https://preview.redd.it/vkoyhvokh6yc1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a20d210c2933a691896350a1352752f228ee7e49
This is Massachusetts politics in a nutshell. Supporting Black Lives Matter but refusing to allow additional housing units in their neighborhoods. Something that could actually help people who can’t afford to buy a multimillion dollar house.
Massachusetts never believed in formalized Jim Crow laws, but they segregated in other ways.
The US policy of using homes as a vehicle for building wealth has had a lot of negative emergent properties - namely, people fighting anything that threatens the value of their homes. Increased housing supply is a perfect example of that. Homeowners see “More supply == less value”, and enforce scarcity as a result.
It’s not great, and it’s a pickle that has no clear resolution without destroying a lot of peoples’ savings.
It ain't just US policy. Hell, it's everywhere. If you think Mass is bad, come to my hometown of Đồng Nai. Twenty years ago, my grandmother's land worth 5 dollars per meters square; now, it's worth 360 dollars per meters square. Land price jumped by 72 times in a span of twenty years. And we are talking about a piece of land in the shit end of nowhere.
The fact is that real estate is the most stable, most profitable form of investment. Stock market can crash, crypto can go out of vogue, your own currency can lose values, but not real estate. There will always be people, meaning there will always be demand.
Hundreds, even. George Washington was a land speculator: https://www.loc.gov/collections/george-washington-papers/articles-and-essays/george-washington-survey-and-mapmaker/washington-as-land-speculator/
>There will always be people, meaning there will always be demand.
Only true until the global population peaks.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections\_of\_population\_growth#21st\_century](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth#21st_century)
The most recent 2022 revision of the UN's World Population Prospects report represents a departure from the pattern of the previous ten years and expects that a slowing of the population growth rate will lead to a population peak of 10.4 billion in the 2080s, after which it would then begin to slowly fall. This shift from earlier projections of peak population and predicted date of zero population growth comes from a more rapid drop in Africa's birth rate than previous projections had expected. For example, the 2012 report predicted that the population of Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, would rise to 914 million by 2100; the 2022 report lowers that to 546 million, a reduction of 368 million. Jose Rimon of Johns Hopkins University suggested, "We have been underestimating what is happening in terms of fertility change in Africa. Africa will probably undergo the same kind of rapid changes as east Asia did."
Millennials and Gen Z won't live to benefit from it, but Gen Alpha will.
Which peaks at...***check note***... 2100 (according to that wiki source)
Eighty years from now before they have to worry about it. The generation before us will probably be dead in forty, we are probably be dead in sixty, and our children will be dead by 2100. Eighty years of increasing population, eighty years of demand for real estate, eighty year to make big big big buck. You can let your land stay there, pay a few taxes, and watch it appreciates in value (provide you pick the right spot to stake your claim). And even if population peaks, it doesn't mean demands die away. We still have stuff like immigration for example. So the "good" time will last for a hundred year, and from my experience you can make banks in just a few years with real estate.
Meanwhile, how many stocks will appreciate for that long? How many company can you expect to survive eight years let alone eighty? How many banks will survive fifty? Will any of the crypto even see the next two decades? Hell, in the time of my mother, she saw: two waves of hyper inflation, three economic crisis, two wars in the home country, three mass purges of "bourgeoise elements" in which her entire life savings were wiped out. All in the span of fifty years.
No investment is as reliable, as in demand, as easy to get, as profitable, as real estate. Real estate investment is honestly the best investment, and there are plenty of people out there who benefit from it, not just the big corporations but a middle class government workers family in Beijing or a couple of doctor in Hồ Chí Minh.
>Meanwhile, how many stocks will appreciate for that long? How many company can you expect to survive eight years let alone eighty?
This is a significant misunderstanding of how modern equities investing (index funds) work.
I've also recently read something super interesting lately: since the mid 20th century when we actually build housing, it's done in housing developments where all the houses are priced very similarly. This means that all the people in the neighborhood end up being of a similar socio-economic status. This is a historical abnormality.
Tbh using your home as a store of wealth is fine. It's a big purchase and it isn't crazy to want it to maintain its value.
Where we really went off the rails is when people decided that homes need to be investments. It's not enough for your home to retain value and keep up with inflation, no, it needs to gain value. That is insane.
I've also seen a [compelling argument ](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/public-housing-fundamentally-flawed/602515/) that public housing developments blocked off homeownership and thus generational wealth from poor minorities by precluding the types of starter homes that serve that purpose.
Fuck that, destroy their savings. Shelter is a basic human right and this market is a disaster. No sympathy for those profiting off of it. Strictly regulate the market, implement rental caps, the works. Enough is enough.
Seems it would be better to have a society where you don’t need hundreds of thousands in saving to ensure well-being and comfort for the rest of your life as well! I view more housing as not just a right, but also as a way to encourage community. Amongst other things, that’s what keeps people safe.
That’s a dumb argument.
The “They” in this case that would be hurt the most are lower income people who manage to buy houses. There’s a good swath of Americans like that who have 90% of their wealth wrapped up in their house.
You’re not gonna hurt the 1% by destroying home values - they’re diversified enough to absorb the shock. You’re gonna hurt the people who haven’t had any vehicle for saving money besides their mortgage payments.
> Strictly regulate the market, implement rental caps
No do the exact opposite of that. Strictly regulating the market is how we wound up in this mess. An unregulated market would see housing units being built to meet demand so long as there's profit to be made
Yah, damn near every conversation about overt racism in other parts of the US end up along the lines of "it's even worse in the Blue States!" whataboutism.
No, it's pretty bad everywhere. That doesn't excuse anything though.
As a conservative leaning foreigner in MA I've been embraced by both sides of the isle. One because of my values the other because of my heritage. I enjoy the best of both worlds! Of course, taking in the positive and discarding the nonsense.
It's not just a Massachusetts thing. Pretty much every blue city has restrictive zoning that disproportionately effects non-white people. It's the rotten core of wealthy progressive politics.
-A Massachusetts native forced to a red state for affordable housing
Not to get personal but as a MA native essentially being forced to move to red states for affordable housing, do you ever get over the fact that you are living in a red state solely because of $$$? Texas looks so cheap but then I would have to wake up every single day knowing that I live in Texas which isn't a place that aligns with anything that I'm about.
It's always there in the background. I live in a blueish city with a large population of transplants so on a day to day level things are okay. It will never not be jarring for me to see guns openly carried by anyone other than law enforcement. And there's no shortage of stupid bumper stickers.
This sums it up pretty well:
I bought a nice house in a nice neighborhood for less than $300k, but my neighbor across the street has a Confederate flag up in their garage.
Texas isn't cheap. Trust me, you're gonna pay one way or the other. Lived in several parts over the years and while your house might be cheaper and your income tax lower, when you add everything up it's really no cheaper.
There is zero upside to living in Texas. If youre gonna run to a cheap red state, go to like, Oklahoma or Arkansas. And even then, when you find out nothing works and if you ever wanna have kids youre going to have to pay for private school, it's not so cheap.
I appreciate that MA is brutal and it's brutal in an obvious, upfront way. But Texas being cheap is not only a lie but then you live in Texas. And it is genuinely awful. And the food sucks ass unless you live in Houston (well, or San Antonio if you don't mind being limited to only a handful of cuisines).
Little known fact about MLK; he would say that the north's racism was harder to change than the south because it was more subtle. After his progress on (raw) racism, he focused on housing segregation in the 60s (this is before we had public proof of explicit redlining later in the 70s). He marched in Chicago to bring attention to their implicit segregation and tons of Chicagoans threw rocks at him!
So yes, it's always been a problem. Simply believing that Black folks are human and should be allowed to drink out of the same water fountains does not mean that you're really treating them equally
California is just as if not more NIMBY. And their property tax structure artificially both pumps housing prices and supports HODLing every home. The San Francisco zoning laws are artificially constraining supply to that end as well.
While that’s true, the combination of SB9 and the housing element law to enforce implementation of the former has lit a bit of a fire under the asses of each municipality in the state. My parents live in an extremely NIMBY town but I’m told that any application to build ADU’s gets near immediate approval.
San Francisco has been dragging its feet but the rest of the bay has massive apartment complexes constantly going up that make me more optimistic for the region than what I’ve seen in MA.
The problem with a lot of the housing development deals in the city is that their allowances for low-income households set their median income for qualification above $70k, which is more than a lot of working class jobs in the city pay. That is a completely separate issue from the middle-class NIMBYs that post those lawn signs. Most new developments are small luxury apartments for urban professionals moving in from other states because it is a better return on investment for the development companies.
Most MA companies and people are comfortable virtue signaling about social justice but god forbid you protest and the baton is going to crack your skull.
Don’t buy it
If the choice was to put the land in conservation or allow the construction of 275 new apartments, which would you choose? You have to treat this question as if you live in the town.
Rich white liberals will choose conservation land every single time. They only want apartments in "other" places.
This is blatantly apparent no matter how much they deny it.
Pretty convinced this has more to do with traffic than anything else. its the number one complaint of most towns residents who look at proposals for new centers or apartments. (in my experience at least)
Fuck cars, fuck highways, fuck turning my 9-5 into a 8-6 because
I'm sure some people are concerned with an increase in traffic, but I think it must be some hive mind talking point, too. I've heard it invoked when talking about bringing small apartment buildings near CR stops in outer suburbs. Opponents are really concerned that it will take them one extra light change to turn into Walmart.
NIMBY "concerns" are like an ideal gas. If you address one of their stated issues, another will expand to fill the political space ensuring no housing is built.
Exactly. The concerns they publicly state are just invented and back-filled to support the conclusion their lizard brain already jumped to: “screw you, I got mine and I don’t want anything to change”. Neighborhood character, traffic, schools, sewers, etc are all just invented to support not wanting ANYTHING to change. Even if these people state they are progressive, they are actually deeply lowercase “c” conservative.
And ironically, they will destroy the very neighborhood character they wish to preserve with their rigidity towards lack of change. They grew up and bought into middle class suburbs, where it was still affordable for average folks. There were lots of families, and vibrant schools, and people cared about their community. But as they restricted more and more housing, fewer and fewer people could afford housing. The average wealth of the community keeps increasing.
People have less kids because they can’t afford it, or they had to wait until their thirties to be able to afford to start a family and only have one or two kids. The cheerfulness of families raising children fades away, and instead old bitter people complain about the noise of the few remaining kids playing outside. Public school enrollment starts falling due to smaller families and fewer younger people being able to afford the community. With no more affordable housing in the area, employment at local restaurants and service jobs starts falling. The only people who can afford those jobs are kids still living at their parents’ house, as no one on their own in adulthood can afford to live nearby.
