat this or create a more equitable space?
The grand scale projects of Le Corbusier have little in common with mixed use / mixed income neighbourhoods they mention here. His huge uniform housing blocks/towers ('plan Voisin') are usually devoid of social interaction and the incremental flexibility of use over time that Strong Towns are in favour of. They failed in it anyway. It is difficult to incorporate those qualities in scale project building. That goes with high rise buildings, suburbia and with 'new towns' projects. There is indeed a tendency with wealthier people to seclude themselves. phyiscally in their houses, cars. And socially with having less interaction with people in general and family and neighbours more in particular. When wealthier people want to live near theatres, fancy restaurants they also price out lower income groups.
It's not just plonking people in a residential area with various socioeconomic backgrounds and hope it works out, you need to also provide a safe environment for them to interact with each other regularly positively.
@@ANTSEMUT1 I can agree with this point of yours more than the other. I also do not think you can synthetically generate blended neighborhoods. You need to study how successfully blended neighborhoods happened in history then look at what conditions existed that caused them to exist without people intentionally forcing them into existence. Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language" type approach.
I don't think the right attitude is "let's combat this". Honestly, I see this as a sort of finger-trap problem. The harder you try and force integration, the harder people will fight back. It's like a parent sticking two quarreling siblings in a room and saying "you will learn to like each other by dinner time". That just doesn't work. What works is allowing them to interact freely - albeit under supervision to immediately address conflicts. So I'd say gentle power simply allowing for the existence of voluntary integrated spaces is indeed more culturally productive. And this is consistent with Strong Towns' philosophy of gradual, productive growth over immediate, feel-good "growth".
Mixed income living environments require mixed use integration into them to help create micro buffers between immediate proximities of high differential living standards. It also requires that the lowest quality living standards be invested in and maintained with integrity and quality standard to also help buffer feelings of differentiation. The American Economy is as much to blame for the inability to do these things because our economy is primarily made up of the large corporate-financial - stock trading investment- banking- Globalists' mega economy, with small macro local market economies that are very undeveloped and survive off the crumbs and scraps of that much larger mega corporate global system. When the economy itself is so disjunct with the community setting, there is almost a developmental "dry well" or financial "drought" when it comes to potential for local community investment, thus like Chuck said, when the money is far away from us, it becomes more emotionless greed without human empathy. Take a state Like New York, were you have a global mega city present that is a center for that mega economy, it produces all this wealth and GDP, and for it to persistently continue to do that the economy has to direct its focus to it, so the state and banks are presented with the dilemma of where to put their focus of investment. The State and all market forces will throw money hand over fist at NYC, but the rest of the state just rots with every other city at times teetering in bankruptcy(even with state fund keeping them on life support) or school district collapse and take over by the state, with Urban Crime and urban decay and rusting infrastructure, the southern tier an abandoned ex-agricultural waste land of trailer parks and meth labs. Its possible for us small individual investors to begin long hauls of effort to focus our own priorities into our community and away from the global market, but that is slow scale market rebellion that will take generations to make progress. for things to change for real one of two things need to happen in North America. The Federal or State governments need to completely change their economy and social theory and make huge legislative actions of change'; or we wait for the global market to collapse and rebuild smaller government entities and new economies from scratch hopefully with these better ideas in mind.
Solidarity > charity. The real benefit of mixed income neighbourhoods has nothing to do with the corrosive effects of charity (in which the rich keep all the power and dignity in exchange for retaining a fraction less of the wealth that we as a whole generate), but rather, mixed income neighbourhoods bring people into a situation in which they have interests in common. A diverse range of perspectives, social capitals, and skills, and a reduced fear of the other (because of simple familiarity) can be a source of strength in a community. It avoids the kind of inter communal tensions and even cultural-political polarisation seen in recent years in the urban/suburban divide. HOWEVER, inequality itself does not help with any of these benefits, and in some cases the inherently antagonistic contradictions created by inequality could divide a community. (Gentrification, renters versus homeowners, competition for school places, etc..) At best, a mixed community will generate a kind of moderate, reformist "progressivism" which is ill equipped to effect the kind of change needed to solve systemic problems which arise from the way in which economic production and exchange is currently carried out. What matters most is that working class people own the means to survival, wellbeing and local political power and have a say in the future of our communities. In this regard, I fear that highly unequal mixed income neighbourhoods could be both a blessing and a curse.
But the point from Adam Smith, about the fact that distance can make people view what are actually social relations through a purely monetary lens, is spot on. There are some very interesting studies which show how people's inclination towards empathy and mutualism disappear as soon as money is introduced to the social context. (Money is not the problem in and of itself though: money is simply the facilitator of exchange and accumulation. Which is why there is no substitute for a strong community with shared material interests as a basis for solidarity.)
