We played this game back in the 70s, during White Flight. I lived through it.
White professionals got very paranoid about living in THE CITY. Built giant gated communities just at the edge of town. Stuffed their neighborhoods with cops and private guards and security cameras and retractable road spikes and giant fuck-off electric gates and stone walls. Then nothing happened for a few years, and people inside realized this shit was boring af and obnoxiously expensive.
So they brought in a bunch of developers to add parks and malls and theaters and clubs. And then these places needed labor, so they built a bunch of low-rent housing just outside the spots just outside THE CITY. And these places filed up with the same working class folks who lived in THE CITY. But now the white professionals weren’t living in the exurbs anymore, they were living in THE CITY again. So they all panicked and sold out and fled to the new edge of town.
And we’ve been repeating this pattern for 50 years, such that now it’s a two fucking hour drive to get from Katy or Clear Lake or The Woodlands into downtown Houston where all the fucking professional jobs are. But, of course, this is Texas so nobody is allowed to build commuter rail. Instead we have several hundred miles of twelve lane highways gobbling up a bunch of historically prime real estate. And we spend $1.1B/year on cops who mostly do dick-all jerking themselves off in their squad cars earning 2.5x overtime pay on six figure salaries.
Everyone under 30 wants to GTFO of these horrible boring overpriced suburbs. While everyone over 60 is still too terrified to walk out their front doors when they live 30 miles outside of town, because the news said someone in a suburb on the opposite side of the city was center stage on the nightly news for getting their purse snatched.
But hey, don’t worry, because Palantir Presents THE PANOPTICON is coming soon. And they’ll definitely finally permanently for real this time solve the problem of crime forever. Just give them access to your retirement account so you can pay for it.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 week ago
We played this game back in the 70s, during White Flight. I lived through it.
White professionals got very paranoid about living in THE CITY. Built giant gated communities just at the edge of town. Stuffed their neighborhoods with cops and private guards and security cameras and retractable road spikes and giant fuck-off electric gates and stone walls. Then nothing happened for a few years, and people inside realized this shit was boring af and obnoxiously expensive.
So they brought in a bunch of developers to add parks and malls and theaters and clubs. And then these places needed labor, so they built a bunch of low-rent housing just outside the spots just outside THE CITY. And these places filed up with the same working class folks who lived in THE CITY. But now the white professionals weren’t living in the exurbs anymore, they were living in THE CITY again. So they all panicked and sold out and fled to the new edge of town.
And we’ve been repeating this pattern for 50 years, such that now it’s a two fucking hour drive to get from Katy or Clear Lake or The Woodlands into downtown Houston where all the fucking professional jobs are. But, of course, this is Texas so nobody is allowed to build commuter rail. Instead we have several hundred miles of twelve lane highways gobbling up a bunch of historically prime real estate. And we spend $1.1B/year on cops who mostly do dick-all jerking themselves off in their squad cars earning 2.5x overtime pay on six figure salaries.
Everyone under 30 wants to GTFO of these horrible boring overpriced suburbs. While everyone over 60 is still too terrified to walk out their front doors when they live 30 miles outside of town, because the news said someone in a suburb on the opposite side of the city was center stage on the nightly news for getting their purse snatched.
But hey, don’t worry, because Palantir Presents THE PANOPTICON is coming soon. And they’ll definitely finally permanently for real this time solve the problem of crime forever. Just give them access to your retirement account so you can pay for it.