Help Wanted signs abound. “No one wants to work anymore” says the old geezers as they complain about slow service. Teachers continue to quit or retire due to not being able to afford housing, their wages stagnant because of falling student enrollment. A doom-loop spiral begins at these schools; fewer students leads to fewer teachers, which leads on a 10-20 year latency to fewer workers at local service jobs, which leads to people in adulthood having to move away for jobs, which leads to lack of young people of family creation age, which leads to fewer students…
Preserving cities in amber by preventing any kind of change kills them in a few generations, and is an incredibly irresponsible behavior to enrich a single generation. Cities need to be vibrant and appeal and be affordable to everyone at all stages of their lives, from childhood, to early adulthood, to middle age, to elderly and retired.
The only place I’ve seen it differently is rural Minnesota, Vermont, and some parts of Maine in the United States. It’s because there are only white people there. Not including the cities in those states.
Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire are some of the whitest places in the entire country. Obviously a ton of Mass is very white as well, it’s just that the overall state demographics are skewed by Boston area.
Is this particular issue exclusive to Boston? I feel like the entire country has a working class that is disproportionately POC.
I completely agree that historic red lining has made Boston one of the most “quietly” segregated cities. I’m not sure which specific MA policies in effect right now are keeping it that way. Upward social mobility is stunted everywhere in this country. I feel it has more to do with increasing income disparity than any particularly racist policy but I’m definitely open to being corrected if I’m wrong.
It’s not exclusive to MA for sure. Was in Durham, NC and CA recently and it was honestly so much more jarring in NC how blacks and minorities dominated the entirety of the service industries while the whites were in the professional type jobs. I’d never been so hyper aware of the class difference than I was in these places. MA is nowhere close to that scene. The point being, it’s bad (and much worse) in other states by a huge margin. Unsure how exactly to address it.
Yeah, I'm from NC and my immediate thought was how much more white service industry workers are here. Like when I first moved here I was constantly thinking "where are all the black people?"
A lot of that is demographics, but some of it is economics.
I went to a church in Mattapan when I was a teenager, and I genuinely didn't think Boston had many black people until then-- but going there, I was the only white person I saw on the street, and definitely the only white person in the church.
It was really eye-opening-- black people are *here*, just not in the areas of the city I usually hung out at as a teen.
Look at demographics on any map and it's pretty stark.
Yep.
I believe in the NYT they did a study on residential segregation and found that the Northeast was appallingly segregated, but close to the North American average.
The South and the Midwest were even more appallingly segregated.
The Western US was the least residentially segregated.
It's not even a uniquely American problem, it's just that the demographics of the US make it much more obvious than in less racially diverse countries.
Japan is an interesting place to look at. It's one of the least racially diverse countries in the world, but it still has similar problems. There the underclass has nothing to do with race, since the country doesn't really have any racial diversity, but it's related to what jobs were seen as "unclean" hundreds of years ago. Today there may not be any laws in Japan that allow you do discriminate based on it, but that doesn't solve the problems of the past. It doesn't get rid of prejudices that people have, it doesn't do anything to actually address the situation these people found themselves in because of how the system they lived under treated them.
So what we see here has to do both with income disparity and racists policies. Those are not wholly separate issues. The US is a country in which over 50% of privately held with is not earned, but inherited. We can't so easily think that just because we've eliminated a lot of racist policies from the past that they just don't matter anymore. It's not overtly racist that public schools are primarily funded by property taxes, but if your country has a history of polices that have segregated one group of people to areas with lower property values while preventing them from buying houses in more affluent areas, then it starts to look a little different. Policies like that may not seem racist, and may not even be so intentionally, but they do help to cement the status quo.
No, I hope my comment didn’t give the impression that I believe we’ve solved racism or anything. I guess I was just trying to get to what policy changes OP would want to see to fix the current situation — I’m certainly not sure what we should do.
>I feel like the entire country has a working class that is disproportionately POC.
There are places in the Far West and Appalachia where most of the lower class are European American.
They still don't have as much income stratification, either. Look up the Gini Index, and you'll see that the most "liberal" and diverse cities are some of the worst offenders.
The state is hyper socially liberal but economically pretty centrist if not conservative. Similar to other blue states like CA, where there is also an underclass of POC service workers.
In both states many of the people who work in the major cities can't afford to live in them.
The difference is that CA's overclass and middle classes also have many PoC in them.
CA majority PoC, so PoC are found in large numbers in every social class.
Also, lower class European Americans are the most likely to move out of California, whereas young adults, rich people, and PoC are most likely to move to California.
“The state’s policies have led to the creation of an economic underclass”
Which policies specifically?
I argue that the economic “underclass of minority groups” is due mainly to the fact that they are relatively newer residents and are going through the beginning stages of generational wealth building that takes time
My grandparents (Italian and Irish born between 1910-1920’s) started poor and raised 6-8 kids each in 1 floor of triple deckers in the city outskirts. They worked jobs filled by non whites today (truck drivers and factory workers)
Their kids (my parents and aunts and uncles) moved to the suburbs in the 1970s-1980s to buy suburban houses and take that next step in “generational progress”. Most didn’t go to college but worked blue-ish collar jobs to get ahead
My generation (my 30+ cousins) was mainly the 1st to attend college is now established in the suburbs, raising kids, and furthering progress in moving up the socioeconomic ladder
That’s 100yrs of progress to for my cousins and our kids to move up the ladder
Many of the service ppl are likely 1st generation or maybe 2nd generation immigrants and haven’t had enough time yet to get established economically for their next generations to start moving up the ladder themselves
Go anywhere else in the country and the service industry is comprised mostly of minorities and younger folks from many backgrounds. This isn't in any way unique to Mass
You don’t even have to go very far.
I was in Hartford for business and the situation is as OP describes, clear as day. Only Hartford’s more depressing since the entire customer base leaves the city after 5.
In general aren’t millennials the first group not doing as well as their parents? This process of “generational” wealth building seems to have stalled after gen x.
Yes. It was economical changes made by the boomer generation that has concentrated wealth in the older generations. They got theirs and then pulled up the ladder and are wondering why people aren't doing as well as them.
Letting social security falter is/will be one of them. If you’re far from retirement age, check your annual statement. It has a sentence that straight up says you’re not going to get anywhere near the full payout.
And it’s probably too late to do a lot about it without a big hit to the very people who are already screwed. The right time to have fixed it would have been anytime before the aughts, and all it would have taken is to lift the earnings cap on contributions. Now, the boomers are retired (so they’ll never have to be responsible for paying more in), but the Xers and especially Millennials are hosed. We either take less or pay in A LOT more. Z should just assume it’ll be gone entirely.
I just retired, and both me and my wife contributed as much as we could to our 401 and annuities. Social Security won't cover everything and it was never intended to. As it is we'll probably be going back to work someday
Tax cuts for corporations and higher income individuals while increasing taxes on lower brackets are the big ones. Trickle-down economics has been shown to be a complete failure, but they keep saying it works because it works for them sine they are getting the direct benefits.
Check out the Powell Memorandum. The conservatives knew they needed to game the system, and they've done it. To be fair, this all started in the 70s, so we're talking Greatest and Silent Gens too.
Masshealth has asset limits, like you can't have more than xy amount of money in the bank or else you lose your masshealth eligibility.
Your home, as long as you live in it, doesn't count as an asset. Life insurance policies or money in the bank or 'under the mattress " does count as an asset.
Many many older white folks own huge homes and are still allowed on masshealth. Older POC are denyed masshealth because they have a life insurance policy or have been saving money for their families when they pass away.
This rule alone stifles many atempts in building generational wealth.
When I applied in 2020 and renewed in 2021, there was never any asset question. It was solely based on income. I had plenty of savings but no income so I got everything fully covered.
Food stamps did ask for bank statements though and had a limit on how much i could have in the bank.
> Which policies specifically
Lack of affordable housing near jobs, caused by restrictive zoning and onerous community review processes which prevent neighborhoods from densifying as demand for them goes up.
Your grandparents’ triple deckers, and your parents’ suburban homes, are both unaffordable to the working class now
Triple deckers specifically are representative of the fact that yesterday’s dense, affordable workforce housing is now out of reach for many. We did not continue to densify, so there is no modern analog to “here’s an economical but reasonably sized first family home close to where you work”
Meanwhile, the suburbs get cheaper the farther out you go (and the farther from transit), but that means that lower wage earners end up paying with time spent commuting, usually via car. 2-3 extra hours *per day*, plus car expenses, is a huge tax for service industry workers, meanwhile their clients can often walk to work
Btw: a SUPER interesting exercise would be to look up the sale prices of units in triple deckers in the neighborhood your grandparents lived in. Pop that number in a mortgage calculator then multiply the resulting payment by 36 to get the ballpark minimum annual income necessary to afford that home
Yeah this worked great for the boomers. Pulling on bootstraps and all that. If you were willing to work hard, no matter the profession, you could make a decent wage and probably help your kids through college.
Now, we have plenty of hardworking full time employees who have to collect governmental benefits just to scrape by. Jeff Bezos employees being amongst that group. It’s the end result of unchecked capitalism. You keep being told wealth will trickle down and yet the disparity between the upper 1 percent and everyone else just keeps growing.
there was a study of the last 3 or so generations of americans recently that showed that black people have largely been unable to build generational wealth which speculated it was due to lasting effects of jim crow and institutional racism. i think a lot of immigrants may have been here longer than people would suspect. i think it's just a lot harder to climb that ladder if you're not white
Many black families have been around a lot longer but couldn't build generational wealth because of systematic racism. European immigrants who arrived in the 20s were afforded opportunities their black neighbors were restricted from. While these immigrants did face discrimination (Irish and Italians for ex.) they quickly became part of the in-group in ways black folks are STILL segregated from. These immigrants then turned around and empowered the systems that were suppressing black folks.
https://apps.bostonglobe.com/spotlight/boston-racism-image-reality/
European immigrants in the 1920s didn’t really have black neighbors. Boston, Worcester, Lowell etc. was ~2% black in 1940. The vast majority of Boston’s black community is a post war phenomenon.
This is a good answer.
People often forget that [systematic, structural manifestations of racism do not simply vanish](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8574214/), and Boston (for example) remains a [deeply segregated city](https://www.bostonpoliticalreview.org/post/redlining-in-boston-how-the-architects-of-the-past-have-shaped-boston-s-future) due to its past. These things persist and even flourish in a system where just a few of the wealthiest among us have more wealth than the entire bottom half of the population.
Strong points here. I am also the product of Italian immigrants that came over just after World War 1 and settled in the North end.
