barrier breaker
GENTRIFICATION AND OTHER LEGITIMATE PROPERTY CONCERNS OF BLACK PEOPLE
First, he said that his opinion on gentrification was personal as opposed to political, before saying that he’d honestly rather go to a shopping center than to a slum. The question he was answering there is, “Do you know what gentrification is doing to black neighborhoods?” I mean, think about it. He could talk about the damage it…actually does to black neighborhoods. It’s not hard.
I countered with the most extreme example of gentrification: condemned housing done to accommodate “urban renewal” projects. Basically, the local government comes in to an area it labels as rundown and bulldozes it to sell it to developers. Do they compensate the people forced out? If you own your place — yes, you get compensated somewhat. But the money people receive is often not enough for them to get housing of equal quality, and anyone renting (as poor people usually are) don’t get a single red cent. TJ Kirk dismissed this in an earlier video as something good, as it was merely getting rid of a crumbling infrastructure and making for more pleasant dwellings.
But that’s disturbing. If you’re kicked out of your condemned housing…you’re going to be hard-pressed to find another place to stay. You have to move there, get checked out, be close enough to work, and so on.
And besides that — if you listen to black communities, solidarity was beginning to develop. Strong friendships were made. Strong cultures were becoming more dignified. Take documentaries like this one (there’s a handful of them around the Internet).
And urban renewal that displaces people from their homes forces people, oftentimes, into worse neighborhoods. It forces them to try to rebuild their lives and their friendships and networks again. Urban renewal does real damage to real flesh-and-blood people’s lives. So…yeah. And these efforts were largely destroying black neighborhoods. As Reason magazine notes:
In 1954, the Supreme Court allowed the District of Columbia to use eminent domain to eradicate blight. The court’s language was high-toned: “The concept of the public welfare is broad and inclusive,” it ruled. “The values it represents are spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as monetary.” The victims, however, shared mostly skin tone: The “urban renewal” district to be bulldozed was 97.5 percent black.
In the 2005 eminent domain case Kelo v. New London, the Supreme Court allowed government to seize private property for someone else’s ostensibly higher use — condemnation in the name of social progress. Dissenting Justice Sandra Day O’Connor warned that “the fallout from this decision will not be random.” She was right. An Institute for Justice study of 184 eminent domain cases occurring since the 2005 decision in Kelo v. New London found condemnation was used disproportionately against minority property holders.
Another study, in 2009, found “a strong and significant … relationship” between low-density zoning policies and racial segregation. Yet another paper, published last year, found that “over half the difference between levels of segregation in the stringently zoned Boston and lightly zoned Houston metro areas can be explained by zoning regulation alone.”
Indeed, the more we look at this, the more James Baldwin (a major Civil Rights leader who actually knew what he was talking about) seems as if he was right here when he said “urban renewal” frequently meant “Negro removal.”
But the gentrification bit often happens when surrounding areas get nicer, forcing up propery taxes or rent, and forcing tenants out into poorer communities. Gentrification in relatively nicer black communities forces black individuals out of the nicer communities and into often lower-quality housing. Some claim that this gentrification’s damage to black populations is a myth, but personal experience from black individuals (see video below) and the concrete statistics show that in major cities, such as New York City and Washington, D.C., gentrification does occur and does have a significantly negative affect on black communities. Slums don’t get gentrified in this way, usually; they are more likely to get bulldozed for urban renewal projects.
So the point is that black people are losing on either side. When they are in slums, they’re likely to get bulldozed for Urban Renewal projects. When they are in areas that are becoming nicer, they’re likely to get forced out due to higher rent and to have to move into worse housing.
Now, for The Amazing Atheist, it’s simple. Those forced out due to higher rent or property taxes will just go to another shitty apartment or house. That’s easy for him to say, making a six-figure income off his legions of fans.
But for poorer people, it’s simply not that easy. I mean, I once thought that the solution, for homeless people, was to simply get a job. It was easy to think that, as I had a job and a roof over my head. But when I actually went and talked to homeless people, I found it wasn’t that simple. It’s hard enough to get a job when you’re not homeless. But when you are — how are you going to get nice clothes for an interview when you don’t have a dollar to your name? And once you have the clothes and go to the interview, you’ll need a number for people to call you back. And even if you have a phone number — what address are you going to put down? Who are you going to put down as references? What are you going to put down on that application for that time you were homeless? And for most jobs, you’ll need a Social Security card, and for your Social Security card you’ll need a birth certificate. You’ll also need a photo ID, like a Driver’s License. And remember, you don’t have a dollar to your name. Between this, you need to find food and shelter — which, honestly, is nearly a full time job in itself. You need to be able to come into a job interview looking presentable. You need to find a shower. And through all this, your mental health is shit. You desperately need a counselor or therapist, and have no access to one whatsoever. And if you have kids? Man, that makes it that much harder. People think it’s easy to get a job at McDonald’s, but that’s not the reality when you’re told your application will be put “on file” and it’s put in a stack piled higher than War and Peace.
