“Disillusioned” Author: American Suburbs Have Become a Ponzi Scheme | Amanpour and Company
“Disillusioned” Author: American Suburbs Have Become a Ponzi Scheme | Amanpour and Company
Once the quintessential image of the American dream, suburban neighborhoods now reveal a systemic racial disparity, with new Black and Brown residents struggling to deal with the declining conditions left by white occupants who have moved on and up. In his new book “Disillusioned,” education reporter Benjamin Herold looks at five suburbs across…
source
Reviews
0 %
Decaying American infrastructure needs reinvestment.
Continually
BULLSHIT!!!!
Wait a minute. I'm really struggling to understand how this whole supposedly economic phenomena hinges on some couple's black son and his "physicality" and, apparently, poor behavior at school. That example in no way explains the economics here, nor why intrastructure in need of repair somehow instantly translates into "colored people move in". This guy's argument seems pretty suspicious.
Private Equity/Private Investment firms are buying up houses and driving prices and rent up. That's what it is. And if so many are subsidised by the government, I don't qualify since I don't make enough money for them to want to invest in me.
Liberals lose all power if the race narrative disappears. Victimhood is all they have. The race hustle continues.
HOAs are mandated by the banks and supported by the cities. Thats why this is coming to a head along with dumb zoning that prevents changing land use to something better.
Kids can’t be allowed to hit other kids. Full stop. Not cultural. No excuses
Public schools are a tick on the homeowner.
Stop already.The people living in the suburbs paid taxes to keep up the infrastructure yet the government didn't maintain it and now you are blaming the white people who left. Now it is their fault that the politicians who kept the minorities out in the first place are the same people who are perpetuating this so called issue which you are now pushing to create division. You also leave out how most of these neighborhoods were destroyed by the very minorities who moved in when the big bad white people left Just because your father left your childhood home in bad condition does not mean others did. Do not paint a broad stroke that everyone is like you. Stop stoking division. Since you are so upset what your family did to create this trauma lead by example and give up everything that you earned back to those who you think were marginalized.
No-logic is way off. Affluent whites are leaving areas that are declining – maybe they are in suburbs but they are close to diverse area/cities with crime, etc. So housing prices decline are now within reach of blacks and hispanics. In the meantime, affluent whites have moved to safer suburbs and pass school budgets that support education as they can afford it.
That's fuzzy math. The neighborhood I grew up in 67 years ago is still intact and still has about the same demographic. The neighborhood looks almost exactly the same as when I left it. I still have family living there. The EXACT same story for the neighborhood my father grew up in in Chicago. Same demographic still lives there and in recent times that demographic has remodeled and renovated the whole place. Whether suburbs thrive or wither depends on the people. Certain people want something for nothing. They don't want to put in the hard work it takes to maintain a nice community.
Now….if you want to talk about minorities being short changed…..talk about the topic of job outsourcing. Republicans stripped away the job opportunities that my father and myself had by outsourcing most decent jobs to China. This is especially hard on the minority community because they didn't get to participate in those job opportunities until the civil rights laws came along. My grandfather and my father and myself got to have these decent jobs and pass that legacy on to our children. NOW those jobs are outsourced to China. The republican CEOs pulled the rug out from under generations of those who came after my grandfather, father and myself. And this includes my nieces and nephews and so forth. Now THAT should be a topic of discussion.
I definitely appreciate the interviewer trying to keep the lid on this dumpster fire of negativity. This guy doesn't even know what his point is other than trying to sell a book by making up a lot of fantasies and backing them up with one example. White people were not expecting black and brown people to move into these suburbs ever so they certainly were not somehow intentionally scheming to leave the old sewer systems and schools to dark skinned people as some form of racist act. Nor did every white person move to the suburbs to escape black people. There was a huge housing shortage after the war and the military was financing housing for ex military and putting them up in new suburbs was just logical, especially considering the baby boom and the fact that Ford wanted to sell more cars and persuaded the president to federally back mortgages so people could purchase garages along with their housing. Ford wanted people to need cars and to have some place to park them and the middle of Chicago or New York was not that place. The world is dark enough we really don't need guys like this fueling false narratives or painting the suburbs with such a broad and nasty brush. That said, I personally hate the suburbs and they are run by tiny cabals of very secretive individuals who are frequently drunk with their own power as the big fish in the tiny pond and have no skill in running communities as they are mostly volunteers or definitely not experts at community planning and execution. If you live in a suburb, pool your funds and hire some crack grant writers and see how life improves. That's my solution.
All the problems happen because of one thing: too many people, especially the stupid kind, who tend to multiply at higher rates than intelligent people. When I was born there were 3.5 billion humans in this world, now there are over 8 and the planet hasn't got any bigger. Do you seriously expect things to be like they used to? It's getting tiring hearing people moan… 'Well when I was a child, when my parents were young, things were better and cheaper.' Yes, there were fewer people and on top of that, they were less demanding. Now we want central heating/ac, cars that warn us when we don't drive straight and have built-in rear cameras, 50-inch HD and 4K TVs, $1000 smartphones, etc., etc.
This gets really reductionist really fast. He's transposing a lot of later developments and dynamics back onto the 50s and 60s.
Oh, what BS. Divisive propaganda, no surprise. What happened to you Christine. I have many friends that are POC that loved their middle class suburban upbringing.
What a bunch of BS. The problem is politicians and government workers who do not plan. Why are some cities in Europe hundreds of years old? Same goes for suburbs. They function quite well. Old infrastructure gets renewed. New schools get build. We know there is no free lunch. In California where I lived a long time the politicians are horrible and extremely corrupt. Infrastructure renewal is not sexy and doesnt win votes. They are extremely shortsighted.