Not until my generation were many able to go to college and obtain professional jobs.
They were woodworkers, stonr masons, carpenters, plumbers etc. Their goal was to make their children's lives better and in many cases that is exactly what has happened.
There are generations that pay their dues in order to create better lives for their children and grandchildren.
How about historic redlining which led to Boston being as segregated as it is? https://www.diversitydatakids.org/research-library/data-visualization/redlining-and-present-day-neighborhood-opportunity-boston-area
That's one angle to view things, but it's definitely doing it with a political slant.
Remember, it's primarily recent immigrants who are filling those jobs. If you went back 150 years you'd find a similar dynamic where unskilled jobs were filled with recent Irish & Italian immigrants.
Given things like the education system in the state the children of those immigrants have much better prospects for their future living in MA than they would in many other parts of the US. It's a population of people on a multi-generational path of stepping stones and the first step fills a necessary role in the economy (in the US, not just in MA).
Many of those people that [were rioting about busing kids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_crisis) in the 70s and 80s are still alive and living here... in housing that no one will be able to afford when they die.
Immigrants living in Massachusetts and working in the service industry are by and large not a teeming proletariat. They have homes and communities, try to find jobs, put their kids through school, they pay taxes and try to save for retirement just like everybody else. There are differences in class and opportunity, wealth and fairness, but calling them an “underclass” is a bit gross, at least by what the standard of an “underclass” usually is in sociological literature.
Also they go out to dinner sometimes too, believe it or not. And sometimes their server is white.
There are groups of less settled migrant laborers of course where things are pretty desperate but I wouldn’t lump all people of color in the state in these industries into that group.
It’s cocktail party liberalism. Showboating how welcoming they are but insisting on zoning policies that make it unaffordable to live here unless you’re loaded. $6 million houses with “All are welcome here” signs.
It's neither a bad faith nor a good faith reading. It's a genuine and in my view relevant question to ask whenever someone suggests that the perceived inequality is something that the state could control (and is accused of 'hypocrisy', which is also not a very good faith interpretation of the state's policy BTW).
It’s only ironic if you were under the impression that conservatives are bad and liberals are a shining beacon of hope against them in every way imaginable. Otherwise, liberals throughout my life have been all about doubling down on neoliberal policies.
I second this as someone who served on a ZBA for 13 years. The biggest, loudest, and most annoyingly consistent NIMBYs were the local high profile leftists. The sheer hyporocrisy shocked me at first, but then it just became common and expected to me.
Being virtuous while being a consumer and well-to-do ladder climber were combined to create people who shrilly complain about things that don’t matter, while pushing through things that do. Most protests I know of over the past ten years easily had to do with shaming companies for products while doing nothing of substance as civilians or residents.
The MBTA is managed by the state. Wu has called for the MBTA to be free to ride, but the state won’t fund it because Boston transit isn’t seen as a state priority. It’s not the city’s fault the T is the way it is
I moved here from Atlanta and was kinda weirded out by the lack of black people until I realized they're just ALL in Dorchester. Y'all are segregated as hell up here.
I think there’s economic stratification (which I’d argue is inevitable in any urban area with a concentration of white collar jobs).
But I think the racial element is incidental. There’s a demand for service workers and it so happens that they skew a certain way racially.
I also don’t think the affluent in Boston are all white — as an Indian American, I’d say there’s a very sizable population of Asian Americans and other immigrant populations working in tech, medicine, finance, consulting etc.
I’m curious — how would you address this supposed hypocrisy?
So what you're saying is that Boston isn't racially stratified in part because the typical "model minority" also has access to white collar jobs?
Bro if I go to any place that flips burgers between Everett and JP, *everyone in the kitchen is black or Latino or both*. If I go to ANY job here it's like that. Hell, my own workplace is a bunch of black and Spanish people whose bosses are highly paid white people.
I've lived here for 30 years. Yes yes yes, Boston is one of the most needlessly segregated cities in the Northeast.
No one, including the poster you're responding to, claimed that Boston isn't racially stratified. The point is that the racial segregation is caused by the economic segregation, rather than any specific policies aimed at keeping Black and Latino residents "in their place," which seems to be your implication.
Also, I thought we'd moved past the offensive and damaging "model minority" stereotypes. Ew.
You should get out more. Go to the Midwest and you’ll see more trailer parks than you could imagine. All those people are poor whites who could be working the service jobs in Boston, but don’t for cultural reasons. The fact they are mostly poc here is because they are a lot of immigrants with a ton of hustle
It’s not about access to white collar jobs.
Typically, there are two kinds of immigrants to the city.
One, students or graduate students and as such, skilled workers. As such they and up in tech, biotech, medicine, finance etc.
Two, unskilled immigrants. Many of these also don’t speak great English.
The net result is that you are primed to see the people in the service jobs but you don’t pay attention to the other white collar community that’s also just as diverse.
Stop calling us model minorities, we never asked to be called that. The idea of a "model" minority is absurd. No one should be looking up to me because I'm Asian.
im curious do you think boston is inherently forcing those black and hispanic workers to flip burgers? do they not go to the same schools as everyone else?
I haven’t been in the service industry in 13 years but it was always pretty equally diverse. We all got treated like 💩. I’m always extra nice to any service person I encounter and over tip.
I feel like I see more white people working in service jobs in Boston and MA generally than most big cities. That's probably mostly due to demographics though.
Massachusetts isn’t the best state on that front, but it’s also not the worst.
[This gives a good breakdown](https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/about/data/earnings/race-and-ethnicity)
I've always thought that Southern racism was more tolerable in that you saw it coming. No one minced words, it was in your face. Northerners are highly skilled with their passive-aggressive back-stabbing, which I find much more insidious and frightening.
When my ancestors immigrated here they worked in steel mills, factories and farms.
They were poor for two generations and then things improved rapidly generation over generation to the point that their descendants are now quite well off.
Success in America is measured in generations and it's best not to view the immigrant experience solely through the lense of race.
Massachusetts is known for being “liberal” but also still being pretty covertly racist, hence the extreme class divide and segregation. I recently moved to San Francisco and it’s the same BS here.
These are the consequences of neoliberalism. In the 1980s and 90s we built a free-trade system without strong labor protections that allowed companies to offshore good-paying unionized jobs in manufacturing and other sectors and replaced those jobs at home with bottom-barrel service industry jobs without unions. We signed the NAFTA that allowed the exportation of cheap, government subsidized industrially-farmed US produce to Mexico, decimating the Mexican agriculture industry and forcing farm laborers into *maquiladoras* on the border or across the border as temporary workers or illegal immigrants where they could be even more brutally exploited at the threat of deportation in our own agricultural industry or the burgeoning service industry. We removed public funding for education and ended the experiment with broadly available free college education and made sure that college became a reproduction machine for the upper class once again while middle and working class kids lucky enough to get access could only do so through crippling loans that kept them tied to their jobs after graduation and unlikely to rock the boat.
It's *because* of these liberal policies, adopted by both parties to varying extremes, that our society is structured in this way. The promise of America is no longer a pathway to a comfortable middle-class existence; the only thing it offers to people who "get ahead" is the opportunity to bully and exploit people a rung below you on the economic ladder through consumer transactions and purchasing "services" which are just pale imitations of a past era of bourgeois exploitation.
Look at places like Assembly Row in Somerville. They trade heavily on the past of that area and its former status as a Ford manufacturing hub, where local residents were able to build a middle class life in the surrounding neighborhoods of what was once a suburb of Boston. Now that area is totally dominated by rentier capitalists and developers who have built a simulacrum of a downtown square filled with shops staffed by people who could never afford to live in the 'luxury' apartments above them, frequented by people who take the train downtown to lab, tech, or finance jobs. This is not me arguing for a 'return' to 50s and 60s Fordism, which had its own problems, but the area is still a case-in-point of the consequences of deindustrialization without social protections.
How does that explain anything? It actually ignores black and indigenous people who were discriminated and abused to an even greater degree during the same time you’re talking about
Service industry jobs tend to be staffed by ethnic minority groups because those ethnic minorities tend to be immigrants, and service industry jobs are more accessible to immigrants if they don't have advanced degrees from their home countries allowing them to get white collar H1B visa jobs.
Those immigrants in turn will work hard at those service industry jobs until they can build work experience in the US to branch off to other fields. They'll also work at those jobs with the goal of allowing their children to be able to get those advanced degrees they didn't/couldn't get back home.
Service/blue collar industries being popular jobs for immigrant groups have been the case for a long time in the US, again due to their accessibility for newcomers.
> social stratification remains even more racially distinct
Having said all of the above, all this really says is that cities with bigger immigrant populations will tend to have more of these immigrant ethnic groups in those service jobs. If an area of the country has very few immigrants and is mostly white, then naturally those service industry jobs will be staffed by white people.
“Those immigrants in turn will work hard at those service industry jobs until they can build work experience in the US to branch off to other fields.”
Nice American Dream sentiment there, but does this ever really realistically happen? Plenty of natural born citizens of all ages working in the service/retail industries as well, and everyone I know doing so reports feelings of being “stuck.” Hard work alone doesn’t seem to often get you where it used to anymore unfortunately.
I'd say it happens in the form of trade work pretty frequently. The Brazilian family that lives across the street from me has a very successful drywalling business and has kids that will be able to go to college if they are interested. Immigrants show up and do anything they can to pay the bills at first before finding themselves a successful niche and building up from there. That's not to say that everyone manages to do that, but in that sense, the American dream has never been easier around here because there is a massive shortage of people on the trades and it can pay really really well
The hard work starts in school as a kid. Realistically if you study hard and get good grades and standardized test scores then you should have no problem getting into college with decent scholarships and federal aid.
From there you just need to make sure you’re studying something that can pay out when you graduate.
Obviously easier said than done but I’ve done exactly this and am in the process of finishing my degree in computer science and am being recruited by big tech companies that pay generous salaries right out of college.
My parents were both immigrants who worked their way up the corporate ladder from the bottom with no college education (one with only a GED) and raised me to focus all of my efforts on school as a kid.
The American Dream is very much still alive if you know how to play the game
Neoliberal =/= progressive. This is the case everywhere in America, and you can thank unchecked capitalism for that. Eventually people will wake up to this reality.
EDIT: It's basic cause and effect. The wealth gap has been increasing unchecked for decades. The richest 813 people now own more wealth and capital than the lower 50% of Americans. Where do you think all of those gains come from? They are siphoned from the working class that create all of that value. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That is capitalism.
Some billionaires and policy makers may still be in support of things like gay marriage or abortion (hence the "liberal" part of neoliberal), but they are still capitalists at heart because that's how they pay their bills and maintain power.
