So What is the Approved SJW Position on This, I am Confused
The exact same people who lament white flight from cities (we heard a lot of lamenting about this during the Baltimore riots) also oppose "gentrification" which could essentially be labelled "white return". So what is it they want?
Jim Collins:
Just to be able to bitch.
May 11, 2015, 11:55 amOnlooker from Troy:
Ha! Excellent point. Just add it to the long list of inconsistent B.S. that comes out of the left. (long list of a different flavor from the right, of course)
May 11, 2015, 12:05 pmMatthew Slyfield:
" So what is it they want?"
Everything,
May 11, 2015, 12:46 pmmogden:
If white people want to do it, it must be bad for everyone else.
May 11, 2015, 1:03 pmjoshv:
They want affluent white people in the 'burbs to finance middle class living standards and housing in the inner city via exorbitant taxes. Simple as that. There are still people bemoaning the fact that suburban Detroit area denizens didn't bail out Detroit.
May 11, 2015, 1:53 pmMacBeachBum:
Classic win-win as in "Heads they win tails we lose."
May 11, 2015, 2:11 pmBroccoli:
I'll take a stab at that question. What they want is stasis since they are the current power brokers. Community organizers want the current situation to continue indefinitely because it keeps them collecting paychecks and locally famous. Of course they can't admit that publically. Thus the same person can be both against white flight and against gentrification and still be internally intellectually consistent, though the justifications they give the public for their positions will not be consistent.
May 11, 2015, 2:23 pmm1shu:
What did Goldfinger want James Bond to do?
May 11, 2015, 2:43 pmNL7:
I imagine they would argue that middle class and wealthy people should be comfortable living in ethnically and racially mixed neighborhoods. And they should accept relatively low-amenity neighborhoods and less extravagant homes, lest the local property values rise too much for the previous group of locals to live there any longer. And presumably such neighborhoods shouldn't be too trendy and popular, because then it might also be a target for boutiques and cafes that draw more high-income people who renovate homes and drive up local home values.
It's not that it's inconsistent, exactly. Technically, you could be against the idea of wealthy enclaves of mostly white people insulated from poorer, less-white neighborhoods around them - whether it's a big-yard suburb outside the city or a big-townhome neighborhood inside the city. But in practice it's absurd to think that everybody should restrain their lives and spending so much that local stores and restaurants wouldn't spring up near wealthy people, or that wealthier people wouldn't want nicer homes (e.g. renovated brownstones in formerly transitional neighborhoods). It's not directly inconsistent, it's just unrealistic to the point that wishing for both things is effectively mutually exclusive (either rich people will live in exclusive suburbs or in exclusive urban neighborhoods).
It's also pretty silly to think that a city, which is very much a nebulous and evolving entity, needs to be frozen in any one particular way. Neighborhoods might shift from German to Irish to African American to Puerto Rican and it's just wrongheaded to think that at any one point in time it was at some "correct" blend of inhabitants.
There's a lot of racial baggage in every US metro area still working its way around, and nobody can really deny that. But the return of affluent people to the cities is a good thing, and in any case is better than the previous equilibirum point where affluent people mostly avoided cities.
May 11, 2015, 3:17 pmNot Sure:
"It's also pretty silly to think that a city, which is very much a nebulous and evolving entity, needs to be frozen in any one particular way. Neighborhoods might shift from German to Irish to African American to Puerto Rican and it's just wrongheaded to think that at any one point in time it was at some "correct" blend of inhabitants."
Isn't this this pretty much the argument used to advocate for reducing carbon dioxide emissions in order to prevent Global Cooling/Warming/Climate Change- that there was a point in time when the climate was "correct"?
May 11, 2015, 3:46 pmDannyD:
In the context of segregation and integration, white flight maintained segregation and created new collateral damage and economic obstacles for African Americans. Gentrification is not necessarily "white return." I would consider "white return" to be a phenomenon where white people try to integrate into an African American majority community. Integration would ideally be a two way street with a sharing of cultures, but gentrification is rarely a process of assimilation. The process of gentrification is usually perceived (true or not, each case is different) as follows; community is left to decay, people are displaced, land is purchased for cheap (or seized though eminent domain) and flipped out of the price range of the current neighbors. The new owners bring with them their own culture and in time take over blocks and neighborhoods.
The anger comes when former residents and current ungentrified neighbors start seeing seeing the differences they had been asking for for decades (community policing, tax revenue spent to better the area, and business development, etc.). The police usually have different relationships with the new neighbors, business don't cater to the surrounding cultures, and the displaced people are consolidated with the rest of the community recreating the conditions that existed before integration and white flight.
By the people who live in a poor neighborhood, gentrification is not an seen as investment in a community, but rather plunder and entitlements given to the better off.
May 11, 2015, 5:10 pmrandian:
White flight doesn't damage blacks or create obstacles for them. If blacks wanted a functional culture that creates wealth and prosperity for themselves they would have it. That they don't is not the problem or responsibility of whites.
As for "what they want", what they want is to steal the wealth of whites ("please stay") while getting rid of them ("don't come back").
May 11, 2015, 6:01 pmbigmaq1980:
"So what is it they want?"
For you (and each of us) to give them money (to spend as they wish on their favored groups), and to shut up!
May 11, 2015, 7:54 pmDannyD:
Maybe "they" want some sort of Marshall Plan/New Deal hybrid in order to built their own Levittowns.
May 11, 2015, 8:16 pmano333:
But many of these neighborhoods were Italian or Polish before African-Americans arrived, does that mean we actually have to go back further in time and re-establish the Italian-American culture of the area?
May 12, 2015, 3:39 amDannyD:
Preserving the culture isn't an economic goal. That happens through migration patterns. I think the bigger issue is access to tools for wealth creation (education, jobs, property, etc.) for a group of people historically segregated. I don't see how $300,000 lofts and some smoothie stands have practically helped the unemployed and homeless within the vicinity.
May 12, 2015, 5:20 amBaelzar:
More. They want more.
May 14, 2015, 11:56 amobloodyhell:
}}} So what is it they want?
YOU... Dead.
ME... Dead.
EVERYONE.... Dead.
This is the end goal for all Postmodern Liberal philosophies and causes.
It's a societal cancer.
May 14, 2015, 8:39 pmLanternFish:
"...And don't forget to feel guilty about all the ... the ... GUILT-Y things you've done!"
May 29, 2015, 6:31 pm