And that’s coming from someone who has never been homeless. If you’ve been homeless, there are likely more barriers.
It’s a similar deal when you’re forced out of your home due to gentrification. You may have to move to a more rundown neighborhood, bringing your possessions — and moves take money and time. There’s usually a reason you lived where you lived. And you have to leave what is often a community of needed support — it can ruin your stability and support system, over time. And your job can be more difficult to get to, especially if you don’t have a car (by the way, have you ever tried moving somewhere without a car?). And sometimes there may not be a cheaper place nearby to move to that will fit in your old budget, and if there is it may be dramatically worse. That’s what happened in Portland, Oregon, for example, where gentrification led the black homeless population to rise by 48% and to make up a disturbingly disproportionate portion of the homeless population. I hardly think this is an issue to be dismissed with a “victim cult” label.
Additionally, from 1937 until 1968, banks explicitly and openly discriminated against black individuals seeking a home loan — they would not give loans, oftentimes, to individuals living in or near predominantly black neighborhoods. This was not based on poverty level; it was based on race, according to fairly explicit language in the writeup of regulations from the Federal Housing Administration. And after the practice was officially illegal, this continued to happen. As the Washington Post notes:
The federal government eventually retreated from the practice, and it was outlawed by the Fair Housing Act in 1968. But black communities have warned that it still exists in subtler and changed forms, in bank tactics that have targeted these same neighborhoods for predatory lending, or in new patterns like “retail redlining.” Some of the persistent redlining, though, still looks an awful lot like the original.
Case in point: This week the Department of Housing and Urban Development settled with the largest bank headquartered in Wisconsin over claims that it discriminated from 2008-2010 against black and Hispanic borrowers in Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota. The bank, Associated Bank, denies wrongdoing in the settlement, but HUD itself is declaring victory in “one of the largest redlining complaints” ever brought by the federal government against a mortgage lender.
So you have all these factors: urban renewal, gentrification that increases rent prices, and discrimination in home loans. These characteristics, together, made it much more difficult for black areas to build up the infrastructure for success that they tried for many years to build. Add to this the infamous War on Drugs that disproportionately affected poor black communities just three years after this open discrimination — in 1971 — and you have fathers missing from communities that have been made poor, and the creation of the highest incarceration rate in the world. One clear case of discrimination is in crack cocaine (primarily consumed by blacks) and powder cocaine (primarily consumed by whites) — crack cocaine’s punishment was 100 times more severe than the punishment for powder cocaine. A Watergate co-conspirator, John Ehrlichmann, allegedly stated, according to journalist Dan Baum, that this fight targeted black communities:
At the time [in 1994], I [Dan Baum] was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Now, remember that whole thing about crack cocaine’s punishment being 100 times more severe than the punishment for powder cocaine? Well, long story short, during Reagan’s presidency Nicaragua was seen as a dangerously leftist country, like Cuba, and there were some rebels there — the Contras. The Contras were supported more openly by Reagan at first, but as time went on support for the Contras (who were basically terrorists against the Nicaraguan government) ended in Congress. There was no money. But the Contras also sold cocaine — especially crack cocaine — and had a system of trafficking drugs into predominantly black communities. To empower the Contras to fund their attacks against the Nicaraguan government, Reagan and the CIA simply looked the other way and seems to pressed the gas on this trafficking, leading to an explosion of crack cocaine in the black communities — which were already doing poorly.
Now, the conservative counter-argument is that there is no evidence that Reagan or the CIA intentionally shipped drugs into black communities — and they’re right, so far as I know. But if they were REALLY serious about the War on Drugs, why does the evidence indicate they looked the other way?
So now you have urban renewal, gentrification raising rent prices, redlining, and the War on Drugs. All targeting black communities. These are real people affected. Can black people still succeed? Of course, in many cases. But we have to be honest about how we got to where we are if we want to change the conditions.
We did not get here because black people are crybabies. We got here because America has been racist.
I want to underline: This is not a fringe, SJW view. So far as I know, this is scholarly consensus. Do your own research, but this is real. It actually happened. Sure, another view may be popular in the anti-SJW echo chamber on YouTube, and you can make this about whether I think TJ is a racist or not, sure. But that’s all kinda beside the point. When you look at the evidence, the way to fix the problem is not to shame black culture, but to honestly diagnose the causes and fix them if you want to create a healthier society.
American society tried the “get tough on those black crybabies” strategy for hundreds of years, and it just made things worse. What has made things better, to where we have the opportunity we do, is people actually taking the concerns of marginalized groups seriously. Are there exaggerators? Sure. But from what I’ve seen, they are the minority, even though many claim they are not. Most are bringing up real problems, and fixing those problems will create a stronger society.
P.S. I have a Patreon, if you want to help me do what I do.
CLICK HERE FOR TJ’S MISLEADING DISCUSSION OF MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY, GAP, AND THE OSCARS
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