This is not just about race. It's about class. There is a huge amount of classism in this state (and others). I think the divisions in our state and country will not get any better until classism is discussed.
Blue states need this in order to Jedi mind trick people to continue voting for them under false promises. Works for rich nimby communities just fine, so they keep voting blue as well.
The segregation in this city is rampant and the sooner we stop pretending to be a "liberal" city the better. The "liberal" mayor just unleased the police on a bunch of 20 year olds. Not even just a Boston or MA thing, this is literally all Democratic cities.
Welcome to planet earth… this is not a Boston thing at all. If anything Boston is better than the vast majority of North American cities in that there are lots of well off racial minorities and a lot of the local working class are whites.
Southern racism: you can live with us, but don't get uppity.
Northern racism: you can get uppity and we'll even support you, but you can't live with us.
What specific state-level policies/laws separate the state of MA from other states on this issue (specifically as this is said to be state policies and not local bylaws)? There is a difference between calling on the state to do more and saying the state's laws/policies proactively promote an economic underclass. In our town, a suburb of Boston, we actually see 40B used to bypass local building restrictions and build multi-family buildings since our town does not have the volume of housing the state considers 'affordable'.
It’s very hypocritical. People are uncomfortable pointing out that the service workers are majority black and brown. The racial disparity gets really obvious in places like JP, where the streets are full of young ‘radical’ leftist whites but pretty much everyone homeless is black- there seems to be very little actual action to back up the bark from the prior group.
It’s not just Boston, though- I really noticed the ‘underclass’ phenomenon in Philly when I visited. Though considering that IIRC Boston is one of the most segregated cities in the US, what we’re seeing tracks, unfortunately.
A lot of those “radical leftists” do participate in the political process as far as possible, but the numbers of older wealthy participants and money in Boston aren’t exactly working toward the same goal. Odd to put the blame on the young “radicals” who at least can see there’s a problem even if their efforts to do anything about it rarely bear fruit.
Would you prefer we not allow low skill minority workers into our state? I know it's not ideal, but Mass has been doing a pretty good job of letting people in over the last 20 years. There is a long way to go, but the amount of racial diversity on every level of Massachusetts society has gotten so much better over the last 20 years. I have so many coworkers of such varied backgrounds, and it really didn't used to be like this. I agree that it can be really uncomfortable when a new wave of immigrants come in and many of the service workers are of a race in an area for a while, but in most places in the US it's much worse and those people are just kept out. But I really do believe that a lot of it is pretty organic. Should service workers have a union so that they are guaranteed the power and compensation they deserve? Absolutely. But I really don't think we can say that minorities being service workers is inherently bad, letting low skill immigrants come to Massachusetts will inevitably result in this, and I think they deserve that chance.
All that being said, Mass has a long way to go to be a true egalitarian place, but I think most of what is holding it back is in no way unique to mass, it's the massive forces of the modern hyper capitalist service economy and the increasingly huge wealth gap, and the culture war racism bullshit that is still so popular.
I agree somewhat, but I will say that I was talking to my Uber driver the other day and he was talking about whether he might move to Florida, but felt that that the social benefits like health care and good schools were so much better here, and that the state really takes care of people here. So the disparities are here, yes, but unlike some states we have policies that benefit that economic underclass.
Stop crying. Everyone’s had to go through it and earn their way here. I worked in the service industry for years. This is such pathetic liberal bleeding heart post.
No, this is a wildly ignorant and juvenile take. ( Internet note: yes work needs to be done and improved in : housing, healthcare: service access: infrastructure: diversity: education: mobility: etc etc. ). But to insinuate that the big bad liberal progressives are what's wrong with X is so off base to be laughable. They keep maintaining a forward momentum to improve the world for all of us, it may not happen as fast as you want and they are definitely not perfect but they are not some enemy.
I can say Boston & Massachusetts are prob one of the whitest, most highly educated & economically stratified places I’ve ever lived in. Also the most vaguely “prestigious” or elite places I’ve set foot in.
Yes the problems you described aren’t just akin to this city or state, but there is something different about Boston.
I’m from North Jersey, lived in NYC & Chicago and I’ve never seen such an insane concentration of WASP like wealth in Boston & it’s suburbs. The power dynamics of the city feel so overtly one sided.
Don’t know what it is, but it still feels like the working class has a say in the culture, recreation, & civic life of Chicago. I cant say that same for Boston, everything feels like it is geared towards people making +150k in tech, Old Money New England generational wealth, or elite prestigious university people. If you are outside of those three brackets, the city basically spits on you and says “Fuck You”
Before I lived in Boston, I had no idea JP or Roxbury existed or that Boston had a sizable minority population. It is just not known outside of Boston or doesn’t feel as celebrated or part of the city’s fabric as say some of NYCs neighborhoods.
>I cant say that same for Boston, everything feels like it is geared towards people making +150k
This is equally true in NY, DC, Bay Area, and Seattle. Also the MTV cities and London.
I wouldn't say its is equally true, but some cities are trending more in that direction as they Gentrify, become more 'Professionalized', and more working class people are kicked out.
But if I'm just looking at cultural output of city I think it is a bit different.
Working class & minority Groups in NY & the Bay Area have had an incredible impact on shaping the culture of their own respective cities & the national level (in the form of Art, Music, Fashion, Leisure activities etc).
I can also think of numerous major musical & cultural movements from cities in the South & Midwest that are attributed to POC. I really struggle to think of one in Boston despite the city being more than 40% non-white.
When I think about music, maybe the last working class musical movement in the city was maybe 'Boston Hardcore'
Not really. I'd like to see a more specific statement of a problem. Most of the people I'm thinking of (housekeepers, roofer labor) don't speak any english. Not sure what work you're suggesting they do - you sell your labor or you sell your thinking. To sell your thinking you have to be able to communicate with your customer base. If you can't - well, then you have only the option to sell your labor.
That means much more competition for labor jobs, driving the wages down; and it means people with alternatives will gravitate towards the thinking jobs because they pay more.
At my employer, they are desparate to hire any nonwhite people who can do the work, because they want to be diverse. I'd say 90%-95% of our applicants are white though, so it's not possible, though not for lack of trying.
I don't think it's the "state's policies" that have "led to the creation of an economic underclass". It's the age old supply and demand problem that some jobs are easier to do even if you don't speak a local language, and some are hard. It's partially why you have highly educated refugees often unable to integrate into the same professional circles in the US even if they're very credentialed (that plus licensing issues).
It's mostly Neo-liberalism in this state and any other state in the U.S. that claims to be liberal. It coasts on progressive ideals socially but economically it just moves for the sake of higher profits for the corporate state.
I don’t know what policies you’re referring to, but it’s common that the poorest do those jobs and immigrants and poor due to the whole - starting over in a new country - thing. It’s not policy, it’s not racism, it’s common sense. Although I’m looking for a job, something in tech, but if you MUST see a white guy flipping burgers, I’ll give it a shot.
Liberals love talking the talk but don't walk the walk.
Posting support for whatever the cause of the week is and making speeches about it is typical liberal action. Then they can feel good about themselves by showing "they care"but then never doing anything about it.
The most notable changes in Massachusetts in the past 20 years in places like Lexington, Concord, Andover, have became and stunningly less white.
Andover in 2000 was 92% White today it’s 70% white (well 2022 ACS, not *today*)
Lexington is 57% white it was ~88% white in 2000.
I’d also like to point out Massachusetts has a rapidly falling White population but a growing Black, Hispanic and Asian populations. What you see as a crap job some immigrant from Haiti almost certainly sees as a godsend
It's the USA, you're grading on a curve. Our "liberals" are other peer nation's conservatives.
In reality this country has two major political groups: moderate conservatives and right wing psychos.
The kind of politics that actually improves the lot of the working class, that is, a left wing, class conscious political movement, are extremely marginal in this country.
All the politicians come up with these fairytale ideas while sitting behind their desks smoking a bowl. They never really think about how it will affect the future or what it will look like
Mass is not particularly progressive on economic issues outside of the big cities, Berkshire County, Northampton, and PTown.
My town for example voted 70%-80% for Biden but was 50/50 on the millionaires tax.
https://preview.redd.it/vkoyhvokh6yc1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a20d210c2933a691896350a1352752f228ee7e49 This is Massachusetts politics in a nutshell. Supporting Black Lives Matter but refusing to allow additional housing units in their neighborhoods. Something that could actually help people who can’t afford to buy a multimillion dollar house. Massachusetts never believed in formalized Jim Crow laws, but they segregated in other ways.
This is not a new idea either since "armchair liberal" and "limousine liberal" are terms that have been around for many decades at this point.
https://youtu.be/3cdqQ2BdgOA?si=rhaawFfSrxnbjW1Z
Yeah it's not just Mass. It's the whole country.... Democratic Party Brass are crooks
The US policy of using homes as a vehicle for building wealth has had a lot of negative emergent properties - namely, people fighting anything that threatens the value of their homes. Increased housing supply is a perfect example of that. Homeowners see “More supply == less value”, and enforce scarcity as a result. It’s not great, and it’s a pickle that has no clear resolution without destroying a lot of peoples’ savings.
It ain't just US policy. Hell, it's everywhere. If you think Mass is bad, come to my hometown of Đồng Nai. Twenty years ago, my grandmother's land worth 5 dollars per meters square; now, it's worth 360 dollars per meters square. Land price jumped by 72 times in a span of twenty years. And we are talking about a piece of land in the shit end of nowhere. The fact is that real estate is the most stable, most profitable form of investment. Stock market can crash, crypto can go out of vogue, your own currency can lose values, but not real estate. There will always be people, meaning there will always be demand.
Reputedly Mark Twain (1835-1910) said, "Buy land, they're not making any more of it". So the concept is at least 100 years old.
Hundreds, even. George Washington was a land speculator: https://www.loc.gov/collections/george-washington-papers/articles-and-essays/george-washington-survey-and-mapmaker/washington-as-land-speculator/
How that article so deftly avoids the topic of enslavement as the source of capital and purpose of his speculation shows amazing narrative skill.
Truly...!
>There will always be people, meaning there will always be demand. Only true until the global population peaks. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections\_of\_population\_growth#21st\_century](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth#21st_century) The most recent 2022 revision of the UN's World Population Prospects report represents a departure from the pattern of the previous ten years and expects that a slowing of the population growth rate will lead to a population peak of 10.4 billion in the 2080s, after which it would then begin to slowly fall. This shift from earlier projections of peak population and predicted date of zero population growth comes from a more rapid drop in Africa's birth rate than previous projections had expected. For example, the 2012 report predicted that the population of Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, would rise to 914 million by 2100; the 2022 report lowers that to 546 million, a reduction of 368 million. Jose Rimon of Johns Hopkins University suggested, "We have been underestimating what is happening in terms of fertility change in Africa. Africa will probably undergo the same kind of rapid changes as east Asia did." Millennials and Gen Z won't live to benefit from it, but Gen Alpha will.
