I just interviewed for a position at Dixie College, while I was there I looked at some houses in the area.  Almost all of the houses were in gated communities, now that kind of makes more sense.  Plus driving back to Colorado I saw a lot of people openly carrying firearms in truck stops along I 15, I suspected they were some sort of the anti-immigration militia people.  When I saw them my first thought was how do these people support themselves as they seem to spend their days “patrolling” the truck stops along I15. 
I guess I should be happy that Dixie College didn’t want me.

What’s worse is that non-Whitopias aspire to *be* Whitopias, because hey, who doesn’t want all that wealth and prestige? I live in east Plano, which is diverse, but west of us is non-diverse and rich west Plano, and east of us are growing non-diverse and white suburbs full of McMansions. I can imagine at some point the developers will start moving in on our diverse little low-rent community, and the city fathers will welcome it in the name of “improvement.”

What is also interesting is how Benjamin’s descriptions of these Whitopias really fit into recent events, and go a long way to explaining what the conservative movement is all about.  Whitopians live in a bubble world

My son referees games for soccer.  Our league includes some extremely wealthy and extremely white communities as well as some of the poorest and heavily immigrant communities in the state. He came home foaming at the mouth one day last spring because he had to red card a goalie who was playing for the “Whitopia” travel team. This 14 year old girl had been running her mouth the whole game and had been cautioned by the lead ref already (lead refs are adults or late high school age).  Then she screamed to one of her teammates “get this n*****r out of here”.  Red card at this age group is a minimum 4 game suspension - she got six and still isn’t eligible yet, since it rolls over. 

You can’t tell me that she had no idea what she was saying.  All the same, she likely had not had anywhere near that many black and hispanic kids around her ever, so she would have no idea of the consequences of her language.  For that part, I blame the bubble effect.  Using those words, absent actual Black people to aim them at, has little consequence beyond saying “shit” if even that.  You can study history all you want, but you will still say stupid shit if you never encounter an actual person of color who might report the slur - or just let you have it.

A couple of days later, I took the train to work with the black girl’s mother, who asked me to thank my son for speaking up when he heard that, and stopping the game and writing up the incident.  I told my son about how bearing witness can be a powerful tool for those of us who don’t have to deal with that crap, but see it around us.

I believe she was from the same Whitopia (yes, MA has a big red swath of white flight stupid just like Philly) where my team arrived at their field and stopped dead for a second, looked around, and then one kid said “they’re all white?”.  The kids had been learning about segregation all year in 4th grade, and it suddenly dawned on them at that moment that segregation really wasn’t over.  I ended up explaining a bit about how that came to be.

Back in the day I used to enjoy reading the press from a couple of closed off countries, especially North Korea and Libya.  I would marvel at how their citizens lived in such a bubble.  The North Korean press was especially off in its own little world.  Small groups of communists in other countries would send a greeting and the NK press would make it sound like most of the citizens of that country LOVED Kim Il Jung.  (the Friends of North Korea Reading Group in Oslo send their greetings on the Great Leader’s Birthday!!!!!!)  They thought NK was the richest country in the world, that Kim had defeated the Japanese in WWII, that it was the Russians that landed on the moon in 1969, that it was Kim that made the rain fall and that double round rainbows would appear to celebrate the Dear Leader’s Birthday!

This was before Faux News and I am struck by the parallels!  These people live in the same type of fantasy bubble.  They have Faux News, RW radio, RW websites, those stupid viral emails.  It’s the exact same damn thing, except these people are doing it to themselves! 

I am increasingly convinced that violence is coming on a scale the US has not seen in many decades.  Somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3d of our country has voluntarily chosen to go insane.  They’re ramping themselves up and up into more and more anger and hatred every passing week.  This will not end well…

In grad school I read and reread “The 9 Nations of North America.”  I wonder if splitting the US into different countries might not be a bad idea.  The reactionaries get “Dixie” and “The Empty Quarter’ and the rest of us can live in our own sections as we would like to live, a northwestern ecotopia, Hispanic Caribbean (lead by Miami) and a renewed Mexican Southwest, Quebec, New England (including the Canadian maritime provinces) , a Great-Lakes-industrial state, etc.

I simply cannot express how accurate this is—and how the illusion of control that these suburbs create in their residents horrifically damages their residents’ (and ESPECIALLY their childrens’) ability to handle even the tiniest of deviations from any plan.

Sounds interesting.

I read a book over the summer that someone recommended (here maybe?) that is about similar stuff (mainly the history of racism and the creating the Whitopias).  It’s Sundown Towns by James Loewen.  Not what I would call a fun read, but still really interesting and a good book.

People who think they can flee their neighbors only accomplish their own isolation, since their new neighbors are just as likely to steal their stuff.  There’s an occasional blip in the news cycle where garage break-ins in Tucson’s foothills get mentioned as if A) this is a new thing and B) this is something that isn’t supposed to happen in “nice” neighborhoods.

I love when the naive get exposed, but it certainly doesn’t happen often enough.  Unfortunately, their usual reaction is to isolate themselves even deeper.  The drive to live in a castle is strong, as is the desire to be safe.  It’s appealing to read “good schools” and “excellent parks” and not bother with the assumptions being made, but they’re still there.

Mostly I love how people move to those isolated areas and complain about how their roads are clogged.  With money come privilege, and being privileged enough to avoid examining ones own naivete is something I am glad I can’t afford to do.

Punditus Maximus:

Oddly, with that illusion of control goes a huge amount of paranoia. Gated communities tend to be in places where the underlying crime rate is so low that you have to ask WTF they’re scared of, other than one another.

And, as Ms Kate points out, many of the rest of us live in a sort of Diversitopia, because we don’t have a lot of contact with all the crazy people, except maybe their broadcasts.

“White flight isn’t just bad for the cities that are seeing so much of their tax base up and leave; they’re bad for the country as a whole and frankly, for the rest of the world.”

Now that the problem has been described, who will step up and propose the solution. It depends on your time frame. Demographics will solve it by 2050, certainly 2100 by the latest, when white people will for all intents and purposes cease to be relevant.
If a shorter term solution is required, then let the proposals flow. Why not simply legislate that any person with a net worth over X can only move once every 10 to 15 years. This solves the tax loss problem when high tax contributors “flee” from certain areas. Or simply take the 2010 census, and declare any area that doesn’t mirror a specific desired distribution of racial and ethnic categories be repopulated. How drastic should the solution be, and in what time frame?

