Playgrounds for Elites | Newgeography.com The elites price out the poor, the lower-class, the working-class, even the middle-class and with them the coloreds. The only people left in the cities are wealthy whites and Asians. More below. "The revival of America’s core cities is one of the most celebrated narratives of our time—yet, perhaps paradoxically, urban progress has also created a growing problem of increasing inequality and middle-class flight. Once exemplars of middle-class advancement, most major American cities are now typified by a “barbell economy,” divided between well-paid professionals and lower-paid service workers. As early as the 1970s, notes the Brookings Institution, middle-income neighborhoods began to shrink more dramatically in inner cities than anywhere else—and the phenomenon has continued. Today, in virtually all U.S. metro areas, the inner cores are more unequal than their corresponding suburbs, observes geographer Daniel Herz. Signs of this gap are visible. Homelessness has been on the rise in virtually all large cities, including Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, even as it declines elsewhere." The goal of the wealthy progressives is to recreate the feudal socio-economic system (when it comes to the industrial economy we call the feudal economy - socialism). "Clearly, then, the urban renaissance has not lifted all, or even most, boats. San Francisco, arguably the nation’s top urban hot spot, is seeing the most rapid increase in income inequality of any metropolitan area in the nation, according to a Bloomberg study. The ranks of the country’s most bifurcated cities include such celebrated urban areas as San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where the poverty rate is higher now than before the 1992 riots, both in the city proper and in the riot zone." This is the intended consequences of the policies which shift wealth from the poor coloreds to the wealthy, older whites (and Asians). Land use planning rules and zoning have driven the prices of homes out of reach for any below the upper-middle class. The cost of living in these areas is outrageous, and the government has driven the cost of fuel and other necessities to absurd heights. "Cities today are about as politically diverse as the former Soviet Union; they are increasingly dominated by “the civic Left,” for which pragmatism and moderation represent weakness and compromise. The emergence of Trump seems to have deepened this instinct, with mayors such as de Blasio and Garcetti, Seattle’s Ed Murray, and Minneapolis’s Betsy Hodges all playing leading roles in the progressive “resistance” against the president. Their anti-Trump posturing is mostly for show, but these mayors are pushing substantive—and increasingly radical—agendas of social engineering. Their initiatives include, in Los Angeles, imposing “road diets” on commuters to reduce car usage (while making traffic worse), as well as “green-energy” schemes that raise energy prices. Most are committed to serving as “sanctuary” cities and enacting unprecedented hikes in the minimum wage in an effort to eliminate income inequality by diktat." These policies are designed to turn middle-class from independent individuals into serfs. The serfs should be required to ride the public transportation system, while the affluent are driven by their protection detail. The serfs must only be allowed to live in specific areas, and increasingly in large apartment bunkers reminiscent of the old Soviet Union. "Many of these efforts clash with the aspirations of middle-class residents, who tend to drive cars, want to preserve their human-scale neighborhoods, and own small businesses highly sensitive to wage levels. Regulatory policies that seek to limit lower-density housing have led to escalating home prices in areas such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Portland. In these areas, housing costs (adjusted for income) are roughly two to three times higher than in places like Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh. At the same time, high income taxes work against upper-middle-class entrepreneurs, who are usually stuck footing the bill for the “civic Left” playbook. These businesspeople often don’t have access to tax shelters, and they usually don’t earn most of their money through capital gains. Particularly vulnerable are those paying higher local income taxes, most of them living in and around the big coastal metros and the Midwest’s new basket case, Chicago." The progressive goal has always been to create the perfect human, living in the perfect city. But the model the progressives have used is Metropolis, not a more human model. The progressives are willing to sacrifice all human elements to achieve their desired perfection of the human race, even achieving the goal requires the destruction of all humans. We see this is the Paul Erlich's Population Bomb, the goals and desires of the global climate alarmism cult, and progressive environmentalism. "No surprise, then, that many of those leaving California, New York, and other blue havens are people in their mid-thirties to early fifties—precisely the age when people are raising families, buying houses, and launching businesses. For many, an escape from the Left means heading to places where the political climate is, if not outwardly conservative, more moderate and business-friendly.
