Critical Race Theory and systemic inequalities

[Ken]

Housing is expensive here on the west coast.

Yes, $200,000 homes would be nice but they don’t exist other than perhaps small studio condos. A $500,000 family home is still a huge improvement over a $1 million home that is required by law to be built in much of the land around here. Doing the math, if you buy a $500,000 home with 10% down that leaves a $450,000 mortgage which at current interest rates of 3.5% is about $2300/month for a 30 year mortgage. Call it $3,000/mo after taxes, insurance, maintenance, etc. That isn’t in reach if you are a single mom working at Wal-Mart, but a middle class 2-income family, say a nurse married to a teacher is going to have a household income in the $100k to $150k around here. That comes to gross income of roughly $8.5k to $12.5k per month of which $3,000/mo of housing costs is affordable and within the recommended 30% of gross income. Rents are going to be in the same ballpark for a single family home so you are stuck either way.

My larger point is that we don’t even allow much construction of $500,000 homes around here. Much of the land by law requires homes in the $1 million plus range, which gets subdivided by all the rest of us in a hundred different ways. Much of the rest of the country is similar.

And no, I don’t expect underprivileged lower income people to be able to buy $500,000 homes. We don’t generally build homes for poor people. That’s not the point. But if you build homes that are affordable to middle class people then they will move up and and the homes they leave behind are then more affordable for the people under them too move up. And so forth. That used to be how things worked in this country. There was much more opportunity for upward mobility. But not so much anymore. Right now used cars are ridiculously expensive because of the semi-conductor shortages preventing new cars from being built. It is part of the same cascade effect. Used cars don’t need new semiconductors but the supply constraints and price increases at the top affect the entire market all the way down to the bottom nevertheless.

Ok, I see where you are coming from, but it sounds an awful lot like trickle down reaganomics, which I find classist, and unpalatable, and delusional.

Why do rich people deserve an enormous house, but poor people need to live in shacks?

Two generations ago we had all kinds of housing being built including lots of modest postwar tract homes for returning GIs and that sort of thing. So housing across the board was relatively affordable and as middle class folks moved up it made housing available for folks from lower incomes. We don’t do that any more. Most new housing is very high end and very restricted, especially here in the west coast which has created housing shortages all up and down the income ladder. That is the deliberate result of government policy that has basically made it illegal to build the sort of housing that was most commonly built in the 1950s and 1960s. In the early 1970s my parents bought a modest single family home of maybe 2000 sf on a single teacher’s salary in Oregon as my mom didn’t work. That would be utterly impossible today and such houses aren’t even hardly getting built anymore because they are against the law in most new subdivisions.

Rich people will always be able to buy whatever kind of house they want. It’s not a question of “deserve” or not. But our government policies shouldn’t be so drastically tilted in their favor and against everyone else.

That is “systemic inequality” when it is tilted against everyone who is not wealthy. And it is systemic racism when it deliberately and disproportionately affects minority communities. The effect is racist even if the individual people involved are not racist themselves. That is all systemic racism means.

[nett]

Housing is expensive here on the west coast.

Yes, $200,000 homes would be nice but they don’t exist other than perhaps small studio condos. A $500,000 family home is still a huge improvement over a $1 million home that is required by law to be built in much of the land around here. Doing the math, if you buy a $500,000 home with 10% down that leaves a $450,000 mortgage which at current interest rates of 3.5% is about $2300/month for a 30 year mortgage. Call it $3,000/mo after taxes, insurance, maintenance, etc. That isn’t in reach if you are a single mom working at Wal-Mart, but a middle class 2-income family, say a nurse married to a teacher is going to have a household income in the $100k to $150k around here. That comes to gross income of roughly $8.5k to $12.5k per month of which $3,000/mo of housing costs is affordable and within the recommended 30% of gross income. Rents are going to be in the same ballpark for a single family home so you are stuck either way.

My larger point is that we don’t even allow much construction of $500,000 homes around here. Much of the land by law requires homes in the $1 million plus range, which gets subdivided by all the rest of us in a hundred different ways. Much of the rest of the country is similar.

