Middle class leaving the cities

An article from Sunday's NY Times talks about how cities are becoming places for the rich and the poor but not the middle class.

Unfortunately, the article fails to address the two main reasons for why the middle class have left the cities:

(1) Zoning laws prevent new housing from being constructed, raising the cost of housing so that the middle class can't afford it. But ghetto neighborhoods and public housing remain resistant to increases in housing costs, so the poor remain even though the middle class are forced out.

(2) School systems full of racial minorities and poor children scare away middle class families to suburbs with more homogenous public schools. Only the rich, who can afford private schools, or the poor who don't care because it's their children who are ruining the schools, remain in the city.

Comments

[spungen]

An LA Times article on Sunday said L.A. was the most economically polarized area in the country, even ahead of New York. More than two-thirds of its residents live in areas that "are solidly rich or poor." The story doesn't say a word about bad schools, or other downsides of integration. The focus was on how to control development so that separation of incomes is discouraged.

[Half Sigma]

"The focus was on how to control development"

Obviously demonstrating that they don't get it. It's controlling of development by government which CAUSES the problelm in the first place.

[superdestroyer]

I have alway thought that one of the problems in the US is that decision makers and influencers now live in a world without the middle class (and specifically without a white middle class). Image that someone in the media in NYC cannot probably go weeks without interacting with any middle class whites.

[SFG]

Damn straight, and it's got me mad as hell. I grew up in NYC, I don't LIKE suburbia. I know suburbanites hate NYC but at least you don't have to live there.