Sure this is a lot of text but here’s Barack Obama on Baltimore. He didn’t look amused:
“This is not new. This has been going on for decades. And without making any excuses for criminal activities that take place in these communities, we also know if you have impoverished communities that have been stripped away of opportunity, where children are born into abject poverty, they’ve got parents, often because of substance abuse problems or incarceration or lack of education, and themselves can’t do right by their kids, if it’s more likely that those kids end up in jail or dead than that they go to college. And communities where there are no fathers who can provide guidance to young men, communities where there’s no investment, and manufacturing’s been stripped away, and drugs have flooded the community and the drug industry ends up being the primary employer for a lot of folks. In those environments, if we think that we’re just going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there without, as a nation, and as a society saying what can we do to change those communities to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity, then we’re not going to solve this problem. And we’ll go through this same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities, and the occasional riots in the streets and everybody will feign concern until it goes away and we just go about our business as usual.”
Housing is the start. Good housing => stability => wealth => wealth transfer. This is how white people have been able to mechanically triple their wealth in the past thirty years.
Housing is even more essential to future wealth now because jobs simply disappear and that’s a trend that is not going to slow down. That’s the massive difference with the 60s and civil rights movements. As Paul Coates remembers:
“What was the environment like back then? Black folks were suffering. But conditions were a lot different then. I don’t think, for example, many people had a problem finding jobs. Maryland had a strong industrial base. Baltimore was a port city. There were active shipyards here. There were major industries in Baltimore—steel mills, clothing factories, tire companies.”
Exactly. You could work at a gas station and be home owner I mean I’m gen X and it makes me salivating to think about something like that.
So even if in those times things were hard people had something to sustain themselves, build/buy their house, aim for something bigger, which is part of happiness. Having plans, son. That feels great.
Today even with the best of luck and financial support and good start in life, shit is tight. Everything can change real quick.
So housing is the start of everything good, still today, even more tomorrow. You have your crib, you can take care of your children and the rest is history, they’ll do fine and will overcome. Or at least, they have the best starter kit.
I feel like sustainable and affordable housing is far, far more important than any mandatory body camera on cops or college courses ever will in the long term. Fair housing policies would massively change the social landscape in two generations.
The good news is we can do that now, cheap. We can build nice homes for the price of a SUV.
The bad news is, no one connects the dots. The bad news is that there’s little to no profit to make. I know right?