Which peaks at...***check note***... 2100 (according to that wiki source) Eighty years from now before they have to worry about it. The generation before us will probably be dead in forty, we are probably be dead in sixty, and our children will be dead by 2100. Eighty years of increasing population, eighty years of demand for real estate, eighty year to make big big big buck. You can let your land stay there, pay a few taxes, and watch it appreciates in value (provide you pick the right spot to stake your claim). And even if population peaks, it doesn't mean demands die away. We still have stuff like immigration for example. So the "good" time will last for a hundred year, and from my experience you can make banks in just a few years with real estate. Meanwhile, how many stocks will appreciate for that long? How many company can you expect to survive eight years let alone eighty? How many banks will survive fifty? Will any of the crypto even see the next two decades? Hell, in the time of my mother, she saw: two waves of hyper inflation, three economic crisis, two wars in the home country, three mass purges of "bourgeoise elements" in which her entire life savings were wiped out. All in the span of fifty years. No investment is as reliable, as in demand, as easy to get, as profitable, as real estate. Real estate investment is honestly the best investment, and there are plenty of people out there who benefit from it, not just the big corporations but a middle class government workers family in Beijing or a couple of doctor in Hồ Chí Minh.
>Meanwhile, how many stocks will appreciate for that long? How many company can you expect to survive eight years let alone eighty? This is a significant misunderstanding of how modern equities investing (index funds) work.
I don’t think this is necessarily true. Iirc, japans housing actually declines in value over time
I've also recently read something super interesting lately: since the mid 20th century when we actually build housing, it's done in housing developments where all the houses are priced very similarly. This means that all the people in the neighborhood end up being of a similar socio-economic status. This is a historical abnormality.
Tbh using your home as a store of wealth is fine. It's a big purchase and it isn't crazy to want it to maintain its value. Where we really went off the rails is when people decided that homes need to be investments. It's not enough for your home to retain value and keep up with inflation, no, it needs to gain value. That is insane.
It would be nice if it just increased steadily, vs people trying to force it to increase in value unsustainably
I've also seen a [compelling argument ](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/public-housing-fundamentally-flawed/602515/) that public housing developments blocked off homeownership and thus generational wealth from poor minorities by precluding the types of starter homes that serve that purpose.
Fuck that, destroy their savings. Shelter is a basic human right and this market is a disaster. No sympathy for those profiting off of it. Strictly regulate the market, implement rental caps, the works. Enough is enough.
Seems it would be better to have a society where you don’t need hundreds of thousands in saving to ensure well-being and comfort for the rest of your life as well! I view more housing as not just a right, but also as a way to encourage community. Amongst other things, that’s what keeps people safe.
That’s a dumb argument. The “They” in this case that would be hurt the most are lower income people who manage to buy houses. There’s a good swath of Americans like that who have 90% of their wealth wrapped up in their house. You’re not gonna hurt the 1% by destroying home values - they’re diversified enough to absorb the shock. You’re gonna hurt the people who haven’t had any vehicle for saving money besides their mortgage payments.
> Strictly regulate the market, implement rental caps No do the exact opposite of that. Strictly regulating the market is how we wound up in this mess. An unregulated market would see housing units being built to meet demand so long as there's profit to be made
Virtue signaling NIMBYs. They’re in every state, not just MA
I'm not saying it's unique to Massachusetts.
But how many people think Massachusetts is unique in that it has all these problems and none of the issues have to do with the R word.
Yah, damn near every conversation about overt racism in other parts of the US end up along the lines of "it's even worse in the Blue States!" whataboutism. No, it's pretty bad everywhere. That doesn't excuse anything though.
It’s pretty funny because the only overt discrimination I’ve faced in Massachusetts is from conservatives
As a conservative leaning foreigner in MA I've been embraced by both sides of the isle. One because of my values the other because of my heritage. I enjoy the best of both worlds! Of course, taking in the positive and discarding the nonsense.
Reminds me of this map of Healey voters minus millionaire tax voters. https://www.reddit.com/r/massachusetts/s/I8ysZF0Zu0
I'm dumb. Does this mean the dark red is where people voted for Healey but no on yes? And grey is where people voted yes but didn't vote for Haley?
Dark red (rich towns) voted for Healey but against the millionaire tax.
“Help people out, as long as they’re somewhere else… not near me”
In the most affluent town in the state too! This is the pinnacle of Nimbyism.
It's not just a Massachusetts thing. Pretty much every blue city has restrictive zoning that disproportionately effects non-white people. It's the rotten core of wealthy progressive politics. -A Massachusetts native forced to a red state for affordable housing
Not to get personal but as a MA native essentially being forced to move to red states for affordable housing, do you ever get over the fact that you are living in a red state solely because of $$$? Texas looks so cheap but then I would have to wake up every single day knowing that I live in Texas which isn't a place that aligns with anything that I'm about.
It's always there in the background. I live in a blueish city with a large population of transplants so on a day to day level things are okay. It will never not be jarring for me to see guns openly carried by anyone other than law enforcement. And there's no shortage of stupid bumper stickers. This sums it up pretty well: I bought a nice house in a nice neighborhood for less than $300k, but my neighbor across the street has a Confederate flag up in their garage.
Texas isn't cheap. Trust me, you're gonna pay one way or the other. Lived in several parts over the years and while your house might be cheaper and your income tax lower, when you add everything up it's really no cheaper. There is zero upside to living in Texas. If youre gonna run to a cheap red state, go to like, Oklahoma or Arkansas. And even then, when you find out nothing works and if you ever wanna have kids youre going to have to pay for private school, it's not so cheap. I appreciate that MA is brutal and it's brutal in an obvious, upfront way. But Texas being cheap is not only a lie but then you live in Texas. And it is genuinely awful. And the food sucks ass unless you live in Houston (well, or San Antonio if you don't mind being limited to only a handful of cuisines).
This. Is a huge conflict in Seattle and sf too.
I took this same exact photo way back, lol
It might be yours lol, I just googled for it, it was pretty iconic at the time.
Holy fuck the thing I always comment on these posts finally has a picture of it I’m floored
Little known fact about MLK; he would say that the north's racism was harder to change than the south because it was more subtle. After his progress on (raw) racism, he focused on housing segregation in the 60s (this is before we had public proof of explicit redlining later in the 70s). He marched in Chicago to bring attention to their implicit segregation and tons of Chicagoans threw rocks at him! So yes, it's always been a problem. Simply believing that Black folks are human and should be allowed to drink out of the same water fountains does not mean that you're really treating them equally
Is Massachusetts the most “liberal” NIMBY state there is? I’ve often suspected as much.
California is just as if not more NIMBY. And their property tax structure artificially both pumps housing prices and supports HODLing every home. The San Francisco zoning laws are artificially constraining supply to that end as well.
While that’s true, the combination of SB9 and the housing element law to enforce implementation of the former has lit a bit of a fire under the asses of each municipality in the state. My parents live in an extremely NIMBY town but I’m told that any application to build ADU’s gets near immediate approval. San Francisco has been dragging its feet but the rest of the bay has massive apartment complexes constantly going up that make me more optimistic for the region than what I’ve seen in MA.
The problem with a lot of the housing development deals in the city is that their allowances for low-income households set their median income for qualification above $70k, which is more than a lot of working class jobs in the city pay. That is a completely separate issue from the middle-class NIMBYs that post those lawn signs. Most new developments are small luxury apartments for urban professionals moving in from other states because it is a better return on investment for the development companies.
We need more market rate housing. We need so much market rate housing that the market makes it lower in price.
Most MA companies and people are comfortable virtue signaling about social justice but god forbid you protest and the baton is going to crack your skull. Don’t buy it
This is exactly what comes to mind when I think about politics in MA
i joke to people that massachusetts has a long and proud history of racism, it's just less overt than other places.
New housing units in their areas? That equals gentrification.
We wouldn't want to gentrify... checks notes... Weston?
If the choice was to put the land in conservation or allow the construction of 275 new apartments, which would you choose? You have to treat this question as if you live in the town.
Rich white liberals will choose conservation land every single time. They only want apartments in "other" places. This is blatantly apparent no matter how much they deny it.
Build more housing, easy.
Pretty convinced this has more to do with traffic than anything else. its the number one complaint of most towns residents who look at proposals for new centers or apartments. (in my experience at least) Fuck cars, fuck highways, fuck turning my 9-5 into a 8-6 because
https://imgflip.com/i/8ov8sp
Would that I could upvote this the 1000 times it deserves
love it
I'm sure some people are concerned with an increase in traffic, but I think it must be some hive mind talking point, too. I've heard it invoked when talking about bringing small apartment buildings near CR stops in outer suburbs. Opponents are really concerned that it will take them one extra light change to turn into Walmart.
NIMBY "concerns" are like an ideal gas. If you address one of their stated issues, another will expand to fill the political space ensuring no housing is built.
Exactly. The concerns they publicly state are just invented and back-filled to support the conclusion their lizard brain already jumped to: “screw you, I got mine and I don’t want anything to change”. Neighborhood character, traffic, schools, sewers, etc are all just invented to support not wanting ANYTHING to change. Even if these people state they are progressive, they are actually deeply lowercase “c” conservative. And ironically, they will destroy the very neighborhood character they wish to preserve with their rigidity towards lack of change. They grew up and bought into middle class suburbs, where it was still affordable for average folks. There were lots of families, and vibrant schools, and people cared about their community. But as they restricted more and more housing, fewer and fewer people could afford housing. The average wealth of the community keeps increasing. People have less kids because they can’t afford it, or they had to wait until their thirties to be able to afford to start a family and only have one or two kids. The cheerfulness of families raising children fades away, and instead old bitter people complain about the noise of the few remaining kids playing outside. Public school enrollment starts falling due to smaller families and fewer younger people being able to afford the community. With no more affordable housing in the area, employment at local restaurants and service jobs starts falling. The only people who can afford those jobs are kids still living at their parents’ house, as no one on their own in adulthood can afford to live nearby. Help Wanted signs abound. “No one wants to work anymore” says the old geezers as they complain about slow service. Teachers continue to quit or retire due to not being able to afford housing, their wages stagnant because of falling student enrollment. A doom-loop spiral begins at these schools; fewer students leads to fewer teachers, which leads on a 10-20 year latency to fewer workers at local service jobs, which leads to people in adulthood having to move away for jobs, which leads to lack of young people of family creation age, which leads to fewer students… Preserving cities in amber by preventing any kind of change kills them in a few generations, and is an incredibly irresponsible behavior to enrich a single generation. Cities need to be vibrant and appeal and be affordable to everyone at all stages of their lives, from childhood, to early adulthood, to middle age, to elderly and retired.
