You and the Zman are in concordance

Looks like someone else has noted your theory on Section 8 infill in pre-existing neighborhoods.

-Nero the Pict

Below is one paragraph from this excellent article. I didn’t realize until now that Zman and I spent so much time so physically close to one another. The neighborhood he describes is familiar to me and I’ll leave it at that.

“Cost-shifting is obviously true in real estate. I’ve joked for years that the builders name developments after whatever it is they bulldozed to build the houses. It is a strange, unintentional mockery of culture. They knock down the authentic, to build a synthetic town, so a bunch of strangers can move through it. The argument is that there is a demand for new houses, so the old must give way to the new. No one ever bothers to ask why there is a demand for new houses or wonder from where these people are fleeing.”

The area in which Zman experienced a glimmer of the death of a neighborhood, a social killing by theft and rape is in the midst of a court ordered process. This is one of five Baltimore County zip codes which must, by order of a Federal Court, spend 320 million dollars from Baltimore County tax receipts, to resettle the lowest income, fatherless martyr families from Baltimore City’s most crime ridden neighborhoods, where schools are being forced to close by political corruption and gang violence, in a stated bid to place disadvantaged children into advantaged school districts. One Baltimore City principal is currently being paid 127k a year while she teaches in Kuwait, with a second principal assigned to her school to run it for a similar salary.

I viewed one of these townhouse units going up in Lutherville, on York Road, this past October, as my companion drove me out of town to a vacation destination. This lady was not only aghast at the shoddy building being thrown up in an upscale neighborhood, in which she once lived, but then noticed that in this 95% ghost person community, along a 4 mile stretch of road, that all of the many folk we saw on foot where martyrs of an ebon hue, not a single ghost in sight, that they were virtually all military aged males with backpacks, either visiting, vagrant, newly arrived or working in the area into which expanded bus service has just forged a deeper connection to the blood-spattered streets of the ghetto ten miles down the road.

As Zman points out in his article, the only people who benefit from social welfare are real estate speculators, with every other segment of society involved suffering.

In that one paragraph quoted above, the author describes America in a nutshell, a thing that would be reprehensible if it had enough social fiber to be offensive.

I tried to place the following comment on the Zman site but my email was declared invalid, despite it being my email, so perhaps I am invalid.

This article, in a healthy nation, would appear as an op-ed in the premier newspaper.

By order of a federal court [2 years past if memory serves] Baltimore County must spend 320 million facilitating the housing of section 8 families from the worst school districts in Baltimore City into the 5 best school districts in Baltimore County. The focus is in the lower crime areas just north and east of the County Seat in Towson. It is being engineered by zip code.

Harm City

Survival