And no, I don’t expect underprivileged lower income people to be able to buy $500,000 homes. We don’t generally build homes for poor people. That’s not the point. But if you build homes that are affordable to middle class people then they will move up and and the homes they leave behind are then more affordable for the people under them too move up. And so forth. That used to be how things worked in this country. There was much more opportunity for upward mobility. But not so much anymore. Right now used cars are ridiculously expensive because of the semi-conductor shortages preventing new cars from being built. It is part of the same cascade effect. Used cars don’t need new semiconductors but the supply constraints and price increases at the top affect the entire market all the way down to the bottom nevertheless.

Ok, I see where you are coming from, but it sounds an awful lot like trickle down reaganomics, which I find classist, and unpalatable, and delusional.

Why do rich people deserve an enormous house, but poor people need to live in shacks?

Two generations ago we had all kinds of housing being built including lots of modest postwar tract homes for returning GIs and that sort of thing. So housing across the board was relatively affordable and as middle class folks moved up it made housing available for folks from lower incomes. We don’t do that any more. Most new housing is very high end and very restricted, especially here in the west coast which has created housing shortages all up and down the income ladder. That is the deliberate result of government policy that has basically made it illegal to build the sort of housing that was most commonly built in the 1950s and 1960s. In the early 1970s my parents bought a modest single family home of maybe 2000 sf on a single teacher’s salary in Oregon as my mom didn’t work. That would be utterly impossible today and such houses aren’t even hardly getting built anymore because they are against the law in most new subdivisions.

Rich people will always be able to buy whatever kind of house they want. It’s not a question of “deserve” or not. But our government policies shouldn’t be so drastically tilted in their favor and against everyone else.

That is “systemic inequality” when it is tilted against everyone who is not wealthy. And it is systemic racism when it deliberately and disproportionately affects minority communities. The effect is racist even if the individual people involved are not racist themselves. That is all systemic racism means.

Our government is bought and paid for by rich people, I'm not really sure what you expect to be happening...

I disagree that these policies are deliberately targeted at minorities. Rather, they are implicitly targeted at lower class communities. That can be and is very wrong without necessarily being racist.

I prefer to call a spade a space, and not attach a label of racism to anything that affects minorities disproportionally, because it's not helpful in that it gives right-wingers a windmill to tilt at, instead of actually admitting that we DO have a very problem with class based inequality, and one of the side effects of that problem is that it disproportionally affects minorities.

[Ken]

Ok, I see where you are coming from, but it sounds an awful lot like trickle down reaganomics, which I find classist, and unpalatable, and delusional.

Why do rich people deserve an enormous house, but poor people need to live in shacks?

Two generations ago we had all kinds of housing being built including lots of modest postwar tract homes for returning GIs and that sort of thing. So housing across the board was relatively affordable and as middle class folks moved up it made housing available for folks from lower incomes. We don’t do that any more. Most new housing is very high end and very restricted, especially here in the west coast which has created housing shortages all up and down the income ladder. That is the deliberate result of government policy that has basically made it illegal to build the sort of housing that was most commonly built in the 1950s and 1960s. In the early 1970s my parents bought a modest single family home of maybe 2000 sf on a single teacher’s salary in Oregon as my mom didn’t work. That would be utterly impossible today and such houses aren’t even hardly getting built anymore because they are against the law in most new subdivisions.

Rich people will always be able to buy whatever kind of house they want. It’s not a question of “deserve” or not. But our government policies shouldn’t be so drastically tilted in their favor and against everyone else.

That is “systemic inequality” when it is tilted against everyone who is not wealthy. And it is systemic racism when it deliberately and disproportionately affects minority communities. The effect is racist even if the individual people involved are not racist themselves. That is all systemic racism means.

Our government is bought and paid for by rich people, I'm not really sure what you expect to be happening...

I disagree that these policies are deliberately targeted at minorities. Rather, they are implicitly targeted at lower class communities. That can be and is very wrong without necessarily being racist.

