Stones Cry Out

Matt, thanks for the thoughtful post. I really wish I had more time to get into this with you.

I was interviewed by Hugh Hewitt on his radio program a while back. He asked me point blank, "So Rick, why do want to take away everyone's property rights?" I kind of chuckled and told him the issue was too complex to discuss in his 10-minute radio segment. I'm beginning to understand why John Kerry told one reporter that his ideas were much too complex to explain to people in 30 second sound bites. Some of this stuff is really far more complex than can be explained/supported in a comment to a post.

Perhaps I need to do a series of essays to explain my positions. It would take me a few years, but perhaps I could make a book out of it.

The root of my ideological tendencies lies in the history of urban policy.

With the establishment of the HOLC in 1933, the federal government actively redlined neighborhoods based on race and religious beliefs. For the first time, federally backed long-term loans were accessbile to white Americans with jobs and they could leave the inner cities, which were still reeling from the effects of the Industrial Revolution and being hit hard by the Great Depression.

Consider the HOLC with the federal subsidization of suburbanization and the white folks no longer have wings, but jetpacks (Federal Highway Acts starting in 1916 through 1956).

Newly established (and don't forget - federally subsidized) suburbs quickly established the institutional means (incorporation) of protecting themselves from swallowed, via annexation, by leaders of the larger metro cities who saw their tax base fleeing. These suburbs also had big daddy federal government on their side with HOLC to "protect their investment" and exclude the poor (can't move there if you can't get a loan to buy a house).

So the poor and minorities were forced to stay behind while federal policy facilitated disinvestment of their neighborhoods. Schools degraded, crime increased, etc etc. They couldn't get loans to fix up their places. HOLC had a certain type of loan and a certain type of lender in mind. The psychological impact on the individual quickly spread to sociological impact and, finally, the impacts became even more visual - poor neighborhoods with rich social networks turned into enclaves of fear and seclusion - many turned into dysfunctional ghettos.

Then came the Title I (Housing Act of 1949) bulldozers of Robert Moses and the like. These poor saps can't take care of themselves, all you have to do is look at their neighborhoods. They have become slums!

Title I did not provide for an adequate replacement housing plan to accommodate displaced residents. The plan was to destroy the "slums" and disperse the poor (even place some into public housing like Pruitt Igoe and Cabrini Green). Then the fat cats could move in and "revitalize" the area like vultures. They got all the profits and the poor were sent packing.

Continue this process through the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s. Finally came the CRA of 1977 to stop redlining.

I have held in my hands maps of the redlined San Diego neighborhoods that were used by lenders issuing federally backed loans up until 1977!!!!! I was born in 1976. If I was a black kid whose parents and grandparents lived in a redlined neighborhood since the 1930s, what kind of life do you think I would have? What kind of hope would I have?

Okay - you say that was 1977 and this is now. Well, that's where the Johnson's "shackled runner" analogy comes in. After 40+ years of federal policy creating suburbanization and income/racial segregation, where the suburbanites have been able to set up shop and institute local policies and regulations that jack up the prices of their homes by artificially restricting the supply from meeting the true market demand in their "elite" suburbs, do you really think it's acceptable to say - "what's from stopping that poor kid who has lived in a ghetto all his life from going to college, getting a good job, and buying that dream home in that dream community?" Or - "Why don't those people in that read more of Horatio Alger and pick themselves up by their bootstraps and clean up their neighborhoods?"

I believe in taking responsibility for one's actions. But, for the same reasons why I believe it is necessary to create the conditions for Democracy in the middle east (we aren't telling them to handle it themselves), it is necessary to create the conditions for success in our inner cities. This means money and TONS of it. It means housing subsidies. It means Community Development Block Grants. It means transit and streetscape/facade improvements. It means low- or no-interest loans to neighborhood vendors and business people. It means a LOT of federal and state intervention.

Oh! Remember my mention of the redlined San Diego neighborhoods? Today those neighborhoods are the worst neighborhoods in San Diego. Their schools are shoddy, the crime rate high, the parks and community centers deficient, streets falling apart, etc.

Our government created the conditions for failure in our inner cities. Our government should be responsible to create the conditions for success. To me that is a truly conservative position to take (forgive the True Scotsman-like intonation of that statement).

"Why help a neighbor when the government does it for you?"

Took the words right out of my mouth... heh... I said exactly the same thing in a comment just a few minutes ago. As long as the government pretends it's got everything under control, people are going to think they can just ignore the poor.

I agree with Rick that our government should create conditions for success -- but I don't agree with the way they often do it. I have friends who are on social security insurance and food stamps (who actually have more disposable income than me at the moment, since I just took a major pay cut and they don't pay rent) and the money they get from the government basically encourages them to just sit back and wait for the next check. The government is just throwing money at the problem.

I suppose... I think Rick's statement only covers half of it. The government should create conditions for success, and they should also create conditions to allow more people to help create conditions for success.

"Why help a neighbor when the government does it for you?"

I do understand the implicit moral hazard here. However, it must be viewed as collateral damage. I remain convinced that most poor people would like a hand up, not a hand out. Sure there are free-riders, but they are inevitable. Again, we caused the problem - we ought to fix it.

I'm beginning to like the idea of a book on this subject. I can see the chapters already...

As I said before, I don't deny that the situation is bad. But you just proved how government involvement and artificial manipulation of the market is a bad thing. I realize that poor want help. I do believe that. I remain unconvinced that throwing more money onto a bad program will help out. I know you understand this very well, and I've read enough to know that the problems are deep. But the answer to the problems of socialism in the past is not more socialism today. I said before - you can't undo these new laws and entitlements very easily. We can't keep adding to the budget; you've seen how difficult it is to fix social security.

Seems to me the bottom line why financially-stable families move out of the inner cities is because the city itself likes to suck up as much of the taxes it can on those families with homes in the city proper, largely in the form of appraisal taxes and property taxes. I would love to live in the older neighborhoods of Houston excpet for the fact that property/appraisal taxes are five times what we would have to pay out here in the suburbs. They are not where I would like them to be out here as well (Fort Bend County), but its a sight better than getting reamed every time our checkbook is opened for living closer to the inner city.

There is a grassroots group begun here that deals specifically with the property/appraisal tax problems. I cannot think of the name they have called themselves, but if you contact Edd Hendee at The Lone Star Times (Houston blog) I bet they could give you the details.

http://lonestartimes.com/?p=40