“I still think golf seems boring”

That may be because you see it as hitting a white ball around an expensively manicured landscape, when really it’s about networking, gambling, and above all, drinking.

(I don’t play myself. Like Eddie Murphy back in the day, I see golf as only slightly more appealing than putting things in people’s butts.)

paul—I know my experience isn’t overwhelming statistical evidence, but I think I always felt “safest” when I was living in a low-income minority neighborhood in the city—there was always at least one or two older people on their porches all day keeping an eye on things. It’s not like a kid couldn’t get snatched under such circumstances, but it’s a lot likelier that someone would witness it and get information to the police to find the perpetrator.

Now, I live in a street that’s a little quieter, but we’re in-town so the houses are pretty much right up against one another. I work at home and so it’s now “my job” to make sure the street is quiet. I’m not out on the porch all day, but I can run downstairs or call the police if I hear someone yelling for help.

I would never live in an exurb. Waaayyyyy too isolated. No one hears you yell for help. If your partner starts beating the shit out of you, no one will be able to hear and call the police. If your kid is snatched while riding his or her bike, it’s not likely anyone will see it to take plate information.

The idea that suburbs are “safer” just doesn’t hold water to me.

Mighty Ponygirl—that’s because you’re a sane person with a sane understanding of risk.

I wonder if splitting the US into different countries might not be a bad idea.  The reactionaries get “Dixie” and “The Empty Quarter’ and the rest of us can live in our own sections as we would like to live, a northwestern ecotopia, Hispanic Caribbean (lead by Miami) and a renewed Mexican Southwest, Quebec, New England (including the Canadian maritime provinces) , a Great-Lakes-industrial state, etc.

You do understand that right next to Whitopia Forsyth County is the city of Atlanta, one of the most diverse places in the US and the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement?  Where should all the Southern POC and people who love them go in your plans?

I see golf as only slightly more appealing than putting things in people’s butts

Putting (safe) things in (consenting) people’s butts, including my own, is a lot more fun, IMO.

wapsie is absolutely correct. Golf is great fun, and has nothing to do with actually playing golf. It’s an excuse to drink and get high outside.

I live in Atlanta, intown where no ethnicity is a majority, and I cannot think of a single reason why I would ever drive half an hour north to Forsyth County. I look the part, but wouldn’t fit in from the moment someone struck up a conversation with me. We live around the corner from a beautiful old restored 1920s theatre, so esp. around the holidays we will see a lot of people from collar counties coming in to catch one or the other of the Xmas special shows. They are truly from a different world. One of them, who could have starred in his own comic book, “Blood Pressure Man,” was absolutely aghast that I put my 11mo daughter down on the *sidewalk* in front of the two buskers, who are *black*, and whom she sees almost every day, so she could dance while they play the trumpet. “You know,” he said, not even trying to whisper, “you better watch out something bad doesn’t happen to your little girl.” What, are they gonna blackify her? Nutcases, every last one of them.

that’s because you’re a sane person

Hey, there’s no need to insult me.

Mighty Ponygirl—

Well, yeah. The kinds of crimes a gated community will prevent are not at all the crimes it’s likely to have in the first place. And you have to wonder whether any “undesirables” actually get stopped at the gate, because why would they want to go there in the first place? So I wonder whether eventually these places will have to develop ethnic-style hatreds for each other, just to have someone to hate…

Now that the problem has been described, who will step up and propose the solution. It depends on your time frame. Demographics will solve it by 2050, certainly 2100 by the latest, when white people will for all intents and purposes cease to be relevant.

Not sure that’s quite accurate… “cease to be relevant”?  I think more correctly, “cease to be the sole dominant voice” or “will be far less relevant”.

2042 is the projected date when white people will make up less than 51% of the U.S. population, but they’ll still have the largest plurality for several more decades.  I think once America ceases to have a white majority, we’ll never again have any one majority ethnic group, which means that no one group will be able to maintain a permanent cultural dominance as we head forward… but I don’t think that necessarily makes any group irrelevant, just “less relevant”.

Even when the tide of demographic change takes white people out of the 51% majority, they’ll still likely control the vast majority of wealth and positions of corporate and government power for quite a while, so unless we implement a far more progressive taxation system, it will still be quite a while before white people aren’t running America… barring a massive nationwide proletariat uprising, none of us will live to see the day where white people don’t have the most power out of all ethnic groups in the U.S.

WHAT is with the “also bought” list for this book?!  Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin…all conservative books.  And this author appears on Fox Radio.  I was thinking about getting this one for my Kindle, but now I’m wondering about his “angle.”

Why not simply legislate that any person with a net worth over X can only move once every 10 to 15 years.

I imagine any legislation which effectively imprisons people to a particular home against their wishes would be highly unconstitutional… I’m not a constitutional scholar, but I guarantee such a law would be overturned by SCOTUS in about ten seconds.  You can’t mandate someone to continue living in a place that they no longer want to live, if they have the means to leave.

I wish there was an easy solution, but I just don’t see it.  Our best hope is that each succeeding generation will learn more tolerance than the one before it… and to a degree, that has been happening.  Gay marriage will be legalized in all 50 states eventually, and that’s precisely because as Gen Xers and Millenials take over Congress, the White House, and state legislatures and governor’s offices, they’ll change the laws.

So I’m not completely hopeless… I just don’t know if this is something we’ll completely eradicate in my lifetime.  As a matter of fact, I’m gonna go ahead and guess that we won’t.

paul—but they have to let the “undesirables” in… they’re mowing the neighbor’s lawn and working on your roof.

A friend and I watched the POV documentary “Farmingville” a week ago (he’s a native Longislander) and the fears of the white community at the sudden appearance of all of the latino day laborers boiled down to “THEY’RE HERE TO RAPE OUR WHITE WOMEN!” Some passing mention was made to the various building code violations (having way too many people living in a house etc, which is a legitimate grievance), but the biggest fear that they kept returning to over and over was that they didn’t want their daughters riding their bicycles down the street because they were going to be raped by the scary Mexicans, even though the documentary didn’t mention any crimes of the sort being actually, you know, perpetrated.

But the day laborers were there doing work in the community (as well as outside), because there was a market for them to take care of white folks’ lawns. So even when white people try to construct isolationist communities, they are going to have to create exceptions just for menial labor.