I appreciate how the author is so passionate about the disparities he has been documenting and exposing. Thanks for such great work!
🙄🙄🙄
How does urban revitalization fit into this equation? People move back into older communities and rebuild them too, what's the distinction?
You are all breathlessly race baiting and signaling the extremists to go to the suburbs with flame throwers. Amanpour and Company straight up hates white people and are disgusting. You seek to divide us! I'm just sorry I didn't see it sooner. This is the banality of evil. People are not stupid. Benjamin Herold, all you have are anecdotes. You give one example with your story about this Cory student. Nothing systemic. Things do happen but they are addressed as they come up and dealt with. You are truly a grifter and I hope your book tanks.
Your conclusion is that present and past how owners leave a path of deteriorating infastructure when they sell their homes, retire and move on. YOU are wrong. The suburban owners pay huge property taxes to maintain the roads and facilities supporting the community. If they didn't who would? Property taxes in similar areas in NY, NJ and Florida and across the states run from $1000/ month to 1500/month and higher. Some as high as $30,000/ month. Those that buy into those communities assume the tax burden to maintain the community. Better do a little more research!!!
Wakanda
I gotta say…….I’m not buying this. I can’t put my finger on it, but it just seems off.
It's not a Ponzi scheme if the government does it.
Coleman Hughes argues, the solution is mostly an economic/class solidarity struggle …race can be used as a divisive issue that only benefits the elites
I’m Canadian and live in a suburb. I’m not escaping anything. I just don’t want to be crowded and absolutely detest densification. My suburb isn’t old but politicians and municipal governments are pushing for densification when it wasn’t designed for it. I don’t want to live like a rat in a cage which is what it’s like living in an apartment. Did it for decades. It’s not living. I’ve just recently travelled to Europe in the last couple of years staying in very modest Airbnbs. Great to visit but I would never want to live there. Too crowded. Buying food isn’t easy. The stores are small. I like our suburbs and our cars. I’ve done the walking and biking. It’s not practical for doing errands.
Sooner or later, white supremacy is impregnantible.
My son was, when he attended publis school, an intelligent, physically beautiful, tallish white boy who was disruptive & who absconded from the get go (K) ….at the school's suggestion he got an IEP and I used that to prevent them from doing all the stuff they could have done (expelled suspended* tossed out ect) this set up some tension but it basically shackled the School district, of course an attorney, even just the presence of an attorney at a meeting, made them play by the rules//
Up yours, woke moralist. We'll see who cancels who.
You are totally wrong the reason why everything was built is because there was a baby boomers I had 280 people in my first grade where you supposed to put all those people of course we built a lot now the population has eased off… Your theory is complete bulshit you're talking about old neighborhoods well guess what they bought into an old neighborhood there's no need for all that massive amount of building and it has nothing to do with the color of your skin nothing whatsoever you racist
Its an escape from poor ppl project
Zoning exacerbates the problem by creating artificial scarcities of real estate. Econmically when a needed resource becomes scarce it causes the price to rise. Houston doesn't have zoning. That means there is one less layer of city govenment and no court cases or city council meetings over zoning issues. When an area of town becomes decripit a developer can buy it cheaply and repurpose it. Which means new infrastructure for the area. Skyscrapers are not confined to a downtown area which lowers the cost of land acquisition for the developer and decreases the congestion of the downtown area. The downside is that they don't have historic districts but then again there are no fights about forcing a property owner to repair and maintain something that no longer has a purpose. The realtor industry doesn't like it because it results in lower prices and that translates into lower commisions. My opionion is that zoning doesn't help anyone. Denver built their current airport away from the city way out in the plains. The land around it was rezoned to residential and shortly after it was developed the city was sued because of the aircraft noises. If zoning worked the miles of land around the airport would have remained in agriculture and in an ideal world the old airport would've been the parking area with subways or urban rail as the support transport system greatly reducing the need for new highways, city streets, water and sewer infrastructure and parking lots.
of course its race related, its getting tiring that everything in america is racist… its insanity. really… this is delusional…
😂
😮😮😮😮, omg,
Good dog!
he's dramatically overstating the situation in an attempt to frame things in a way that gives him a potent theme to write a book on.
Just another HATE ON whitey story. Liberals are sick.
It is only natural that different racial and cultural groups adhere more closely to their own group. Before the disaster of “desegregation”, the large cities had different ethnic groups all over town, each within their own ethnic enclave and with their own school system in which the parents were active supporters. The Stalinist bussing programs imposed unconstitutionally from the top destroyed these communities that resulted in white flight, leaving the less affluent in what became urban ghettos.
The middle class Herold refers to has been largely eviscerated by the fiat banking cartel’s theft of real wealth (in collision with their criminal friends in the Fed. gov.) by decades of currency depreciation (inflation) through debt monetization. This insidious “tax” moves the fruits of middle class productivity into the hands of the financial insiders at the top while impoverishing those beneath them as the result of this financial scam “trickles down” through the economy. All of the amenities required to maintain the middle class existence have to be paid for by a class of people who no longer exist for the most part. Thats what you call a third world country.
It's not about public schools. Surburbs was govt sanctioned racial segregation in America
C’mon this man knows something! Thank you Benjamin Herold!
so biased
Great issue. Too many elements of complex story to cover in one interview. This is kind of the urban version of deforestation and misuse of human imagination. A piece of good news: If you are willing to stake your feet to the ground–you can own a place and build community. We do have choice.
As a 75 yo white woman, living in a HUD subsidized, high-rise apartment building with approximately 100 other disabled, low income retirees, I found this incredibly enlightening; I had no idea.