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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index
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To: David Jones who wrote (4624)8/24/2002 4:59:48 PM
From: ConanRead Replies (3) of 306849
 
David:

Subdivisions and the automobile have been the best legal way to fence off segregated enclaves in American for the past 30 years. The significant hurdle of being able to own, insure, and operate a car is a great barrier to the lower classes who cannot afford this luxury. Suburbs that prevent one from walking to a nearby grocery store for milk also create large contiguous areas of middle to upperclass homeowners who value living in an area where the lower classes and working poor cannot live. If you want to live in a diverse area with mixed zoning there are many beautiful cities like SF and Seattle where you can live. If you value class homogeneaity, privacy, and high barriers to people with a higher propensity to commit crime and live dysfunctionally you can choose to live in a suburb and vote against any government funded public transportation initiative that seeks to level the playing field for those without access to an automobile. Based on the decisions that people living in the suburbs are making as they vote with their feet and housing choices it is clear that the suburb is a very appealing choice to many.

As I look at America I see two camps. There are the ultra rich and their allies the working poor in one camp. The middle class is in the other camp. The rich employ the working poor as servants, guards, drivers, etc... They co-opt the voting numbers of the poor against the middle class. The rich vote for wealth transfers financed by the government that move money mainly from the middle to the poor. The rich don't send their kids to public schools with the poor but do seek to finance better education for the poor by through a combination of desegregation and moving control of education from local to state and federal entities. The rich feel much more comfortable with the working poor because the working poor don't threaten them socially or economically. They feel comfortable living near them in the cities because they like easy access to their labor and can afford the requisite security measures. They really like having servants.

The middle class work hard to achieve more leisure time but are constantly fighting against the wind of high marginal tax rates. They admire the wealth of the rich but mostly find it unattainable. Most of them fail to understand how the deck is sometimes stacked against them. To the extent that the middle class wield political power in the form of popular tax breaks like the deductability of home mortgage interest and the proliferation of suburbs, SUVs, and large barbeques they are utterly despised by the rich.

Conan
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