Referring to Saint George as Dixie always confused me when the other, better-known Dixie came up in history class or conversations. (I grew up in Utah, and our Academic Decathlon was held in Dixie College.) I can’t speak to the racial dynamics of the area, although my hometown of Orem, Utah, five hours north, was pretty damn white and racist against Hispanics. (We all thought we weren’t racist, but yeah, we were.)

The reshaping of the landscape is very much a part of Saint George culture. I remember my father trying to get Utah’s Department of Wildlife Resources to declare some gila lizards a protected species because a big ol’ developer was going to wipe out a canyon where a population of them lived and turn their habitat into golf courses and condos. Sadly, we couldn’t move fast enough on this, and the habitat was destroyed. There’s no sense of the environmental or social costs to people moving into their bubbles.

Speaking of the bubble effect, when I moved to North Carolina and the Research Triangle area, I ended up in a nice neighbourhood near Duke University in Durham. And by nice, I mean, my standards of nice where people can paint their house whatever colour they want and have a statue of Buddha in their front yard without pissing off the neighbours. (Unlike the HOA of the first place I looked at, where you could only paint your house on of five approved colours, and statuary had to be approved by committee.)  So many of the people I worked with freaked out when I said that I had moved to Durham—they all lived in Cary, a very white, very prim township. I know there are parts of Durham that are sketchier than where I lived, but still, the freakout seemed fairly disproportionate and almost entirely based on the idea that Durham, omgs! had non-white people. I remember reading a newspaper article about an HOA in Cary that tried to get a Hispanic family kicked out of their rental house because….they had too many cars and would work on them in their driveway. We’re not talking cars up on cinderblocks, although I’m of the opinion that your yard is your yard, and do what you want. Just that the family had the temerity to keep their cars running by working on them themselves. And when the newspaper asked the HOA and neighbours if they’d tried talking to them before taking legal action, one of the neighbours said, “Well, I didn’t know if they spoke English.”  All this is just to say that the bubble effect isn’t something to be ignored, but that it really does promote ignorant views of folks.

@ #10 wapsie:  I have been told that I am highly skilled at putting (safe) things in (consenting) peoples’ butts.  In fact, people call and request the experience, sometimes after dinner or a movie.  I’ll wager that if you would give me the opportunity, I could change your mind.

“The white residents of the town went on a terror campaign, forcing some black landowners to sell their property for a pittance, and just running others off without giving them a dime, and stealing the farm land.  Sitting on top of the stolen land is now some of the fanciest, most expensive exurban developments in the country.  The amount of money made all around for the white people involved in these transactions—-the people who sold land they or their family stole for top dollar, the developers who sold it again, the people who are sitting on top of escalating property values—-is obscene.  The descendants of the people whose land was stolen haven’t seen a dollar, or even much of an acknowledgment that this happened.”

This touches upon a question that has puzzled me for a number of years and perhaps someone can enlighten me about it.

Around the turn of the last century into the 1920’s after Plessy v. Ferguson declared separate being the rule of race in this country African-American business people/ artists/ entrepreneurs were achieving some success on adding the equal part, at least in certain economic arenas.

This appeared to either trigger or coincide with a white pogrom against many of these successful Black communities and business centers.

The result was a widespread destruction of african american wealth in businesses, property and community infrastructure.  Tulsa being one of the more obvious association of Black owned business success ( winning municipal contracts for furniture etc) and riots that used racial bigotry to destroy the competition they were creating for the white establishment businesses.

During that period, from my reading, insurance companies reneged upon policy’s that had been paid for by the African-American businesses and individuals and state, local and federal government failed to ensure peace and domestic tranquillity for these communities.

That being said I have always been curious why there has not been a widespread legal movement by survivors and direct descendants of these property owners and business men to hold insurance and government liable for the losses that they insurance companies illegally refused to make whole and that government failed, by conscious inaction, to prevent or mitigate.

The analogies I think of are the Jewish community pursuing Swiss insurance Co’s after WW II, Japanese- Americans over WW II internment, the Tribes over interior department fraud and mismanagement.

To me it would appear that the case that could be made for “reparations” over these wrongs where survivors and direct descendants are still alive and with newspaper and official records are reasonably available for research would offer a greater chance for success then the “reparations” movement for slavery . (Speaking on a practical level only)

I would be interested in knowing if there is some obvious flaw that I am overlooking or fact I am unaware of ( many I am sure but relevant is the issue) or ....

Inquiring minds want to know.

You do understand that right next to Whitopia Forsyth County is the city of Atlanta, one of the most diverse places in the US and the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement?  Where should all the Southern POC and people who love them go in your plans?

Outside the perimeter (the 285 bypass that rings ATL), the rest of GA is Mississippi.  I live in downtown ATL, and yes, it is awexomely diverse and sane in these parts (except when the suburbanites come in for the Falcons and Thrashers games - NBA fans seem to be less dick-ish).  The only way this works is if we become part of a neighboring country, like Berlin pre-1990.  Airlift us in sushi, and we’ll export OutKast via the interwebs.

Quebec, New England (including the Canadian maritime provinces) , a Great-Lakes-industrial state, etc.

umm, you do know that the us doesn’t get to decide what happens to canada, right? soveriegn nation, war of 1812 and all that?

Outside the perimeter (the 285 bypass that rings ATL), the rest of GA is Mississippi.

I believe the city of Athens, GA - home of the Human Rights Festival and the Really, Really Free Market - respectfully disagrees with that uninformed assessment.

Unlike the HOA of the first place I looked at, where you could only paint your house on of five approved colours, and statuary had to be approved by committee.

I’m going to plead ignorance here. How is it possible that an HOA has any jurisdiction over any damn thing? Once you’ve bought a property, isn’t it yours? Or is the very sale contingent on you signing an HOA agreement? And if you run afoul, what’s the remedy? Property forfeiture? And to whom would you forfeit?

My dumsquizzlement at the whole enterprise is only part of the reason why I would never even contemplate residing within a community like that. Somedays I hang out my laundry to dry, you know?

Blitz, do you think I’m tricking you or that I was tricked?  I assure you neither is true.  Benjamin strikes me as the sort who enjoys going into enemy territory, but he’s definitely liberal.

Athens is the least Mississippi-like place in Georgia outside of Atlanta, but I would defend Savannah too.