Nor is the progressive agenda likely to help its intended beneficiaries: the poor. The prospect of rapidly rising wages for mid-level jobs is undermining sectors like the Los Angeles garment industry, for example, where an exodus of employers is already occurring. Overall, as documented in a Center for Opportunity Urbanism study, economic prospects for minorities are much brighter in metro areas other than New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. This is particularly true for homeownership, where the rates for blacks are at least 20 percent higher in cities like Atlanta, Nashville, and Charlotte, compared with those more glamorous cities. Adjusted for income, homes are less than half as expensive for blacks and Hispanics in metropolitan Atlanta or Dallas–Fort Worth, compared with Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Meantime, heavily white cities with rising real-estate values like Portland, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle are seeing what remains of their minority neighborhoods disappear." The self-gutting of the progressive enclaves is solidly underway. Nearly all of them are losing people which they need to stave off the Detroitization of the city. They continue to double down on the policies which motivate people in their prime working years to leave seeking greener and more politically, socially, and economically reasonable pastures. The tech boom continues to fuel movement to a few cities like San Francisco/San Jose and Seattle but for how long? "Crime poses a conundrum for the new Left urban politics. The decline in crime in the 1990s reduced homicides dramatically, likely helping to reverse population loss in most cities. Now homicides are back on the rise in many large cities—but instead of bolstering law enforcement, most mayors have embraced the Black Lives Matter critique, which blames crime on institutionalized police racism. They do so despite measurable evidence that the main victims of this outlook, which has led to “de-policing” of vulnerable communities, are minorities and the poor." But the elites live in enclaves within the city, often in gated communities and they have the money to pay for security details. Most of them live in areas where self-protection is nearly outlawed, and personal concealed carry is all but impossible. Their security details are heavily armed, but the middle-class cannot protect themselves, and so crime which is suppressed due to the radical policies of the progressives again raises its ugly head. The elites show they agree with Marie Antoinette, "Let them eat cake!" Police response in most cities takes quite a while at more than 10-15 minutes although in Detroit it takes more than an hour. Remember that is the path the progressive cities are following the Detroitization of the city. "The disposition of the millennial generation, on which so many urban dreams rest, will be critical. Roughly 70 percent of millennials already live outside core-city counties and, Kolko suggests, as they head into their thirties, many appear to be moving back to suburbia. USC demographer Dowell Myers suggests that we have reached “peak urban millennial” as the generation, albeit more slowly, becomes adult householders, not hipsters seeking a great “urban experience.'" The Millennials are young, poorly educated, and their brains are filled with SJW nonsense, but they are not stupid. And reality bites hard once the individual steps outside of the protection of the parents, and the University. The Millennials, once exposed to reality, change significantly and permanently. "And most young people are not doing well in elite cities. For example, in New York City, millennial incomes (ages 18–29) have dropped in real terms compared with the same age cohort in 2000, despite considerably higher education levels, while rents have increased 75 percent. New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco have three of the nation’s four lowest homeownership rates for young people and among the lowest birthrates. Housing costs might be the biggest driver of millennial migration in the future. According to Zillow, for workers between 22 and 34, rent costs claim up to 45 percent of income in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Miami metropolitan areas, compared with closer to 30 percent of income in metros like Dallas–Fort Worth and Houston. This may be one reason, notes a recent Urban Land Institute report, that 74 percent of Bay Area millennials are considering a move out of the region in the next five years, while a recent survey by the UCLA Luskin School suggests that 18-to-29-year-olds were the group least satisfied with life in Los Angeles." The affluent, progressive Boomers are attempting the near impossible Triple Lindy where they pay only $3 trillion per year in federal taxes while demanding the federal government spend $4 trillion in benefits often to the affluent Boomers in the form of Social Security, Medicare and other transfer payments from the middle-class to the wealthy. How cool is that? The Boomers have also failed over the past 40 years sufficiently fund their pension, or other retirement benefit funds. As a result, they are expecting the Millennials to make these payments to them. Making matters worse, the states, particularly the Blue model states are bankrupt from the state right on down to the municipalities and counties. Illinois is the poster child for this disaster although New York, California, Rhode Island, and others are nipping at their heals. "If the flight of moderate, middle-income homeowners continues, along with the growth in population of poor residents and childless hipsters, urban centers will be destined to serve as sandboxes for the progressive political class. Most urban leaders and media boosters have been slow to recognize such trends, which call for a thorough change in policy. Urbanist Derek Thompson suggests that cities like New York are wonderful for new immigrants, hipsters, and the ultrarich but “not a great place for middle class families.” Yet young families, not single hipsters, will now be increasingly critical to urban success. Rather than indulging feel-good radical experiments in social justice, cities need to rediscover their historical role as creators of the middle class, as Jane Jacobs put it. If they don’t, some extraordinary areas—in brownstone Brooklyn, much of Manhattan, Seattle, west Los Angeles, and San Francisco—will likely become ever more exclusive, divided between the rich and the hip (many of whom are their subsidized children) and surrounding poor populations working in low-end services (or not working). The policy emphasis