I prefer to call a spade a space, and not attach a label of racism to anything that affects minorities disproportionally, because it's not helpful in that it gives right-wingers a windmill to tilt at, instead of actually admitting that we DO have a very problem with class based inequality, and one of the side effects of that problem is that it disproportionally affects minorities.

It’s both. In some places like here in WA it is largely class and not race. In the south a lot of policies are indeed specifically about race, or were when they were created decades ago. Live in the south long enough and you discover that most things are ultimately about race at some level. Like how school district boundary lines were drawn along racially gerrymandered lines. Waco still had racially segregated public cemeteries up until the 2010s, for example. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pos ... years-ago/

[Neto]

Waco still had racially segregated public cemeteries up until the 2010s, for example.

Holmes County also has "racially" segregated cemeteries. (The 'English' have their own FANCY cemeteries, and the Amish have their small, simple cemeteries stuck away on the corner of some farm. ) {By the way, I mean this as a joke. I don't believe there is more than one race of humankind.
But I do get what you mean.}

[Ken]

Waco still had racially segregated public cemeteries up until the 2010s, for example.

Holmes County also has "racially" segregated cemeteries. (The 'English' have their own FANCY cemeteries, and the Amish have their small, simple cemeteries stuck away on the corner of some farm. ) {By the way, I mean this as a joke. I don't believe there is more than one race of humankind.
But I do get what you mean.}

But in Holmes County they aren’t segregated PUBLIC cemeteries maintained by the city where there was a single public cemetery with the black graves are separated from the white graves by a chain link fence with one side maintained, and the other not. That was the case in Waco. They didn’t take the fence down until 2020. Seriously. https://wacotrib.com/news/government/wa ... edb08.html

Yes, a whole lot of inequality is economically based. But a lot of it is also racially based. And often racial inequality is justified or explained away as simply being economic. We live in a tangled mess of a country where as Faulkner said of the south, “The past is never dead, it is not even past”

[Neto]

Waco still had racially segregated public cemeteries up until the 2010s, for example.

Holmes County also has "racially" segregated cemeteries. (The 'English' have their own FANCY cemeteries, and the Amish have their small, simple cemeteries stuck away on the corner of some farm. ) {By the way, I mean this as a joke. I don't believe there is more than one race of humankind.
But I do get what you mean.}

But in Holmes County they aren’t segregated PUBLIC cemeteries maintained by the city where there was a single public cemetery with the black graves are separated from the white graves by a chain link fence with one side maintained, and the other not. That was the case in Waco. They didn’t take the fence down until 2020. Seriously. https://wacotrib.com/news/government/wa ... edb08.html

Yes, a whole lot of inequality is economically based. But a lot of it is also racially based. And often racial inequality is justified or explained away as simply being economic. We live in a tangled mess of a country where as Faulkner said of the south, “The past is never dead, it is not even past”

Perhaps a lot of people would be surprised about this, or not believe it, but Texas is a very different place in comparison to Oklahoma, even though there are many similarities that conceal the differences. Texas has a long history of ethnocide, specifically against Native Americans, but it has not been a really nice place for Blacks, either (even though a lot live there). One of my best friends from Bible institute died from Aids after an assault while he was locked up for involvement in a civil rights march. (He had been ordained as a pastor in the Mennonite Brethren church in Omaha, but was back home in Dallas.)

But as to the main cemetery here in Berlin, I think it actually IS maintained by the Township. The difference is that the Amish do not WANT to be buried there. I can also imagine that a lot of Blacks also don't want to be buried in a predominantly 'white' cemetery, either, but it's more complicated than that. (I said "Black' because my experience in our small town in Oklahoma is that I'm pretty sure that the city cemetery has 'people of color' buried there as well, and going back many years. Just for information sake, I'm not talking about Owasso, where I went to school, but the closer town from where we lived in the country, Collinsville. It wasn't an "Indian town" like Owasso, but there were not only respected Native American businessmen in the town, but Arabs as well. However, it's also true that there was not a single Black family in that town during the time I lived there in that area. Hadn't been since the Tulsa Riots in 1921.)