I whiffed on Athens.  They can be part of the airlift.  I tried to find something that approaches the HRF or RRFM in Mississippi, but all I could find were Robert Johnson, Oprah, and James Earl Jones.

Savannah loses points for Tiger Ridge.  Add the two together and we get Gulfport, MS.

I’m going to plead ignorance here. How is it possible that an HOA has any jurisdiction over any damn thing? Once you’ve bought a property, isn’t it yours?

Not precisely.

Whitopian communities tend to have the most draconian provisions on things like paint color for houses and whatnot, but even in the middle of major urban areas, try to not mow your lawn for a summer and see what happens to you.

In the City of St. Louis, which is far from being a Whitopian paradise, if you allow your grass to grow beyond 5” in height, you will be fined by the city, and if you refuse to pay, they will pile more fines on that, and eventually sue you, and if necessary, seize your property.  And that’s just one of many landscaping standards they maintain… if you have a railroad tie retaining wall that is rotting, you MUST remove it or be fined.

Just because you own the house and the land that it sits on doesn’t necessarily mean you are legally free to keep it in any condition you want.

The problem with Whitopias is that they take the community standards to a pretty ridiculous level… lots of Whitopian suburbs ban any sort of yard signs, including even “For Sale” signs.  Granted, houses in gated communities aren’t typically sold by yard sign advertising, but it’s still pretty silly that you aren’t allowed to put any sort of sign in your yard in these communities.

Mighty Ponygirl —

Sorry, I was unclear. The “undesirables” you’re talking about get let in, albeit probably after some harassment and humiliation. I was wondering idly whether there’s ever a scenario where a bunch of hoodlums from elsewhere, intent on pillage and assault/murder, or at least trespassing and petty vandalism, arrive at the gate of a gated community and are turned away, thus saving untold amounts in life and property. My guess is that this doesn’t happen very often, if at all.

Home Owners Associations are the kind of socialist government principles the Tea Party nincompoops choose when left to their own devices.  Regulating things such as mailbox flags, American flags, trim colors, satellite dishes, solar panels, landscaping, and such is the semi-private nanny-statism loved by little dictators who are constantly in search of the correct kind of balcony from which to announce their latest tirades against those who are out to undermine their real estate values.

Cary is scary and beige.  It literally has no personality beyond beige.  HOA’s can do pretty much anything.  You are supposed to be informed before you buy the house, and by buying the house, you agree to those policies.  People who want these policies LOVE HOA’s.  The rest of us would be wise to avoid them.

This book sounds like its about 3 of the least desirable places to live in the US.  I wonder why people want to flee to somewhere so awful.

You guys sure you want to talk about Georgia and putting things in people’s butts at the same time?

You guys sure you want to talk about Georgia and putting things in people’s butts at the same time?

In my art gallery festooned, mid-gentrification neighborhood, it’s the new black.

Rational, that’s a really good question.  The state of Georgia put together a commission to investigate the land grab in Forsyth, but that was a stupid idea, because the white members of the commission were able not only to kill even the question of paying the original owners or their children some amount of money, but they also ended up covering up more than they revealed.  I appreciate that the people living on the land were worried that they’d have to give something up if it was concluded that the land was taken unlawfully, but it seemed they were never in any danger of that.  It’s not that anyone is gunning to take the land back.  But this history of large scale theft of black-owned property has ramifications to this day, in terms of poverty and just the general reality that black people own less wealth than white people.  Cutting a check for everyone who was descended from people whose stuff was stolen seems like it would go a long way towards not only justice, but moving towards equality. 

I realize that a lot of conservatives would throw an enormous fit over “entitlements”, but it seems to me the argument here is not about whether people are getting money they didn’t work for.  In fact, it’s about money they explicitly worked for, with their hands, and had stolen from them.  It’s compensation, pure and simple.

benvolio-

Yes, usually the property sale is contingent on you signing the HOA contract. HOA’s have an absolutely rediculous amount of power in some neighborhoods. And the penalty is usually fines, which can be quite steep and escalate with more violations. In my neighborhood (I rent, but am subject to the rules of the HOA or could be evicted) you cannot keep your garbage can out more than 12 hours on trash day, nothing can be placed in or around your front or side yards (visible from the street) except lawn furniture. Cars cannot stay in the street for more than 24 hours. You have to get HOA pre-approval to do any external improvements to your house. The HOA tells you when to paint your house and what color (among a selection of pre-approved colors) etc. Its ridiculous. None of the neighbors know each other, so what could be a positive thing (the HOA) is really just signing your life over to a voluntary dictatorship.

I’m not sure if they can kick you out if you, like, just refused to follow the contract. I suppose they oould just sue you for breach of contract and make your life a living hell. You wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, really. I do believe they can seize your house if you do not make payments (which can be quite high) to the association.

The next place I live will not be in an HOA controlled community. I’ve learned my lesson. I didn’t think the whole thing was such a big deal at the time and traded freedom for good public transit access to my jobs and stuff. Besides the above, I pay huge HOA fees just so that a brown person can mow the 10X20 patch that is my front lawn. It makes me want to crawl into a hole. Not to mention that I’d be much happier just mowing my own lawn and not paying for persnickety people to drive around “enforcing the covenants”.

Mother nature is about to have a huge laugh at the expense of all those exurban whitopias. They are all premised on the existence and continued availability of cheap fossil fuels, especially oil. Residents of these enclaves are slaves to their automobiles to get/do anything, and those cars need gasoline. Meanwhile, they also depend on the diesel for the trucks that bring all the stuff they need, like food. But, a nasty surprise awaits them, and in the not-too-distant future.

World oil production has been flat since 2004 and soaring demand led to soaring gas prices (remember last summer). Well, those soaring fuel costs tanked our economy, first by bringing the housing bubble to a screeching halt which clobbered the financial markets and second, by extracting tens of billions of dollars from consumers wallets and shipping it to Canada, Mexico and other countries. (A website such as www.theoildrum.com clearly documents the connections here).

Anyway, despite all the hullabaloo about new oil finds around the world a couple of salient details throw cold water on the celebrations—

1). Production at existing oil fields is declining about 6.5%/year—a drop of about 5 million barrels/day, so we need to find new fields producing at least 5 mbd to make up the shortfall… and it’s not happening.

2). The new stuff being found is hard to extract (needs more energy to recover) in difficult places (needs more energy to ship) and is often heavy and sour (needs more energy to refine).

