CHA Mixed-Income Building Has Class Clash

There was a documentary on PBS a few years ago about the Cabrini Green projects. I thought of it when reading this story, because “mixed” developments like these are based on the egalitarian nonsense that people just can’t live in high rise buildings (NYC high rise condos go for seven and eight figures), so they need to be put next to working people, and civilization will rub off on them.

The irony about places like Cabrini Green is that they were most stable, or rather I should say least unstable, when one singular drug gang was running the whole complex. When a couple of the ‘bangers got heads of steam and started splinter groups, the gang wars started. When the Feds came in and took a bunch of the gangsters off to Club Fed, all that did at CG was to create a power vacuum, settled by gang wars. When they razed CG and moved the “residents” to other neighborhoods, this created more gang wars, the established bangers fighting with the new ones.

Best to leave a beehive alone, sometimes.

“Dobson, then condo president, said he received calls from real estate agents who complained that residents were lounging for long periods of time in the lobby, making the building less attractive to buyers.”

Are these people lounging in the lobby because they don’t have jobs? Or they don’t have jobs because they are lounging in the lobby? which ever it is, it explains why they are in govt. housing in the first place. maybe Lazyboy could get some govt. money to hire these folks to do some field testing of their products. I mean taxpayers should get something out of this right?

Realtor to prospect: “Oh, don’t mind them, the white part of the building starts on the 10th floor, you’ll hardly notice them”

I guarantee you they weren’t just *lounging* in the lobby, either. I’d bet they were being loud, blocking the paths of people trying to get in the building, etc. Everyone who has been around that lower class culture knows exactly what I’m talking about.

This notion, or allegation, that “mixed-income housing works” is mostly wishful thinking. It only “works” in the sense that there are not 10 murders or 15 burglaries a day in the complex. But the middle-class and lower-class occupants will never really be comfortable together. That’s why we have “neighborhoods” that tend to one level or another — not welfare recipients living cheek-by-jowl with owners of mansions.

If all our major cities were overwhelmingly White, there would be none of this sweaty by hook or crook to force different income groups to live in close proximity. It’s White guilt again — and militant black determination to make Whitey take polyglot housing and like it — that has led to these ill-advised experiments. Most people prefer to live among their own kind — whatever that kind is.

This whole article is too funny.

“To be sure, not all condo owners are critics. Ruth Terefe, who grew up in Ethiopia, said she would buy her home again.” I think the “grew up in Ethiopia” part says it all, don’t you? Hey Ruth, can I interest you in this cardboard box? Sleeps three, low maintenance!…

But the most gratifying part is that at least some of the, uh, non-diverse owners surely patted themselves on the back for being such good people for moving in with, uh, “diverse” folks—like the ones who be hangin’ out in the lobby. (How you feelin’ now, sucka?)

I also took a look at comments on the original article, and noticed a refreshing grasp of the obvious. I especially liked this: “You can take the thug out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of the thug.”

There may be hope for the Second City.

“The mixed-income building is part of a local and national movement to house poor families side by side with working professionals instead of segregating them in gang-infested, dilapidated ghettos.”

How utterly laughable!!!!

Translation: ‘The mixed-income building is part of a local and national sociopolitical sanctimony movement, to force working professionals into living side by side with the people of “leisure” they pay ever increasing taxes to subsidize, and turn their hard-earned property into dilapidated and gang-infested ghettos.’

What more to say, other than, God Help Us All!!!!

Reminds me of where I live. I live in a apartment buidling next to a huge sprawling public housing project.

The steps to my apartment seem to be prime lounging turf for residents of the projects all summer long. You always have to gingerly open the door, excuse your self several times in a humble tone of voice and profusely apologize to the 4 or 5 surly loafers reclined on the steps, sometimes smoking weed, some times drinking but generally just sitting doing absolutely nothing.

Then you wait about 20 or 30 seconds as they slowly as molasses collect themselves in a resentful manner and move just enough for you to open the door and squeeze past them. If you have not apologized sufficiently sarcastic exclamations of “Well,’scuse me” are hissed in your direction.

The cultural diversity is marvelous.

When just about every other thing you look at in American life today is being run in a way that’s directly opposite to the plain common sense that reigned 60 years ago, you have to conclude that someone has wanted to destroy us, and has gotten us to pitch in and help with the project.

What kind of idiot would buy into a building like that?!!!! Basically, you’re just declaring open season on yourself. What stupid people.

“But Antwan Dobson, an owner and former condo president who is African-American, argues the problems have been more about lifestyle differences. Dobson, who was raised by a foster parent on the West Side, said he understands isolation and struggle.”

Well, it’s a good thing the reporter told us that Antwan Dobson was an African American, because many of her readers would have expected him to be an upscale Boston Lawyer.