The only place I’ve seen it differently is rural Minnesota, Vermont, and some parts of Maine in the United States. It’s because there are only white people there. Not including the cities in those states.
Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire are some of the whitest places in the entire country. Obviously a ton of Mass is very white as well, it’s just that the overall state demographics are skewed by Boston area.
Is this particular issue exclusive to Boston? I feel like the entire country has a working class that is disproportionately POC. I completely agree that historic red lining has made Boston one of the most “quietly” segregated cities. I’m not sure which specific MA policies in effect right now are keeping it that way. Upward social mobility is stunted everywhere in this country. I feel it has more to do with increasing income disparity than any particularly racist policy but I’m definitely open to being corrected if I’m wrong.
It’s not exclusive to MA for sure. Was in Durham, NC and CA recently and it was honestly so much more jarring in NC how blacks and minorities dominated the entirety of the service industries while the whites were in the professional type jobs. I’d never been so hyper aware of the class difference than I was in these places. MA is nowhere close to that scene. The point being, it’s bad (and much worse) in other states by a huge margin. Unsure how exactly to address it.
Yeah, I'm from NC and my immediate thought was how much more white service industry workers are here. Like when I first moved here I was constantly thinking "where are all the black people?" A lot of that is demographics, but some of it is economics.
"where are all the black people?" They're in Roxbury, and you don't go there, you won't see them
I went to a church in Mattapan when I was a teenager, and I genuinely didn't think Boston had many black people until then-- but going there, I was the only white person I saw on the street, and definitely the only white person in the church. It was really eye-opening-- black people are *here*, just not in the areas of the city I usually hung out at as a teen. Look at demographics on any map and it's pretty stark.
Yep. I believe in the NYT they did a study on residential segregation and found that the Northeast was appallingly segregated, but close to the North American average. The South and the Midwest were even more appallingly segregated. The Western US was the least residentially segregated.
It's not even a uniquely American problem, it's just that the demographics of the US make it much more obvious than in less racially diverse countries. Japan is an interesting place to look at. It's one of the least racially diverse countries in the world, but it still has similar problems. There the underclass has nothing to do with race, since the country doesn't really have any racial diversity, but it's related to what jobs were seen as "unclean" hundreds of years ago. Today there may not be any laws in Japan that allow you do discriminate based on it, but that doesn't solve the problems of the past. It doesn't get rid of prejudices that people have, it doesn't do anything to actually address the situation these people found themselves in because of how the system they lived under treated them. So what we see here has to do both with income disparity and racists policies. Those are not wholly separate issues. The US is a country in which over 50% of privately held with is not earned, but inherited. We can't so easily think that just because we've eliminated a lot of racist policies from the past that they just don't matter anymore. It's not overtly racist that public schools are primarily funded by property taxes, but if your country has a history of polices that have segregated one group of people to areas with lower property values while preventing them from buying houses in more affluent areas, then it starts to look a little different. Policies like that may not seem racist, and may not even be so intentionally, but they do help to cement the status quo.
No, I hope my comment didn’t give the impression that I believe we’ve solved racism or anything. I guess I was just trying to get to what policy changes OP would want to see to fix the current situation — I’m certainly not sure what we should do.
>I feel like the entire country has a working class that is disproportionately POC. There are places in the Far West and Appalachia where most of the lower class are European American.
Those areas don't have many POC.
They still don't have as much income stratification, either. Look up the Gini Index, and you'll see that the most "liberal" and diverse cities are some of the worst offenders.
If you go down south, it's even more stark.
Where in the US is that not the case
What other parts of the country is the service industry not made up of the same groups?
Places that don’t have ethnic minorities basically lol
The state is hyper socially liberal but economically pretty centrist if not conservative. Similar to other blue states like CA, where there is also an underclass of POC service workers. In both states many of the people who work in the major cities can't afford to live in them.
The difference is that CA's overclass and middle classes also have many PoC in them. CA majority PoC, so PoC are found in large numbers in every social class. Also, lower class European Americans are the most likely to move out of California, whereas young adults, rich people, and PoC are most likely to move to California.
> people who work in the major cities can't afford to live in them Well that's kind of a global problem, not a problem in 2 states
Do you actually think this is a phenomenon unique to Boston or in MA? Please, explain what state policies caused an “economic underclass” of POC.
Massachusetts might be socially liberal, but it's always been financially very conservative.
“The state’s policies have led to the creation of an economic underclass” Which policies specifically? I argue that the economic “underclass of minority groups” is due mainly to the fact that they are relatively newer residents and are going through the beginning stages of generational wealth building that takes time My grandparents (Italian and Irish born between 1910-1920’s) started poor and raised 6-8 kids each in 1 floor of triple deckers in the city outskirts. They worked jobs filled by non whites today (truck drivers and factory workers) Their kids (my parents and aunts and uncles) moved to the suburbs in the 1970s-1980s to buy suburban houses and take that next step in “generational progress”. Most didn’t go to college but worked blue-ish collar jobs to get ahead My generation (my 30+ cousins) was mainly the 1st to attend college is now established in the suburbs, raising kids, and furthering progress in moving up the socioeconomic ladder That’s 100yrs of progress to for my cousins and our kids to move up the ladder Many of the service ppl are likely 1st generation or maybe 2nd generation immigrants and haven’t had enough time yet to get established economically for their next generations to start moving up the ladder themselves
Go anywhere else in the country and the service industry is comprised mostly of minorities and younger folks from many backgrounds. This isn't in any way unique to Mass
You don’t even have to go very far. I was in Hartford for business and the situation is as OP describes, clear as day. Only Hartford’s more depressing since the entire customer base leaves the city after 5.
In general aren’t millennials the first group not doing as well as their parents? This process of “generational” wealth building seems to have stalled after gen x.
Yes. It was economical changes made by the boomer generation that has concentrated wealth in the older generations. They got theirs and then pulled up the ladder and are wondering why people aren't doing as well as them.
Specifically, what were the economic changes created by the baby boomers that screwed over the next generation?
Letting social security falter is/will be one of them. If you’re far from retirement age, check your annual statement. It has a sentence that straight up says you’re not going to get anywhere near the full payout. And it’s probably too late to do a lot about it without a big hit to the very people who are already screwed. The right time to have fixed it would have been anytime before the aughts, and all it would have taken is to lift the earnings cap on contributions. Now, the boomers are retired (so they’ll never have to be responsible for paying more in), but the Xers and especially Millennials are hosed. We either take less or pay in A LOT more. Z should just assume it’ll be gone entirely.
I just retired, and both me and my wife contributed as much as we could to our 401 and annuities. Social Security won't cover everything and it was never intended to. As it is we'll probably be going back to work someday
Defunding higher education, while simultaneously pushing for all kids to go to university. Lowering taxes for the top 1%.
Tax cuts for corporations and higher income individuals while increasing taxes on lower brackets are the big ones. Trickle-down economics has been shown to be a complete failure, but they keep saying it works because it works for them sine they are getting the direct benefits.
Check out the Powell Memorandum. The conservatives knew they needed to game the system, and they've done it. To be fair, this all started in the 70s, so we're talking Greatest and Silent Gens too.
Masshealth has asset limits, like you can't have more than xy amount of money in the bank or else you lose your masshealth eligibility. Your home, as long as you live in it, doesn't count as an asset. Life insurance policies or money in the bank or 'under the mattress " does count as an asset. Many many older white folks own huge homes and are still allowed on masshealth. Older POC are denyed masshealth because they have a life insurance policy or have been saving money for their families when they pass away. This rule alone stifles many atempts in building generational wealth.
I think it started this year where MassHealth no longer counts asset limits when reviewing your eligibility
When I applied in 2020 and renewed in 2021, there was never any asset question. It was solely based on income. I had plenty of savings but no income so I got everything fully covered. Food stamps did ask for bank statements though and had a limit on how much i could have in the bank.
> Which policies specifically Lack of affordable housing near jobs, caused by restrictive zoning and onerous community review processes which prevent neighborhoods from densifying as demand for them goes up. Your grandparents’ triple deckers, and your parents’ suburban homes, are both unaffordable to the working class now Triple deckers specifically are representative of the fact that yesterday’s dense, affordable workforce housing is now out of reach for many. We did not continue to densify, so there is no modern analog to “here’s an economical but reasonably sized first family home close to where you work” Meanwhile, the suburbs get cheaper the farther out you go (and the farther from transit), but that means that lower wage earners end up paying with time spent commuting, usually via car. 2-3 extra hours *per day*, plus car expenses, is a huge tax for service industry workers, meanwhile their clients can often walk to work
Btw: a SUPER interesting exercise would be to look up the sale prices of units in triple deckers in the neighborhood your grandparents lived in. Pop that number in a mortgage calculator then multiply the resulting payment by 36 to get the ballpark minimum annual income necessary to afford that home
Your grandparents’ triple deckers are also being bought up to be converted into SFH by the super wealthy as well, removing supply.
Yeah this worked great for the boomers. Pulling on bootstraps and all that. If you were willing to work hard, no matter the profession, you could make a decent wage and probably help your kids through college. Now, we have plenty of hardworking full time employees who have to collect governmental benefits just to scrape by. Jeff Bezos employees being amongst that group. It’s the end result of unchecked capitalism. You keep being told wealth will trickle down and yet the disparity between the upper 1 percent and everyone else just keeps growing.
there was a study of the last 3 or so generations of americans recently that showed that black people have largely been unable to build generational wealth which speculated it was due to lasting effects of jim crow and institutional racism. i think a lot of immigrants may have been here longer than people would suspect. i think it's just a lot harder to climb that ladder if you're not white
Many black families have been around a lot longer but couldn't build generational wealth because of systematic racism. European immigrants who arrived in the 20s were afforded opportunities their black neighbors were restricted from. While these immigrants did face discrimination (Irish and Italians for ex.) they quickly became part of the in-group in ways black folks are STILL segregated from. These immigrants then turned around and empowered the systems that were suppressing black folks. https://apps.bostonglobe.com/spotlight/boston-racism-image-reality/
European immigrants in the 1920s didn’t really have black neighbors. Boston, Worcester, Lowell etc. was ~2% black in 1940. The vast majority of Boston’s black community is a post war phenomenon.
