Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
You should study up on the history of blockbusting.
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I read up on all of this 25+ years ago. I created one of the first urbanist websites back in 1998. Back then I held many of the beliefs that are now popular on NPR, Twitter, Strongtowns, etc. I came to see the faults in those sentiments well before all of that stuff became a cottage industry in the 2010s (really, post-2015).
The NUMTOTs and Twitter loudmouths think that they are able to predict the future by pointing fingers at events from the past. The passage of time will prove them wrong. The things - good or bad - that people like me predicted that have come to pass have occurred for different reasons than we anticipated.
The S&P 500 in mid-2021 is well over 4,000 - or 10X what it was when I was in high school. This means the 500 biggest U.S. companies are 10X more valuable than they were 30 years ago. The rural land and farm homes and houses and other structures in small towns are not 10X more valuable today than they were in the early 1990s.
So yes - those white Americans whose primary residences are in NYC, LA, SF, Seattle, and on a beach have experienced wild appreciation - perhaps the 10X that the S&P has experienced over the past 30 years. But the white Americans in small towns and out in the country - which comprise tens of millions of households - haven't experienced any appreciation at all.
NPR, etc., don't care about those people. In fact, they sneer and look down on them. The owners of rural property and homes in uncool small cities and towns don't have anything at all to do with what might or might not have happened in Chicago, Detroit, etc., back in the 1960s. But continuing to antagonize those people by connecting them to things they had nothing to do with is fomenting an ugly backlash.