3). In order to extract this new oil profitably, it takes about $80/barrel, the price at which the world economy falters.

4). The economies of oil-exporting nations are growing, which means they are using more of their oil for their own purposes—which means less to export.

5) We are the world’s largest importer of oil—13 million barrels per day.

Do the math. Whitopias will be hoisted on their own petards.

More on community standards…

One of the wealthiest suburbs in the United States is just outside St. Louis - Ladue, MO (97% white, $180K median annual household income, 72% with a Bachelor’s Degree or higher) - home to many executives from Monsanto, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Emerson Electric, Wachovia Securities, and Nestle-Purina Petcare.

In the 1990s, Brett Hull, the multi-millionaire star of the St. Louis Blues NHL team, tried to buy a house in Ladue for himself and his long-term girlfriend.  The sale was blocked, because the couple was unmarried… and according to the city charter of Ladue, two unmarried and unrelated adults were forbidden from jointly occupying a home in the city.  They actually prohibited the most famous athlete in St. Louis at the time from buying a $5 Million house because he wasn’t married to his girlfriend of 10+ years with whom he had children.

I don’t know if the law still stands, but if it does, that essentially means that any gay couple is effectively forbidden from buying a home in the city.

That’s Whitopia for you.

I’m going to plead ignorance here. How is it possible that an HOA has any jurisdiction over any damn thing? Once you’ve bought a property, isn’t it yours? Or is the very sale contingent on you signing an HOA agreement? And if you run afoul, what’s the remedy? Property forfeiture? And to whom would you forfeit?

If you live in an area with conditional covenants or HOAs, then yes, the very sale of the property in question is contingent on signing such agreements.  If you run afoul, one can be compelled to sell the house/co-op/condo in a sale forced by the housing/co-op/condo association to a new approved buyer or in extreme cases…to the association itself. 

Something like this happened in a co-op building several years back where a couple of trustafarians in their early 20s were forced out of the two bedroom co-op they bought only six months before by their co-op association because they had frequent almost daily over-the-top parties which went to 3-4 am and caused the building/area populated mostly by young families and retirees to be annoyed at the being deprived of sleep…even during work/school days. 

The last straw was when the trustafarians had a stretch limo bringing in noisy partygoers in at 1 am which not only aggravated the noise issues, but also blocked traffic on the narrow one-way road..both of which prompted a call and response from the local NYPD precinct.  When they were tossed out, nearly everyone in that building were glad to be rid of them.

How is it possible that an HOA has any jurisdiction over any damn thing? Once you’ve bought a property, isn’t it yours?

In California, the HOA can put a lien on your house or even foreclose on it if you don’t pay your dues, and you have no recourse at all.  It’s pretty effed up.

There are a lot of gated communities in north Georgia now.  A lot of them are golfing communities, but a lot of them are just great big houses on tiny plots of land sitting very close together in areas where there are large open expanses of land with no development at all.  These people have to be afraid of something to buy a house with that little yard and privacy when they could easily buy a house and several acres of land for less money.

The thing that bothers me most about seeing these communities springing up everywhere is that this is an area with a lot of poverty.  There are people living in rented single wide trailers that should probably be condemned in the same counties, and plenty of houses that could be called shacks.  The county’s money goes to bringing amenities to these new communities, and the incorporated cities are usually places with deserted down town merchant areas and one big Walmart on the outskirts of town. 

The covenants are usually very restrictive.  Most of the refugees from the city being the conservative and libertarian types who complain about every government program as being intrusive into their lives, I wonder why it is that they have no problem living under the restrictions of their new community.

They are usually built with access to the interstate highways in mind to get the people who live there back and forth to Atlanta where they work but are afraid to live.

Most of the refugees from the city being the conservative and libertarian types who complain about every government program as being intrusive into their lives, I wonder why it is that they have no problem living under the restrictions of their new community.

conservatives and libertarians LOVE government intrusion, as long as it’s foisted upon the “right” people BY the “right” people. And concerns matters of deepest personal privacy, rather than national security or the public good.

er, actually, the first “right” should be “wrong.” And really it should be “brown.”

Cutting a check for everyone who was descended from people whose stuff was stolen seems like it would go a long way towards not only justice, but moving towards equality.

Why do you think the righties are always screaming about the horrors of “reparations”?  They imply that they would be for slavery, but they know damn well that it would be more likely to happen for more recent actions.

The amount of money made all around for the white people involved in these transactions—-the people who sold land they or their family stole for top dollar, the developers who sold it again, the people who are sitting on top of escalating property values—-is obscene.

Obscene, indeed.  I google the phrase “Forsyth County race riot” and I have to really dig for anything deeper than this explaining the events of 1912 :

“Blacks fled to Gainesville, a few miles to the east in Hall County.”

Gee… I wonder why they would just leave for good the land they had lived on, paid for, raised families on. The explanation that blacks “fled” should be enough, they think?  Well, I remember “fleeing” a hurricane.  I also remember the “going back home” part.

Like they hadn’t had enough stolen from them already.  I am now a little curious about the whitewashing commission Amanda mentioned upthread.  Anybody still in power on it?  Just a thought.

Something like this happened in a co-op building several years back where a couple of trustafarians in their early 20s were forced out of the two bedroom co-op they bought only six months before by their co-op association

To be fair, co-ops are even more restrictive than condo associations.  As far as I can tell, the whole point of buying co-op vs. condo is to pay top dollar in fees and take a hit in equity just so you can avoid having asshole neighbors.  It’s not hard to guess why co-ops are so popular in NYC.

“Cutting a check for everyone who was descended from people whose stuff was stolen seems like it would go a long way towards not only justice, but moving towards equality.”

It would seem that a certain amount of this money should come from the insurance companies not all from the Governmants.

Why haven’t “commercial” ( not being a lawyer so I am sure that there is a more accurate word for this) lawsuits been filed against the insurance companies that failed to pay for damages etc.?

@ Llelldorin :

Or are they just a sort of half-assed nongovernmental equivalent of a city council?

Yes, they are.  That’s why I went to the first meeting of mine and resolved about :20 later never to go again.

Thanks for all who answered me on HOAs.  I’m okay on municipal zoning ordinances, like DTG in STL describes; that’s completely comprehensible to me. Also comprehensible are rules for co-op/condo deals, as Llelldorin mentions. I remain uncomprehending on why anybody would volunteer for such a non-governmental noose among single family dwellings, but not because you have failed to explain it to me. Quite the contrary. Being forced to live in a beige house would kill me.