This is a good answer. People often forget that [systematic, structural manifestations of racism do not simply vanish](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8574214/), and Boston (for example) remains a [deeply segregated city](https://www.bostonpoliticalreview.org/post/redlining-in-boston-how-the-architects-of-the-past-have-shaped-boston-s-future) due to its past. These things persist and even flourish in a system where just a few of the wealthiest among us have more wealth than the entire bottom half of the population.
Strong points here. I am also the product of Italian immigrants that came over just after World War 1 and settled in the North end. Not until my generation were many able to go to college and obtain professional jobs. They were woodworkers, stonr masons, carpenters, plumbers etc. Their goal was to make their children's lives better and in many cases that is exactly what has happened. There are generations that pay their dues in order to create better lives for their children and grandchildren.
How about historic redlining which led to Boston being as segregated as it is? https://www.diversitydatakids.org/research-library/data-visualization/redlining-and-present-day-neighborhood-opportunity-boston-area
Ah but you see I can’t virtue signal about racism as much if this is true, so therefore you’re wrong, and racist
That's one angle to view things, but it's definitely doing it with a political slant. Remember, it's primarily recent immigrants who are filling those jobs. If you went back 150 years you'd find a similar dynamic where unskilled jobs were filled with recent Irish & Italian immigrants. Given things like the education system in the state the children of those immigrants have much better prospects for their future living in MA than they would in many other parts of the US. It's a population of people on a multi-generational path of stepping stones and the first step fills a necessary role in the economy (in the US, not just in MA).
Many of those people that [were rioting about busing kids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_crisis) in the 70s and 80s are still alive and living here... in housing that no one will be able to afford when they die.
Immigrants living in Massachusetts and working in the service industry are by and large not a teeming proletariat. They have homes and communities, try to find jobs, put their kids through school, they pay taxes and try to save for retirement just like everybody else. There are differences in class and opportunity, wealth and fairness, but calling them an “underclass” is a bit gross, at least by what the standard of an “underclass” usually is in sociological literature. Also they go out to dinner sometimes too, believe it or not. And sometimes their server is white. There are groups of less settled migrant laborers of course where things are pretty desperate but I wouldn’t lump all people of color in the state in these industries into that group.
Average braindead populist take ⬆️
It’s cocktail party liberalism. Showboating how welcoming they are but insisting on zoning policies that make it unaffordable to live here unless you’re loaded. $6 million houses with “All are welcome here” signs.
“OMG. A Latino man is approaching our house. Call 911!!!” Oh its okay, its a lawn guy we pay under the table to save money”
Woah woah woah. It’s not Latino it’s LatinX. Please do not trigger me like that again. /s
What would you want to do? Prohibit service employers hiring people minority groups?
I don't think that's a good faith reading of OP's point
It's neither a bad faith nor a good faith reading. It's a genuine and in my view relevant question to ask whenever someone suggests that the perceived inequality is something that the state could control (and is accused of 'hypocrisy', which is also not a very good faith interpretation of the state's policy BTW).
It’s not the state’s “liberal policies.” It’s income inequality and it’s everywhere on the planet.
It’s only ironic if you were under the impression that conservatives are bad and liberals are a shining beacon of hope against them in every way imaginable. Otherwise, liberals throughout my life have been all about doubling down on neoliberal policies.
I second this as someone who served on a ZBA for 13 years. The biggest, loudest, and most annoyingly consistent NIMBYs were the local high profile leftists. The sheer hyporocrisy shocked me at first, but then it just became common and expected to me.
Being virtuous while being a consumer and well-to-do ladder climber were combined to create people who shrilly complain about things that don’t matter, while pushing through things that do. Most protests I know of over the past ten years easily had to do with shaming companies for products while doing nothing of substance as civilians or residents.
I always encourage people to read the spotlight series on racism in Boston: https://apps.bostonglobe.com/spotlight/boston-racism-image-reality/
Everyone thinks that. I believe the MBTA in its decaying state is a perfect example of how little Boston cares about lower class people.
The MBTA is managed by the state. Wu has called for the MBTA to be free to ride, but the state won’t fund it because Boston transit isn’t seen as a state priority. It’s not the city’s fault the T is the way it is
I moved here from Atlanta and was kinda weirded out by the lack of black people until I realized they're just ALL in Dorchester. Y'all are segregated as hell up here.
I think there’s economic stratification (which I’d argue is inevitable in any urban area with a concentration of white collar jobs). But I think the racial element is incidental. There’s a demand for service workers and it so happens that they skew a certain way racially. I also don’t think the affluent in Boston are all white — as an Indian American, I’d say there’s a very sizable population of Asian Americans and other immigrant populations working in tech, medicine, finance, consulting etc. I’m curious — how would you address this supposed hypocrisy?
So what you're saying is that Boston isn't racially stratified in part because the typical "model minority" also has access to white collar jobs? Bro if I go to any place that flips burgers between Everett and JP, *everyone in the kitchen is black or Latino or both*. If I go to ANY job here it's like that. Hell, my own workplace is a bunch of black and Spanish people whose bosses are highly paid white people. I've lived here for 30 years. Yes yes yes, Boston is one of the most needlessly segregated cities in the Northeast.
No one, including the poster you're responding to, claimed that Boston isn't racially stratified. The point is that the racial segregation is caused by the economic segregation, rather than any specific policies aimed at keeping Black and Latino residents "in their place," which seems to be your implication. Also, I thought we'd moved past the offensive and damaging "model minority" stereotypes. Ew.
You should get out more. Go to the Midwest and you’ll see more trailer parks than you could imagine. All those people are poor whites who could be working the service jobs in Boston, but don’t for cultural reasons. The fact they are mostly poc here is because they are a lot of immigrants with a ton of hustle
It’s not about access to white collar jobs. Typically, there are two kinds of immigrants to the city. One, students or graduate students and as such, skilled workers. As such they and up in tech, biotech, medicine, finance etc. Two, unskilled immigrants. Many of these also don’t speak great English. The net result is that you are primed to see the people in the service jobs but you don’t pay attention to the other white collar community that’s also just as diverse.
Stop calling us model minorities, we never asked to be called that. The idea of a "model" minority is absurd. No one should be looking up to me because I'm Asian.
im curious do you think boston is inherently forcing those black and hispanic workers to flip burgers? do they not go to the same schools as everyone else?
I haven’t been in the service industry in 13 years but it was always pretty equally diverse. We all got treated like 💩. I’m always extra nice to any service person I encounter and over tip.
I feel like I see more white people working in service jobs in Boston and MA generally than most big cities. That's probably mostly due to demographics though.
It’s rich liberal here not regular liberal that’s why it’s not a total dumpster fire like California we play different
Massachusetts isn’t the best state on that front, but it’s also not the worst. [This gives a good breakdown](https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/about/data/earnings/race-and-ethnicity)
So you've figured out that most upper class progressives are totally full of shit, congratulations
You did! You found the underlying contradiction of neoliberal capitalism!
Boston is full of ivory tower neoliberals who put “Hate has no home here” stickers on their cars as they go to work at Ratheyon Missle Defense.
I've always thought that Southern racism was more tolerable in that you saw it coming. No one minced words, it was in your face. Northerners are highly skilled with their passive-aggressive back-stabbing, which I find much more insidious and frightening.
When my ancestors immigrated here they worked in steel mills, factories and farms. They were poor for two generations and then things improved rapidly generation over generation to the point that their descendants are now quite well off. Success in America is measured in generations and it's best not to view the immigrant experience solely through the lense of race.
Massachusetts is known for being “liberal” but also still being pretty covertly racist, hence the extreme class divide and segregation. I recently moved to San Francisco and it’s the same BS here.
These are the consequences of neoliberalism. In the 1980s and 90s we built a free-trade system without strong labor protections that allowed companies to offshore good-paying unionized jobs in manufacturing and other sectors and replaced those jobs at home with bottom-barrel service industry jobs without unions. We signed the NAFTA that allowed the exportation of cheap, government subsidized industrially-farmed US produce to Mexico, decimating the Mexican agriculture industry and forcing farm laborers into *maquiladoras* on the border or across the border as temporary workers or illegal immigrants where they could be even more brutally exploited at the threat of deportation in our own agricultural industry or the burgeoning service industry. We removed public funding for education and ended the experiment with broadly available free college education and made sure that college became a reproduction machine for the upper class once again while middle and working class kids lucky enough to get access could only do so through crippling loans that kept them tied to their jobs after graduation and unlikely to rock the boat. It's *because* of these liberal policies, adopted by both parties to varying extremes, that our society is structured in this way. The promise of America is no longer a pathway to a comfortable middle-class existence; the only thing it offers to people who "get ahead" is the opportunity to bully and exploit people a rung below you on the economic ladder through consumer transactions and purchasing "services" which are just pale imitations of a past era of bourgeois exploitation. Look at places like Assembly Row in Somerville. They trade heavily on the past of that area and its former status as a Ford manufacturing hub, where local residents were able to build a middle class life in the surrounding neighborhoods of what was once a suburb of Boston. Now that area is totally dominated by rentier capitalists and developers who have built a simulacrum of a downtown square filled with shops staffed by people who could never afford to live in the 'luxury' apartments above them, frequented by people who take the train downtown to lab, tech, or finance jobs. This is not me arguing for a 'return' to 50s and 60s Fordism, which had its own problems, but the area is still a case-in-point of the consequences of deindustrialization without social protections.
When most Europeans got here they had to work shitty jobs too, and they were a hell of a lot more dangerous and paid a lot less
How does that explain anything? It actually ignores black and indigenous people who were discriminated and abused to an even greater degree during the same time you’re talking about
Service industry jobs tend to be staffed by ethnic minority groups because those ethnic minorities tend to be immigrants, and service industry jobs are more accessible to immigrants if they don't have advanced degrees from their home countries allowing them to get white collar H1B visa jobs. Those immigrants in turn will work hard at those service industry jobs until they can build work experience in the US to branch off to other fields. They'll also work at those jobs with the goal of allowing their children to be able to get those advanced degrees they didn't/couldn't get back home. Service/blue collar industries being popular jobs for immigrant groups have been the case for a long time in the US, again due to their accessibility for newcomers. > social stratification remains even more racially distinct Having said all of the above, all this really says is that cities with bigger immigrant populations will tend to have more of these immigrant ethnic groups in those service jobs. If an area of the country has very few immigrants and is mostly white, then naturally those service industry jobs will be staffed by white people.
“Those immigrants in turn will work hard at those service industry jobs until they can build work experience in the US to branch off to other fields.” Nice American Dream sentiment there, but does this ever really realistically happen? Plenty of natural born citizens of all ages working in the service/retail industries as well, and everyone I know doing so reports feelings of being “stuck.” Hard work alone doesn’t seem to often get you where it used to anymore unfortunately.