should shift to middle-income areas—whether in the Sunset district of San Francisco, Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, Queens, or South Brooklyn—and closer suburbs, which could keep some younger families in the urban orbit. Such a shift will require a new kind of urban politics, one that encourages grassroots industries and corporate relocations that create more middle-income jobs, promotes the flourishing of human-scale neighborhoods, and accommodates families with good schools and low crime. The appeal of urban living remains viable, though today’s urban political class sometimes seems determined to kill it." Social justice has reached its zenith. Over the past 3-5 years, we've seen a resurgence in people on the other side pointing out the flaws, and dangers of this destructive system. The Universities have reached peak nonsense, they no longer educate, they indoctrinate, and little that goes on in the University has value or merit outside of the STEM areas. The cities are losing population because they have become radicalized. And the federal government's bureaucratic class his now firmly progressive Democrat. On the other hand, middle America stood up this last election and hired a man willing to attack these anti-American individuals directly, and their institutions, ideals, and policies. It would seem that we are at the beginning of a socio-economic-political-technical revolution which will shake not only the foundations of America but the world. I suggest that between 2020 and 2030 we will see shocking changes in all of these and many other institutions and in the way the world acts and interacts. I would suggest that we prepare for war and likely large scale war. While I have no idea where these wars will come, I would suggest they might come in Europe due to the building friction between the increasing nationalists native Europeans and the increasingly radicalized Islamist. It could also happen in the Middle East as the proxy wars between Iran and the House of Saud shift from proxy to direct wars. Other apparent areas where war could break out are North Korea versus the world and China versus the world regarding the South China Sea. I would suggest watching the Iran versus the House of Saud and North Korea versus the World potential conflicts most carefully. It is clear that the Norks and Iran are sharing military secrets and likely are working closely together in the nuclear and ballistic missile areas. If one were to go to war, the other could quickly decide that with the US divided it should also press its war. I suspect we will see either a massive scale war or a two-front war. I would be inclined to favor the two-front war scenario. Everything I have studied over the past 45 years leads me to the understanding that we are about to enter a period of severe crisis and conflict the results of which will form the basis of the new socio-economic model for the next 100+ years. Progressivism which is now about 100 years old is about to be ripped to shreds and replaced. I do not find support for the idea that it is progressivism, social justice, and the other far left progressive policies which will win this crisis conflict and prevail. To the contrary, I expect a serious shift away from progressivism whether Democratic Party or Republican Party driven and towards a more Classical Liberal socio-economic position. The Internet shifted power from the corporate, and progressive ideas which strongly turned power from the individual to the Bigs (big business, big labor, big banking, big law, big government, etc.) Today the individual empowered with the instant information available from the internet, and the massive processing power of the internet is far more nimble than any of the Bigs. The individual can eat the lunch of the Bigs and does pretty much every day. Combined with automation, the next 100 years appears to be one where the Bigs will shrink, not just 20% or 30% but 90% or 95%. I expect we will see large corporations and governments reduced to a few thousand people. Much will be automated, but much more will be "outsourced" to individual and small groups where they will perform services as independent contractors where they would have had to be an employee before. These IC's will make more money, and work hours they want not hours the employer demands. I have no idea if the "job" will make the transition. Jobs were a necessary device to allow the Industrial Revolution to function and to redistribute wealth reasonably among the people. Before the Industrial Revolution, there were few jobs. There is no way to know if the job will make the jump, or how wealth will be redistributed. One thing we should not do is allow government to slow, halt, or distort the process of achieving the new socio-economic model. Government at the end of the progressive movement did just that and was successful in delaying the shift to the new socio-economic model by decades. This created all of the current problems we see today and slowed the movement to the new economy. This is a terrible outcome, and we need to bring it to a halt now. (The US should have begun undergoing the shift between the middle 1970s and 1990s, not 2020-2030. The progressives used government to delay this change, and this only made us more miserable, less satisfied, and less productive.) We stand at a pivotal moment. While these moments come about twice per century, this one appears to be more significant and more pronounced than any we've seen as far back as the shift from the Agricultural Revolution (AR) to the Industrial Revolution (IR). The reason this change will be so pronounced and dramatic is our technology has finally come of age and with automation will quickly move us out of the end phase of the IR and into a new economic paradigm. Socially we are now ready to finally leave the feudalism/socialism/authoritarianism model and move decisively back toward more individual liberty and personal responsibility. Economically we appear to be prepared to strengthen the free market capitalist economic model by eliminating the government harness which yokes us to the employer-employee model by allowing freedom to contract directly between independent contractors and people who need services. This is only the beginning. Take a last look around; I suspect that soon everything we know will be changed. While it will be for the better, the shift will be dramatic, and cathartic. I've not discussed at all the global changes, the changes to foreign policy. Those and the rest will have to wait for a later date, my head hurts! This post has run amok far enough!!!
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