[Ken]

Perhaps a lot of people would be surprised about this, or not believe it, but Texas is a very different place in comparison to Oklahoma, even though there are many similarities that conceal the differences. Texas has a long history of ethnocide, specifically against Native Americans, but it has not been a really nice place for Blacks, either (even though a lot live there). One of my best friends from Bible institute died from Aids after an assault while he was locked up for involvement in a civil rights march. (He had been ordained as a pastor in the Mennonite Brethren church in Omaha, but was back home in Dallas.)

But as to the main cemetery here in Berlin, I think it actually IS maintained by the Township. The difference is that the Amish do not WANT to be buried there. I can also imagine that a lot of Blacks also don't want to be buried in a predominantly 'white' cemetery, either, but it's more complicated than that. (I said "Black' because my experience in our small town in Oklahoma is that I'm pretty sure that the city cemetery has 'people of color' buried there as well, and going back many years. Just for information sake, I'm not talking about Owasso, where I went to school, but the closer town from where we lived in the country, Collinsville. It wasn't an "Indian town" like Owasso, but there were not only respected Native American businessmen in the town, but Arabs as well. However, it's also true that there was not a single Black family in that town during the time I lived there in that area. Hadn't been since the Tulsa Riots in 1921.)

The University of Oklahoma desegregated in 1948 and the football team by 1955. By contrast, the University of Texas did not desegregate its football team until 1970 and then only very slowly and grudgingly. I don't think it is a coincidence that Oklahoma has more or less dominated the series in those past 50 years. They had a 15 year head-start on integration and recruiting Black talent, and by all reports are a more welcoming university for Black students.

This is the 1969 Texas Longhorns football team. I'm old enough to remember 1969.



This was Oklahoma a few years later. I can't find a Sooners team photo from 1969 but they were very desegregated then too

[Haystack]

Housing is expensive here on the west coast.

Yes, $200,000 homes would be nice but they don’t exist other than perhaps small studio condos. A $500,000 family home is still a huge improvement over a $1 million home that is required by law to be built in much of the land around here. Doing the math, if you buy a $500,000 home with 10% down that leaves a $450,000 mortgage which at current interest rates of 3.5% is about $2300/month for a 30 year mortgage. Call it $3,000/mo after taxes, insurance, maintenance, etc. That isn’t in reach if you are a single mom working at Wal-Mart, but a middle class 2-income family, say a nurse married to a teacher is going to have a household income in the $100k to $150k around here. That comes to gross income of roughly $8.5k to $12.5k per month of which $3,000/mo of housing costs is affordable and within the recommended 30% of gross income. Rents are going to be in the same ballpark for a single family home so you are stuck either way.

My larger point is that we don’t even allow much construction of $500,000 homes around here. Much of the land by law requires homes in the $1 million plus range, which gets subdivided by all the rest of us in a hundred different ways. Much of the rest of the country is similar.

And no, I don’t expect underprivileged lower income people to be able to buy $500,000 homes. We don’t generally build homes for poor people. That’s not the point. But if you build homes that are affordable to middle class people then they will move up and and the homes they leave behind are then more affordable for the people under them too move up. And so forth. That used to be how things worked in this country. There was much more opportunity for upward mobility. But not so much anymore. Right now used cars are ridiculously expensive because of the semi-conductor shortages preventing new cars from being built. It is part of the same cascade effect. Used cars don’t need new semiconductors but the supply constraints and price increases at the top affect the entire market all the way down to the bottom nevertheless.