I’m going to plead ignorance here. How is it possible that an HOA has any jurisdiction over any damn thing? Once you’ve bought a property, isn’t it yours? Or is the very sale contingent on you signing an HOA agreement? And if you run afoul, what’s the remedy? Property forfeiture? And to whom would you forfeit?

It’s technically a “voluntary” signing of a contract, stating that you will abide by these rules.  I also doubt that you can buy a house in a HOA neighborhood and not sign the agreement.  Most cities also have certain standards for property care—you have to have your sidewalks shoveled, you have to have your lawn mowed, you can’t have hazardous materials lying around, etc.

Some HOAs charge dues for landscaping maintenance, or tennis courts, or pools, or whatever, and I have heard of cases where homeowners who do not pay their dues are foreclosed upon.  I would assume that in HOAs without dues/fees, you could be sued for breach of contract if you painted your house the wrong color of beige.

It’s messed up, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why someone would want to live in a neighborhood where every flower they plant is up for committee approval.  I suppose because the HOA imparts an air of “exclusivity” and you’ll never have to actually worry about what color to paint your house or what bushes to plant by the garage.

Former HOA board member here, though in my defense I only got on the board to subvert the HOA’s mission.

In my neighborhood the HOA covenants are attached to the mortgage; you HAVE to join. The only punishment they can do is put a lein on your property and eventually foreclose, which of course has to be held up by a judge. From what I understand they often aren’t. Some HOAs, such as mine, were created by nincompoops and run by the utterly incompetent or lazy (like myself), and so have little influence in their jurisdictions.

Every single person I know in my neighborhood breaks at least one covenant on a regular basis, if not several. To this day there have been 0 consequences

I remain uncomprehending on why anybody would volunteer for such a non-governmental noose among single family dwellings

It makes sense if you’re the fretful type who worries that your neighbors—not you, heavens no—would otherwise do something to “bring down property values.”  HOAs are de rigeur around here, although ours doesn’t seem particularly zealous, happily.  There are certainly plenty of cranky oldsters with too much time on their hands who would be all too happy to play “spot the violation” as their own version of Fantasy Football.

To be fair, co-ops are even more restrictive than condo associations.  As far as I can tell, the whole point of buying co-op vs. condo is to pay top dollar in fees and take a hit in equity just so you can avoid having asshole neighbors.  It’s not hard to guess why co-ops are so popular in NYC.

Interesting considering the fact that in many parts of NYC, co-ops are often the only types of apartments to be had if one does not want to rent for the rest of their life and wants to remain in the same area of the city. 

Moreover, I’m not sure that co-ops are necessarily more restrictive than condo associations. Encountered several condo/housing associations in NYC and the Boston area that are far more restrictive than most co-ops I’ve looked at in Queens…..and had far higher maintenance fees due to poor management by the association concerned. 

In some areas…in addition to the same/worse onerous restrictions…the maintenance fees were actually much higher than the going rental rate in the same area because the condo had a high amount of unpaid mortgage/second mortgage et al or were otherwise in deep debt. 

Doh!  “de rigueur.”  Stupid French crash course…

I have to wonder if, as a black man, Rich Benjamin really got the full effect.

They were nice to him probably because they were uncomfortable and didn’t know what else to do in a society that frowns on overt racism.  But I bet if he was white and considered “one of us” he would have had a different set of experiences.

As a white American, I’ve had the “privilege” on too many occasions of getting closer to a genuine version of some white people’s thoughts and feelings about race and class, immigration, politics, etc., and it ain’t pretty in there.

Just as I will never really know what it’s like to be black in America, I don’t think non-whites can ever really know what lurks deep in the hearts of some of their white friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and associates…

Moreover, I’m not sure that co-ops are necessarily more restrictive than condo associations.

In some areas…in addition to the same/worse onerous restrictions…the maintenance fees were actually much higher than the going rental rate in the same area because the condo had a high amount of unpaid mortgage/second mortgage et al or were otherwise in deep debt.

I do agree that it varies.  It’s just my experience that condo owners generally have less ability to force out crappy neighbors and have somewhat lower fees, of course depending on the age of the building, how well it’s been maintained in the past, etc.  I’ve also never heard of a condo owner having to interview for the right to buy a condo.  I’m sure not all co-ops do that, but I’ve only ever heard of co-ops going to that extreme.

Co-ops can also restrict at what price you’re allowed to sell your shares (i.e. your unit).

Ah, St. George, Utah.  There’s only one drunk in town but he’s very imporatant.  He’s in charge of zoning and road design.  It’s very hard to be a drunk in St. George.  It has about 75,000 people and the only way you can get a drink without ordering dinner is to be an Elk.  Seriously.  Vegas is only a couple hours away and Mesquite a lot less.  The juxtaposition is overwhelming.  It’s a Mormon retirement community; ‘nuff said.

They were nice to him probably because they were uncomfortable and didn’t know what else to do in a society that frowns on overt racism.  But I bet if he was white and considered “one of us” he would have had a different set of experiences.

Good point and likely true, but I think the people he describes are pretty close to an accurate portrayal.  What I’ve read about Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, for instance, is that the white people of that city were pretty bothered by the presence of the Aryan Nations Compound just outside their city (it was actually located in nearby Hayden Lake, which is technically not inside the city proper), and that they were pretty happy to see it get demolished after it was seized following an SPLC lawsuit.

Most of these folks aren’t typically out and out wearing it on their sleeve racists… you may never hear some of these folks say the word “nigger”, and they may even scold their own children if they hear them say the word.  I’ve witnessed it… my uncle and aunt are full-blown Whitopians, and I remember seeing my cousin get chewed out at the dinner table once for saying that “nobody wants to live in the city (of St. Louis) because it’s filled with niggers”.  I’m sure my aunt agreed with his basic sentiment, that there were lots of African-Americans living in the city and that was a bad thing, but she chose to take offense to him using the word “nigger” so that she could keep telling herself that she isn’t really a racist.  And that’s how these people operate - saying the word “nigger” is racist, but thinking that areas where a lot of African-Americans live are terrible places is not.  They really want to believe that they aren’t really racists, so they express opinions that the worst cultural expressions of outright racism are wrong, and then flaunt their “See, I’m not a racist, I think the Klan is evil, too!” card.  When they encounter upper middle-class, college educated African-Americans who don’t fit their “ghetto thug” stereotypes, they may treat them deferentially, because in their minds, the upper middle-class educated “clean and articulate” black person is not like “those people”.  It’s why they love Michael Steele.

