LogFAQs > #970441516

Lokarin posted...

there's an alternative solution that's a little harder to work with... and that's mixing high and low end housing together; As it is a person is 99% likely to have neighbours in the same economic bracket as themselves, and this hurts economic communication which promotes financial mobility.

Yeah, all this nonsense of "our building has 5% affordable units, but they have to use a separate lobby so the rich people don't have to look at the middle class" needs to be kicked squarely in the dick. Some degree of economic segregation is kind of inevitable, given how inextricably linked location is with real estate prices, but deliberately concentrating all affordable housing in a single area and isolating people based on SES is a really bad idea.

Of course, the flip side of that is that forcibly separating existing affordable neighbourhoods is also bad. That happened here in Halifax with the community of Africville, which was a predominantly-black community that was little more than a ghetto because of how badly the city neglected it. In the 60's, the city condemned the entire community, deported everyone against their will, and razed the whole thing to make room for the new bridge that was being constructed across the harbour. All the former residents were sent to one of three public housing districts established around the city, each of which is about a half-hour walk from the other. That was done with little regard for who wanted to live near whom, and that fragmentation did some serious harm to each district's sense of community and likely contributed a lot to how high-crime the areas were for many years after that.