The problem with houses now is the cost of permits, land, labor, and materials have all gone way up. The amount of hoops you have to jump through to get plans approved and permits is enough to drive someone crazy, at least here in California (your mileage varies by state). Also for whatever reason everything has to be luxury and in a neighborhood such as [insert] Estates, [insert] Heights, etc. These types of places tend to have HOA that have crazy rules and are $400+ a month. For whatever reason the general population eats this marketing up. Even "cheap" 1 bedroom apartments from the 80s have at least $400 HOA fee. Then don't get me started on the taxes, which for income alone on a household making $150k would be pretty close to $40kish. Another 7-10k+ for property taxes and that's a 1/3 of your income already. Add on a mortgage and all your other living expenses and it would be getting pretty tight when it's all said and done. But there's not much that's decent for $500k, even burned down lots from wildfires are going for $350k. Wages don't increase as much as the cost of living does, which I won't even dive into because that's a whole other rabbit hole conversation. Now I'm just rambling so I'll end it there. But yeah mileage varies depending on location for a lot of these situations.

[Ken]

Housing is expensive here on the west coast.

Yes, $200,000 homes would be nice but they don’t exist other than perhaps small studio condos. A $500,000 family home is still a huge improvement over a $1 million home that is required by law to be built in much of the land around here. Doing the math, if you buy a $500,000 home with 10% down that leaves a $450,000 mortgage which at current interest rates of 3.5% is about $2300/month for a 30 year mortgage. Call it $3,000/mo after taxes, insurance, maintenance, etc. That isn’t in reach if you are a single mom working at Wal-Mart, but a middle class 2-income family, say a nurse married to a teacher is going to have a household income in the $100k to $150k around here. That comes to gross income of roughly $8.5k to $12.5k per month of which $3,000/mo of housing costs is affordable and within the recommended 30% of gross income. Rents are going to be in the same ballpark for a single family home so you are stuck either way.

My larger point is that we don’t even allow much construction of $500,000 homes around here. Much of the land by law requires homes in the $1 million plus range, which gets subdivided by all the rest of us in a hundred different ways. Much of the rest of the country is similar.

And no, I don’t expect underprivileged lower income people to be able to buy $500,000 homes. We don’t generally build homes for poor people. That’s not the point. But if you build homes that are affordable to middle class people then they will move up and and the homes they leave behind are then more affordable for the people under them too move up. And so forth. That used to be how things worked in this country. There was much more opportunity for upward mobility. But not so much anymore. Right now used cars are ridiculously expensive because of the semi-conductor shortages preventing new cars from being built. It is part of the same cascade effect. Used cars don’t need new semiconductors but the supply constraints and price increases at the top affect the entire market all the way down to the bottom nevertheless.

The problem with houses now is the cost of permits, land, labor, and materials have all gone way up. The amount of hoops you have to jump through to get plans approved and permits is enough to drive someone crazy, at least here in California (your mileage varies by state). Also for whatever reason everything has to be luxury and in a neighborhood such as [insert] Estates, [insert] Heights, etc. These types of places tend to have HOA that have crazy rules and are $400+ a month. For whatever reason the general population eats this marketing up. Even "cheap" 1 bedroom apartments from the 80s have at least $400 HOA fee. Then don't get me started on the taxes, which for income alone on a household making $150k would be pretty close to $40kish. Another 7-10k+ for property taxes and that's a 1/3 of your income already. Add on a mortgage and all your other living expenses and it would be getting pretty tight when it's all said and done. But there's not much that's decent for $500k, even burned down lots from wildfires are going for $350k. Wages don't increase as much as the cost of living does, which I won't even dive into because that's a whole other rabbit hole conversation. Now I'm just rambling so I'll end it there. But yeah mileage varies depending on location for a lot of these situations.

Oh yes. It all contributes to and results from a lack of available housing. It is a vicious circle and CA is the worst.

[Josh]

The core problem is places run by Democrats seem to be really unaffordable and to have all kinds of laws making housing really expensive.

So it seems strange that Ken’s answer is even more leftist, liberal government regulations. Housing is expensive on the West Coast thanks to decades of single-party leftist rule.

Interestingly, Ken doesn’t want to live in Portland, which has all kinds of laws favouring “urban” housing, urban growth boundaries, and other things to make housing more “affordable”. He instead lives in the most conservative, right wing area in the Portland metro - then complains non stop about conservatives and right wing people. It’s really quite something to behold.