I think this is a very naive take on the situation. Wealthy people isolate because other wealthy people are not going to kick in their front door and steal their stuff but poor people and drug addicts will. So to defend themselves they move where there are no poor people or drug addicts. I don't live in a gated community but I wish I did because every time I have been burglarized it has been from drug addicts coming in from the middle of town. It wasn't wealthy professionals or retirees that did it. Now I work from a home office and I can only imagine how those burglaries would have turned into robberies if I was at home.
Ah yes poor people do these things instinctually, there's nothing that can be done about it we must remove ourselves from it entirely. Screw helping them at all, that's immoral and unclean.
@@ANTSEMUT1 People don't do it instinctually. They do it because they have learned it is a way so solve some of their problems some of the time and they can get away with it often enough that it seems reasonable. More reasonable than other solutions to their problems. It still doesn't explain why you think I should live in a high crime area just to suit someone else's plan for improving other people's lives.
@@ANTSEMUT1 But you haven't made a point, at least not in this comment thread. You have just set up a straw man that had nothing to do with my comment. So what was the point?
That stinks, I think there are ways to make towns safe and mixed income. I grew up in a very safe blue collar suburb of Philadelphia. There weren’t many rich people but there was no crime. I think it comes from building a sense of community and that people would be watching. Idk. But we never locked our doors and I never heard of a break in
a strong town or city needs mixed income housing, it reduces crime rate and gives those on the lower end more pride in their homes while those that are on the higher end can help control the crime level by having neighbourhood watch, talking with people and so forth.
Having segregated neighbourhoods encourage tribalism and you can't have that in a unified nation "oh he's from New York! New York is dirty" "oh watch out, he's from Chicago!"
It can also benefit from helping the poor get around by extending services and the more affluent using them and therefore demanding better amenities - you can't get away with a sign on a post with rich areas and say "bus comes... whenever, good luck".
What the more wealthy don't understand is that those that are less wealthy are needed because they work in areas that they wouldn't want to work doing the things that aren't dangerous but highly repetitive and... boring but still can't be replaced yet.
I live in Australia, a suburb here that is mixed income, there's a medium shopping center down the road with a costco, the only one in the state and I like it because it's beautiful, I'm low income - below poverty and I keep the place clean and tidy, my neighbours hate it because they hate change but in reality they will like it because it's improvements that are necessary... like graffiti removal, improving lighting and the gates, putting down mulch, etc.
But they still love me because... I don't do crime, I'm not a pest... I'm happy - I'm happy being poor and I'm happy without taking your stuff, I gone through hell just to afford a bargain bin second hand bike and to fix it up so I can have transport, I struggled because I don't need to steal to do anything, I don't need to cause damage to other's property because... you don't take a turd in your own back yard... and the habit sticks to other places you go... I welcome other people, even if they don't have the same colour skin as me, because they still have family values and... many of them adopt me as family.
Some great points!
My only question is this; do people tend to self-segregate in a given urban center? I feel that, and this is just through my understanding and experience of American and midwestern urban centers, people, especially upper class white Americans, tend to not be comfortable with diversity and integration of different socioeconomic groups in a given dense area. This even calls back to some of the approaches taken by the lead Urban designers of the 20th century including Le Corbusier, and how their developments aspired to have a diverse selection of people in one roof, and how most of them failed. Is this understanding flawed in some way? Or if there is some truth to it, is there methods or systems that can be put in place to help combat this or create a more equitable space?
The grand scale projects of Le Corbusier have little in common with mixed use / mixed income neighbourhoods they mention here. His huge uniform housing blocks/towers ('plan Voisin') are usually devoid of social interaction and the incremental flexibility of use over time that Strong Towns are in favour of. They failed in it anyway. It is difficult to incorporate those qualities in scale project building. That goes with high rise buildings, suburbia and with 'new towns' projects.
There is indeed a tendency with wealthier people to seclude themselves. phyiscally in their houses, cars. And socially with having less interaction with people in general and family and neighbours more in particular. When wealthier people want to live near theatres, fancy restaurants they also price out lower income groups.
It's not just plonking people in a residential area with various socioeconomic backgrounds and hope it works out, you need to also provide a safe environment for them to interact with each other regularly positively.
@@ANTSEMUT1 I can agree with this point of yours more than the other. I also do not think you can synthetically generate blended neighborhoods. You need to study how successfully blended neighborhoods happened in history then look at what conditions existed that caused them to exist without people intentionally forcing them into existence. Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language" type approach.
I don't think the right attitude is "let's combat this". Honestly, I see this as a sort of finger-trap problem. The harder you try and force integration, the harder people will fight back. It's like a parent sticking two quarreling siblings in a room and saying "you will learn to like each other by dinner time". That just doesn't work. What works is allowing them to interact freely - albeit under supervision to immediately address conflicts. So I'd say gentle power simply allowing for the existence of voluntary integrated spaces is indeed more culturally productive. And this is consistent with Strong Towns' philosophy of gradual, productive growth over immediate, feel-good "growth".