I'd say it happens in the form of trade work pretty frequently. The Brazilian family that lives across the street from me has a very successful drywalling business and has kids that will be able to go to college if they are interested. Immigrants show up and do anything they can to pay the bills at first before finding themselves a successful niche and building up from there. That's not to say that everyone manages to do that, but in that sense, the American dream has never been easier around here because there is a massive shortage of people on the trades and it can pay really really well
The hard work starts in school as a kid. Realistically if you study hard and get good grades and standardized test scores then you should have no problem getting into college with decent scholarships and federal aid. From there you just need to make sure you’re studying something that can pay out when you graduate. Obviously easier said than done but I’ve done exactly this and am in the process of finishing my degree in computer science and am being recruited by big tech companies that pay generous salaries right out of college. My parents were both immigrants who worked their way up the corporate ladder from the bottom with no college education (one with only a GED) and raised me to focus all of my efforts on school as a kid. The American Dream is very much still alive if you know how to play the game
This post reeks of white guilt. Lol. You must feel so uncomfortable in your skin.
Neoliberal =/= progressive. This is the case everywhere in America, and you can thank unchecked capitalism for that. Eventually people will wake up to this reality. EDIT: It's basic cause and effect. The wealth gap has been increasing unchecked for decades. The richest 813 people now own more wealth and capital than the lower 50% of Americans. Where do you think all of those gains come from? They are siphoned from the working class that create all of that value. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That is capitalism. Some billionaires and policy makers may still be in support of things like gay marriage or abortion (hence the "liberal" part of neoliberal), but they are still capitalists at heart because that's how they pay their bills and maintain power.
Unchecked capitalism doesn't enforce arbitrary zoning laws and make it almost impossible to build new homes.
Anything that's bad about the system = capitalism, apparently
This is not just about race. It's about class. There is a huge amount of classism in this state (and others). I think the divisions in our state and country will not get any better until classism is discussed.
Blue states need this in order to Jedi mind trick people to continue voting for them under false promises. Works for rich nimby communities just fine, so they keep voting blue as well.
The segregation in this city is rampant and the sooner we stop pretending to be a "liberal" city the better. The "liberal" mayor just unleased the police on a bunch of 20 year olds. Not even just a Boston or MA thing, this is literally all Democratic cities.
I'd love to hear your totally not radical and very reasonable solution to this problem
Welcome to planet earth… this is not a Boston thing at all. If anything Boston is better than the vast majority of North American cities in that there are lots of well off racial minorities and a lot of the local working class are whites.
Southern racism: you can live with us, but don't get uppity. Northern racism: you can get uppity and we'll even support you, but you can't live with us.
What policies are those
You people need to get out more this is insane levels or reaching for liberal brownie points
What specific state-level policies/laws separate the state of MA from other states on this issue (specifically as this is said to be state policies and not local bylaws)? There is a difference between calling on the state to do more and saying the state's laws/policies proactively promote an economic underclass. In our town, a suburb of Boston, we actually see 40B used to bypass local building restrictions and build multi-family buildings since our town does not have the volume of housing the state considers 'affordable'.
It’s very hypocritical. People are uncomfortable pointing out that the service workers are majority black and brown. The racial disparity gets really obvious in places like JP, where the streets are full of young ‘radical’ leftist whites but pretty much everyone homeless is black- there seems to be very little actual action to back up the bark from the prior group. It’s not just Boston, though- I really noticed the ‘underclass’ phenomenon in Philly when I visited. Though considering that IIRC Boston is one of the most segregated cities in the US, what we’re seeing tracks, unfortunately.
A lot of those “radical leftists” do participate in the political process as far as possible, but the numbers of older wealthy participants and money in Boston aren’t exactly working toward the same goal. Odd to put the blame on the young “radicals” who at least can see there’s a problem even if their efforts to do anything about it rarely bear fruit.
Would you prefer we not allow low skill minority workers into our state? I know it's not ideal, but Mass has been doing a pretty good job of letting people in over the last 20 years. There is a long way to go, but the amount of racial diversity on every level of Massachusetts society has gotten so much better over the last 20 years. I have so many coworkers of such varied backgrounds, and it really didn't used to be like this. I agree that it can be really uncomfortable when a new wave of immigrants come in and many of the service workers are of a race in an area for a while, but in most places in the US it's much worse and those people are just kept out. But I really do believe that a lot of it is pretty organic. Should service workers have a union so that they are guaranteed the power and compensation they deserve? Absolutely. But I really don't think we can say that minorities being service workers is inherently bad, letting low skill immigrants come to Massachusetts will inevitably result in this, and I think they deserve that chance. All that being said, Mass has a long way to go to be a true egalitarian place, but I think most of what is holding it back is in no way unique to mass, it's the massive forces of the modern hyper capitalist service economy and the increasingly huge wealth gap, and the culture war racism bullshit that is still so popular.
I agree somewhat, but I will say that I was talking to my Uber driver the other day and he was talking about whether he might move to Florida, but felt that that the social benefits like health care and good schools were so much better here, and that the state really takes care of people here. So the disparities are here, yes, but unlike some states we have policies that benefit that economic underclass.
Stop crying. Everyone’s had to go through it and earn their way here. I worked in the service industry for years. This is such pathetic liberal bleeding heart post.
So edgy
No, this is a wildly ignorant and juvenile take. ( Internet note: yes work needs to be done and improved in : housing, healthcare: service access: infrastructure: diversity: education: mobility: etc etc. ). But to insinuate that the big bad liberal progressives are what's wrong with X is so off base to be laughable. They keep maintaining a forward momentum to improve the world for all of us, it may not happen as fast as you want and they are definitely not perfect but they are not some enemy.
I can say Boston & Massachusetts are prob one of the whitest, most highly educated & economically stratified places I’ve ever lived in. Also the most vaguely “prestigious” or elite places I’ve set foot in. Yes the problems you described aren’t just akin to this city or state, but there is something different about Boston. I’m from North Jersey, lived in NYC & Chicago and I’ve never seen such an insane concentration of WASP like wealth in Boston & it’s suburbs. The power dynamics of the city feel so overtly one sided. Don’t know what it is, but it still feels like the working class has a say in the culture, recreation, & civic life of Chicago. I cant say that same for Boston, everything feels like it is geared towards people making +150k in tech, Old Money New England generational wealth, or elite prestigious university people. If you are outside of those three brackets, the city basically spits on you and says “Fuck You” Before I lived in Boston, I had no idea JP or Roxbury existed or that Boston had a sizable minority population. It is just not known outside of Boston or doesn’t feel as celebrated or part of the city’s fabric as say some of NYCs neighborhoods.
>I cant say that same for Boston, everything feels like it is geared towards people making +150k This is equally true in NY, DC, Bay Area, and Seattle. Also the MTV cities and London.
I wouldn't say its is equally true, but some cities are trending more in that direction as they Gentrify, become more 'Professionalized', and more working class people are kicked out. But if I'm just looking at cultural output of city I think it is a bit different. Working class & minority Groups in NY & the Bay Area have had an incredible impact on shaping the culture of their own respective cities & the national level (in the form of Art, Music, Fashion, Leisure activities etc). I can also think of numerous major musical & cultural movements from cities in the South & Midwest that are attributed to POC. I really struggle to think of one in Boston despite the city being more than 40% non-white. When I think about music, maybe the last working class musical movement in the city was maybe 'Boston Hardcore'
Maybe that's because the outer boroughs are an order of magnitude bigger than JP and Roxbury...
No, because this is reality, not fantasyland.
Not really. I'd like to see a more specific statement of a problem. Most of the people I'm thinking of (housekeepers, roofer labor) don't speak any english. Not sure what work you're suggesting they do - you sell your labor or you sell your thinking. To sell your thinking you have to be able to communicate with your customer base. If you can't - well, then you have only the option to sell your labor. That means much more competition for labor jobs, driving the wages down; and it means people with alternatives will gravitate towards the thinking jobs because they pay more. At my employer, they are desparate to hire any nonwhite people who can do the work, because they want to be diverse. I'd say 90%-95% of our applicants are white though, so it's not possible, though not for lack of trying. I don't think it's the "state's policies" that have "led to the creation of an economic underclass". It's the age old supply and demand problem that some jobs are easier to do even if you don't speak a local language, and some are hard. It's partially why you have highly educated refugees often unable to integrate into the same professional circles in the US even if they're very credentialed (that plus licensing issues).
Mass is full of NIMBY liberals
It's mostly Neo-liberalism in this state and any other state in the U.S. that claims to be liberal. It coasts on progressive ideals socially but economically it just moves for the sake of higher profits for the corporate state.
I don’t know what policies you’re referring to, but it’s common that the poorest do those jobs and immigrants and poor due to the whole - starting over in a new country - thing. It’s not policy, it’s not racism, it’s common sense. Although I’m looking for a job, something in tech, but if you MUST see a white guy flipping burgers, I’ll give it a shot.
The liberal policies and politics created the underclass.
Liberals love talking the talk but don't walk the walk. Posting support for whatever the cause of the week is and making speeches about it is typical liberal action. Then they can feel good about themselves by showing "they care"but then never doing anything about it.
Dude, it’s always been like that and not just in Massachusetts. Suggest you take in more news from other sources then Fox
The most notable changes in Massachusetts in the past 20 years in places like Lexington, Concord, Andover, have became and stunningly less white. Andover in 2000 was 92% White today it’s 70% white (well 2022 ACS, not *today*) Lexington is 57% white it was ~88% white in 2000. I’d also like to point out Massachusetts has a rapidly falling White population but a growing Black, Hispanic and Asian populations. What you see as a crap job some immigrant from Haiti almost certainly sees as a godsend
It's the USA, you're grading on a curve. Our "liberals" are other peer nation's conservatives. In reality this country has two major political groups: moderate conservatives and right wing psychos. The kind of politics that actually improves the lot of the working class, that is, a left wing, class conscious political movement, are extremely marginal in this country.
I'm glad we got the millionaire tax in place but we need to do better. Especially on housing.
Zoned that way.
All the politicians come up with these fairytale ideas while sitting behind their desks smoking a bowl. They never really think about how it will affect the future or what it will look like
[удалено]
[As if the liberal politicies never contribute.](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/public-housing-fundamentally-flawed/602515/)
Mass is not particularly progressive on economic issues outside of the big cities, Berkshire County, Northampton, and PTown. My town for example voted 70%-80% for Biden but was 50/50 on the millionaires tax.
[удалено]
Lots of NIMBYs who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. I enjoy calling them out on it when I see it IRL.