Antwan might understand isolation and struggle, but he’s not to adept when it comes to comprehending that putting urban blacks in with middle class people is not really a recipe for effective socializing. But it appears he’s no dumber than the feds whose hare-brained idea started this whole debacle to begin with.

“Proximity, however, has not led to harmony.”

This was done with a housing project called Cabrini-Green (this may be a part of that complex. The article doesn’t say).

A prerequisite for ‘low income’ residents was to attend classes on how to be good neighbors. One of the things taught in the class that you should respect your neighbors by not sitting on the stoop and blocking people coming in and out. Common sense to whites. A cultural norm for blacks that leads to resentments, intimidation, territorial disputes, and fights.

“experts say results of the experiment are mixed”

Translation: It’s been a failure.

The operative word here is ‘experiment’.

Experiments are devised to prove or disprove theories. The theory of racial harmony has been proven false numerous times and yet they keep using us (and our children) like lab rates in their ‘experiments’.

Anonymous # 10

The people who buy here would be the same ones praising Obama as he leads them off to the gulag. My old neighborhood was 90% white, but the local elementary school was only 40%. (A lot of retirees and busing from section 8 housing). We would have given the house away to get out of there. Fortunately, we sold before the bottom fell out of the market.

This happens a lot in the town I live in in England. New developments of more than 5 units must set aside 20% of them for Housing Associations (a form of social housing). So you get the ridiculous scenario of people spending a fortune for a fancy house or flat, only to have low lifes (of all races, I must add) moving in next door. Within a year, the neighbourhood has gone downhill, kids run riot, drug dealing takes place openly, and the properties lose their value, only to be bought by speculators, who rent them out to other low lifes. It only takes one or two “families” (usually a woman with a number of kids by different men), who are obnoxious and threatening to the decent majority (who keep quiet and hope it’ll go away), to destroy a decent block.

For anyone who has never experienced blacks “hanging out”, there is a lot more to it, generally, than their simply lounging about. They stare. They make ugly comments. They size up potential victims. They ‘menace’. How’d you like to be a lone white woman headed for the elevators late at night, having just passed a throng of YBMs? Oh yeah? Thought not.

Then who on earth would be crazy enough to buy a condo in a building like that? I can’t even imagine such a thing. Were the potential condo buyers assured that the public housing renters would all be elderly and disabled?

My one semester in an integrated college dorm was more than enough to teach me my lesson. Never again.

These developments are actually more profoundly Marxist in conception than the housing projects they replaced. The planners typically insist that the Section 8 apartments have precisely the same floorplans as the “market rate” units, even though, in this case, the (presumably) naive working white liberal buyers of the new market rate units paid $225,000 for them, while their lobby-lounging ghetto neighbors are paying $200/month for the same place. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, etc.

But it can’t last. The realtor’s “trick” of getting people to buy in works only once: right at the beginning, when “mixed income living” is just a sales slogan aimed at gullible buyers. When the initial market raters eventually try to sell, they will take substantial losses, and that “market” rate will plummet. More likely, they simply won’t be able to sell at an acceptable price, and will end up renting their places to the relatives of the ghetto blacks down the hall, the only ones who’d want to move in there. And thus, the apartment building will eventually turn back into Cabrini Green.

Most of the racial experimentation of the last 50 years has been class warfare by another name. If the owners of these condos truly are upper-middle class “working professionals” then you can only laugh at their predicament. ONLY upper-middle class and rich neighborhoods should house these welfare families, on the grounds that the middle class and below are in too vicarious of an economic position to sustain the cost and the upper classes are a better role model for the dysfunctional. Right by the mansions, right in every gated community and every guarded apartment building, and right in their schools, both private and public. See how long their support for social experiments lasts once they are forced to participate instead of foisting the cost on those below them economically. The nasty little secret of the elite is that in the ways that really count they have reserved a segregated lifestyle for themselves while paying lip service to diversity.

Rich, powerful people want middle-class people to properly socialize the denizens of the underclass. Only foolish middle-class people consent to such an arrangement. We need to ask ourselves, who benefits? We certainly don’t.

I remember the “blockbusting” tactics used by real estate people in the 1960’s. When a black family moved into the neighborhood, the post cards from the real estate company would go out. These post cards read- “A new family is moving int your neighborhood. If you wish to sell your house, please contact me at XXX XXXX”.
If white people had just STAYED PUT instead of running, the cities would be much different places today. The enactment of “civil rights” statutes and the abolishment of “restrictive covenants” regarding race has led to the situation we have now.
The “rich” can get away from the human garbage with their “gated comunities”, the “poor” get housing subsidies, the middle class is told to shut up and take it.