Hiro11

Many reasons:
- It devalues the lives of the people affected.
- It makes it seem that it's "tragic but to be expected" in these neighborhoods. This kind of setting low expectations is both pervasive and toxic in many ways.
- It allows us as a nation to continue on as if nothing happened instead of seeing this a colossal problem we need to deal with. The murder rate skyrocketed last year ( https://www.npr.org/2021/01/06/95325...ndemic-in-2020 ) in many cities and there was essentially no public reaction from any politician or journalist. Almost complete silence. It's ridiculous.
- The non-existent press coverage and political discussion around this type of violence is galling, especially when compared to the national crisis sparked by the much, much less common crime of police brutality. Police brutality is a problem, but to me it pales into insignificance in terms of an issue affecting these neighborhoods when compared to this type of violence. The disproportionate response deflects attention from this much, much larger issue and makes it hard (for me at least) to take people who speak out against police brutality while staying silent on this issue seriously. I realize some say you can't conflate these two issue, but to me they are intrinsically related.

What's shocking is both sides of the political aisle seemingly have no interest in actually trying to solve, or even address, this problem.

Shard

Agreed it is bizarre. A similar situation in the UK exists with respect to teenage knife crime (as you may know). There does seem to be political awareness, and of course, community awareness, but the main issue is economic. These deprived communities need massive economic injections, and nobody seems to be willing to make this happen. That's where perhaps the debate has to shift, how can we develop these communities so that crime is not the first resort. Unfortunately, the USA with its phobia of taxation and social engineering will not be making much progress here. My thinking is that advanced economies need to radically overhaul corporate taxation (particularly in tech) and use these funds to re-generate the forgotten communities.

Hiro11

I'd say these neighborhoods need jobs and opportunity, but I think we're aligned broadly here. Precisely, totally agree here. Ironically, I would actually argue that "social engineering" in the form of historical and present US public housing policy is a major contributing cause of this violence. Multiple studies have demonstrated the link. This is where things get particularly political. For what it's worth, I disagree but I don't want to debate this...

scrubbedexpat099

Throwing money at the issue whilst popular, well as long as it is not your money, does not work.

The jobs have gone, look at why people went there, usually to find work.

Shard

No need to debate it, but would be interested to hear your more viable solution (given that you are annoyed by the status quo).

Shard

Who said anything about jobs? Throwing money is merely re-directing resources. Tends to work in every sphere that it is applied.

scrubbedexpat099

I am intrigued, what is being proposed, presumably it has been tried and succeeded elsewhere.

Hiro11

Fair enough. I won't pretend to be a affordable housing expert and it's a complicated topic. Still, I'll throw out one (supply side, of course, you know me) idea: scrap current zoning regulatory regimes. One major cause of high housing costs is lack of supply. Many cities, the best example being San Francisco, have continually thrown up insurmountable roadblocks for developers trying to build new housing. As a result, San Francisco and other cities have been chronically short of housing for decades, driving prices ever higher. Compare this to zoning regimes in places like Japan where building new housing is relatively easy and housing cost isn't as absurd. A home in Tokyo is far, far more affordable than a similar home in the Bay Area.

Liberalizing zoning has become more popular with voters and politicians on both sides of the aisle in recent years, hopefully the idea gains traction.

OldJuddian

It may depend on when you do the comparison "After a long climb during the decades of Japan’s economic miracle, prices exploded in the late eighties in the frenzy of the bubble economy. Over the following decade, prices collapsed by over 80%, hitting a low in 2002". When I was there in the late 90s people remembered the very expensive housing, and the dramatic slump. Tokyo became moderately affordable due to the lost decade. It looks to be rising strongly since 2014 Japanese Home Prices, Graphed as Time-Series (globalpropertyguide.com)

ddsrph

I read somewhere during the big housing boom in Japan that at that time greater Tokyo was worth more than the entire United States.

Nand

There were several shiploads of people who had committed crimes, they were given a royal pardon and sent to the colonies a few hundred years ago. They really were the founders of America. Of course they married and had large families and really populated the colonies. I suggest it is the dna. Most criminals of the servant classes and the lower merchant class were probably sociopathic, voila, we are seeing the results. 😕

Leslie

I'd like to see the data on that. More than likely, they were hungry.

Lion in Winter

What an odd thing to say.

Completely scientifically invalid, thing one.

Thing two, the "transported" people to the Americas included advocates of Irish Home Rule, union activists, and people convicted of theft (very often children and the aged, so hungry) and people from debtors prisons. And they were not given a pardon. They were transported rather than hanged, and lived in conditions of near slavery in penal colonies for the duration of their sentence.

I think you may need to revise your thinking.

ddsrph

In reality England inadvertently sent us their best and brightest. The British ruling class had nothing going for them except being born into affluent households. How else would you explain the slow demise of the British empire into a shadow of its former self. Meanwhile back at the ranch, the exiled to America bunch helped to create the most broad based affluent, influential society the modern world has known.

Nand

Yes it is as I thought, reading History, especially european history was a mistake for real world conversations.