The thing is, these Whitopian dwellers do more harm to race relations than the Aryan Nations or the KKK can ever do in the 21st Century.  Everybody writes off the obvious racists in the Klan and the White Nationalist movements as fringe kooks.  But the folks who insulate themselves from everything except upper middle-class white culture and hides their racism by not expressing it overtly?  Society treats them like perfectly good and decent citizens.

Over the weekend Matty and my family were at my parents’ house in the Chicago suburbs for my father’s birthday.  My little sister was talking about her coworkers, many of whom are immigrants, and my grandmother commented that she wouldn’t have thought we “get a lot of Hispanics around here” (a follow-up to last time, when she asked if we “get a lot of Blacks around here”).

My sister started to say, well, yeah, it’s not that unusual, when my mother cut in and said, “Those Mexicans are sneaky—just this summer we had one get in the house!”

My little cousin visited us in August from Mexico City.  Remind me to high five my mom later.

By the way, everytime I look at the picture in this post, I can’t help but think of the fictional city of Agrestic, the whitopian suburb of the first three seasons of the TV show Weeds.  And I keep hearing the song “Little Boxes” playing in my mind.

Funny how HOAs are popular in parts of the country where people are inclined to bray at length about private property rights.

On the subject of HOAs:  We have one in my neighborhood (which is mostly working- to lower-middle class, mostly black, in Durham as a matter of fact) because the street was built as a “private street.”  This means the city will not do anything to maintain it, despite the fact that we pay city taxes.  (I think this has something to do with how much tax the developer has to pay.)  The HOA pays the power company to keep the streetlights on; the HOA pays a paving company to keep the road from crumbling; the HOA pays private snow and ice removal services so that we can get to work if it snows; HOA pays someone to come in and plant trees along the creekbed to keep the whole place from just eroding away.

I’m on the HOA board.  It’s a completely volunteer position and none of us really know what we’re doing.  We have the responsibilities of a mini-government and it sucks that this is the way it is.  We don’t go around nitpicking people’s choices in garden statuary because we’re too busy wondering how we’ll keep the streetlights on this month, and whether we can possibly convince people not to drive on the damn newly-paved road before it hardens and cause it to crumble again, because we don’t have another ten grand to repave it for the third time.

If the HOA disbands, then it’s a Real True Libertarian Paradise.  Every man for himself.  If the streetlight is in your yard, you pay to keep it on, and if you don’t, the street is dark for everyone.  God knows how the street would ever get repaved, considering that I couldn’t even get my neighbors in the duplex to treat for termites when I found a swarm on the front of our connected units.

And we can’t get more than six people from the neighborhood to even come out to a neighborhood meeting, no matter how we flyer and how many doors we knock on.

I’m sorry, I rant about this whenever the subject of HOAs comes up.  Believe me, I would much rather not have to have an HOA in my neighborhood, and let people who get paid to keep the city running keep my street running.  Even if people painted their houses purple.  HOA doesn’t always mean busybody.

Blitz, do you think I’m tricking you or that I was tricked?  I assure you neither is true.  Benjamin strikes me as the sort who enjoys going into enemy territory, but he’s definitely liberal.

You also note that Benjamin is black.  I think it would be fascinating for him to collaborate with a whiet author, having him/her live in the same places and compare notes.

“I think it would be fascinating for him to collaborate with a whiet author, having him/her live in the same places and compare notes.”

This.  I think the results would be quite interesting…

My father told me this weekend that the neighborhood in Ohio where I was born was exclusively white and “colored folks” were not allowed to buy homes there or be in town afterr 9:00 pm when the stores closed.  This was a lower middle class neigborhood in 1962.  Ain’t it funny how far we have (not) come?

You guys sure you want to talk about Georgia and putting things in people’s butts at the same time?

Well, at least it’s not Alabama - nobody’s talking about a brace of wetsuits as well.

umm, you do know that the us doesn’t get to decide what happens to canada, right? soveriegn nation, war of 1812 and all that? 

I am simply noting that the author suggested that parts of Canada and the US had more in common wih each other than with the rest of their respective nations.  The maritime provinces, for example, have more in common with the New England states than with, say, Alberta.  In ‘The Nine Nations” the author suggested that if the US were to break up then some of the Canadian provinces might want to join with some of the new countries.  Maybe I should suggest that New England might want to join Canada.  Is that better??  The book was written about 1980 or so, when it was still common to worry that Canada would break up if/when Quebec left.  No one is suggesting US tanks be sent rolling north to take over Newfoundland. 

As for Atlanta, Athens, GA and other rational outposts in the deep south, maybe we could do an exchange, trading for those rightwingers trapped in Vermont and Oregon?  8-)

Some HOAs, such as mine, were created by nincompoops and run by the utterly incompetent or lazy (like myself), and so have little influence in their jurisdictions.

Every single person I know in my neighborhood breaks at least one covenant on a regular basis, if not several. To this day there have been 0 consequences

Cool.  Onerous restrictions which everyone must break, but the enforcement of which is up to the local authority.  Just like “disturbing the peace” for cops.

That could come in real useful if you wanted to discourage, you know, the wrong type of people from sticking around.  people who don’t blend in if you get my drift.

I live in a collar city/exurb of Chicago that’s now about one-third Hispanic. There’s been a backlash. Some jerks calling themselves Assholes for Legal Americans, or some such, are always showing up at City Council meetings and demanding that the cops pull over every brown-skinned driver and check his or her “papers.”

The local paper practically turned its front page over to these folks. Thank God the editor got bounced and they now take a more balanced view of things.

Sorry if this is a threadjack, but can someone explain the appeal of Curb Your Enthusiasm? I’ve tried to get into it but to me it’s just random people yelling at Larry David. I made it through most of season one but just could not sustain interest.

As for Atlanta, Athens, GA and other rational outposts in the deep south, maybe we could do an exchange, trading for those rightwingers trapped in Vermont and Oregon?

Good luck getting native Southerners to move to snowy hells like Vermont and Oregon.  I say this as a native Midwesterner who high-tailed it to sunny California after the winter of 70 frickin’ below.