@@galiantus1354 great comment. One question I have is this: why is it that people of different socioeconomic levels are antagonistic to each other?
I love my mixed-income neighborhood!
What city would this be?
Mixed income is great for maintaining culture. People can move up the social ladder without moving 20 miles from their parents.
Mixed income living environments require mixed use integration into them to help create micro buffers between immediate proximities of high differential living standards. It also requires that the lowest quality living standards be invested in and maintained with integrity and quality standard to also help buffer feelings of differentiation. The American Economy is as much to blame for the inability to do these things because our economy is primarily made up of the large corporate-financial - stock trading investment- banking- Globalists' mega economy, with small macro local market economies that are very undeveloped and survive off the crumbs and scraps of that much larger mega corporate global system. When the economy itself is so disjunct with the community setting, there is almost a developmental "dry well" or financial "drought" when it comes to potential for local community investment, thus like Chuck said, when the money is far away from us, it becomes more emotionless greed without human empathy. Take a state Like New York, were you have a global mega city present that is a center for that mega economy, it produces all this wealth and GDP, and for it to persistently continue to do that the economy has to direct its focus to it, so the state and banks are presented with the dilemma of where to put their focus of investment. The State and all market forces will throw money hand over fist at NYC, but the rest of the state just rots with every other city at times teetering in bankruptcy(even with state fund keeping them on life support) or school district collapse and take over by the state, with Urban Crime and urban decay and rusting infrastructure, the southern tier an abandoned ex-agricultural waste land of trailer parks and meth labs. Its possible for us small individual investors to begin long hauls of effort to focus our own priorities into our community and away from the global market, but that is slow scale market rebellion that will take generations to make progress. for things to change for real one of two things need to happen in North America. The Federal or State governments need to completely change their economy and social theory and make huge legislative actions of change'; or we wait for the global market to collapse and rebuild smaller government entities and new economies from scratch hopefully with these better ideas in mind.
Solidarity > charity. The real benefit of mixed income neighbourhoods has nothing to do with the corrosive effects of charity (in which the rich keep all the power and dignity in exchange for retaining a fraction less of the wealth that we as a whole generate), but rather, mixed income neighbourhoods bring people into a situation in which they have interests in common. A diverse range of perspectives, social capitals, and skills, and a reduced fear of the other (because of simple familiarity) can be a source of strength in a community. It avoids the kind of inter communal tensions and even cultural-political polarisation seen in recent years in the urban/suburban divide. HOWEVER, inequality itself does not help with any of these benefits, and in some cases the inherently antagonistic contradictions created by inequality could divide a community. (Gentrification, renters versus homeowners, competition for school places, etc..) At best, a mixed community will generate a kind of moderate, reformist "progressivism" which is ill equipped to effect the kind of change needed to solve systemic problems which arise from the way in which economic production and exchange is currently carried out. What matters most is that working class people own the means to survival, wellbeing and local political power and have a say in the future of our communities. In this regard, I fear that highly unequal mixed income neighbourhoods could be both a blessing and a curse.
But the point from Adam Smith, about the fact that distance can make people view what are actually social relations through a purely monetary lens, is spot on. There are some very interesting studies which show how people's inclination towards empathy and mutualism disappear as soon as money is introduced to the social context. (Money is not the problem in and of itself though: money is simply the facilitator of exchange and accumulation. Which is why there is no substitute for a strong community with shared material interests as a basis for solidarity.)
"Potter"
I think this is a very naive take on the situation. Wealthy people isolate because other wealthy people are not going to kick in their front door and steal their stuff but poor people and drug addicts will. So to defend themselves they move where there are no poor people or drug addicts. I don't live in a gated community but I wish I did because every time I have been burglarized it has been from drug addicts coming in from the middle of town. It wasn't wealthy professionals or retirees that did it. Now I work from a home office and I can only imagine how those burglaries would have turned into robberies if I was at home.
Ah yes poor people do these things instinctually, there's nothing that can be done about it we must remove ourselves from it entirely. Screw helping them at all, that's immoral and unclean.
@@ANTSEMUT1 People don't do it instinctually. They do it because they have learned it is a way so solve some of their problems some of the time and they can get away with it often enough that it seems reasonable. More reasonable than other solutions to their problems. It still doesn't explain why you think I should live in a high crime area just to suit someone else's plan for improving other people's lives.
@@davidjdriver ... talk about missing the point entirely.
@@ANTSEMUT1 But you haven't made a point, at least not in this comment thread. You have just set up a straw man that had nothing to do with my comment. So what was the point?
That stinks, I think there are ways to make towns safe and mixed income. I grew up in a very safe blue collar suburb of Philadelphia. There weren’t many rich people but there was no crime. I think it comes from building a sense of community and that people would be watching. Idk. But we never locked our doors and I never heard of a break in