I think it would be fascinating for him to collaborate with a whiet author, having him/her live in the same places and compare notes.”

A collaboration with James W. Loewen, author of ‘Sundown Towns’ would be brilliant.

NJ, on balance, is pretty-non-Whitopian, but this is interesting to think about, because it does vary widely from town to town and county to county (and proximity to the major urban areas. For instance, Mercer County (Trenton and surrounding burbs) gets (at least from my anecdotal evidence) whiter the further north you go, Princeton being a unique case. My town is one of the immediately bordering ‘burbs. I went to the Homecoming football game at my old (public) HS this weekend, and was amused at how effortlessly diverse the homecoming court was. Which I’m sure would not be true a few towns over.

Hey!

The problem with the wingnuts trapped in Vermont (well, some of them—there are also the propertarian creeps like the governor and his cronies) is that they’re dirt poor and tend to live places not a lot of other people would want to live. Oh, and they’d want milk price supports.

You know, there’s a certain kind of suburbia that is good and liveable. The 1950s-early ‘70s suburb, with 1800 square foot or so all-brick modest colonial houses, 1/4 acre lots, sidewalks, and streets laid out in a gridiron pattern with a shopping center at the entrance that you can walk to if you choose.

It is the 1980s-style and forward suburb that pisses me off. The big, gaudy McMansions that look like something that would happen if an architecture textbook vomited on sod, lots the size of Rhode Island, no sidewalks, incredibly confusing cul-de-sacs and circles with one big-ass “collector” road, and where you have to drive five miles just to buy a cup of coffee!

The former are the kind of place I’d want to be if I ever got married and had kids. And I even say this as a guy who really enjoys living downtown. The latter would be a living fucking personal hell for me. I wouldn’t live there if you paid me a billion dollars.

Good luck getting native Southerners to move to snowy hells like Vermont and Oregon. 

I have lived in all four corners and the middle of Oregon.  The ONLY area that could be remotely characterized as “snowy hell” is the one by Ideehoe.  LaGrande was backward - but it isn’t quite so bad now that my dad helped build Interstate 84 through the area.

Most of Oregon is either too temperate to get much if any snow, or far too dry.

What I can’t understand is how Massachusetts communities of 60,000 people that are on public transit and are cycling distance from a major city and bounded on each side by other highly dense urbanity breed people who act like they live in that sort of isolated hamlet.

Paul, Appalachia doesn’t stop at the West Virginia border.  It just keeps going north.

Mnemosyne, Oregon had a very strong contingent of Southerners who came after the Dust Bowl to work first in the fields as migrant laborers, and then in the shipyards during WWII.  This was a pretty massive migration, and you can still hear it in the way some older people talk.

Nobody south of the Canadian border has any business talking about ‘snowy hells’. Thank you.

or west of the rockies, eh blackbloc? (/smug vancouverite)

What’s “snow”?  Isn’t that, like, that stuff sane people only find on mountains and in ski fields?

Nobody south of the Canadian border has any business talking about ‘snowy hells’. Thank you.

Visit Chicago in the dead of winter sometime, when those winds from Quebec come whipping down the Great Lakes.  I am not joking when I say that last year’s winter in Illinois broke up my friends’ marriage.

I am simply noting that the author suggested that parts of Canada and the US had more in common wih each other than with the rest of their respective nations.  The maritime provinces, for example, have more in common with the New England states than with, say, Alberta.

Being as I am from the Maritimes, um, no.  There’s some crossover at the New Brunswick-Maine border, but aside from superficial similarities like fishing, no, not that much.  Whenever I see these “cross border similarities” lists, almost inevitably the things they indicate are so broad as to be meaningless.

Vancouver is not really like Seattle.  The prairies aren’t like the US states to the south.  Ontario really isn’t like the midwest/eastern US.  The Maritimes aren’t really like New England.

  Nobody south of the Canadian border has any business talking about ‘snowy hells’. Thank you.

Visit Chicago in the dead of winter sometime, when those winds from Quebec come whipping down the Great Lakes.  I am not joking when I say that last year’s winter in Illinois broke up my friends’ marriage.

Coldest temperature ever recorded in Chicago: -32 Celsius on Jan 20, 1985
Average January temperature range where I live: high -30 C, low -37 C.

Average Chicago winter low temperature: -24 C
Reaction to -24 C in winter where I live: “Hey, spring!”

Re: Comment #68 by snowmentality:

Why do you need streetlights?  They don’t stop criminals, are unnecessary, and it’s nice to see the stars (though impossible in many places because there’s some notion that streetlights will deter criminals.)  If I was a criminal, streetlights are my friend: they give a false sense of security, keep me from bumping into garden gnomes and flowerpots, and it’s easier to tell if people are home or not based on the television glow anyhow.

And the next time your streets start to crumble: let them.  Dirt roads aren’t that bad, they can be compacted quite inexpensively, and various grasses can be used to keep erosion (and much of the dust) at bay and will grow in between the tread spaces.

You’ll be amazed at how little you’d lose by letting the unnecessary trappings of “civilization” go.

With respect to HOAs, and in deference to Robert Frost, good covenants make good neighbors. Those complaining about HOAs have never lived in a sub where all roads are private and must be maintained by the homeowners. I venture they’ve never seen their property value drop by over $40 thousand because of the rusting collection of old cars and boats gracing their neighbor’s property. Have they ever taken their child for a walk through the commons area only to find that asshats have turned it into a public toilet for their dogs. Prospective buyers receive a copy of the covenants prior to submitting a purchase offer. They know, or should know, what HOA restrictions are in force before buying the property. Don’t like the rules? Look elsewhere. It’s worth repeating, good covenants make good neighbors.

Ms. Kate -

Living just north of Boston, I’m somewhat curious as to what town it is (before you mentioned the transit and nearby density, I assumed that it was somewhere like Stoneham or N. Reading*:-). The only towns that I’m thinking of that fit the bill (if you mean the T and not the commuter rail by “transit”) are fairly diverse places and the all-whiteness of a team would surprise me. Not much, if it is the town I suspect it is, though…b/c I live there and for all of the diversity, there is a small but significant group of bitter (primarily older) white people that makes a lot of noise about how the T brought “more people” in (um…like me and my boyfriend, apparently, since we wouldn’t live here otherwise), how “quaint” and “small-towny” it used to be, and how “homeowners” need to take it back.

*No offense meant to Stoneham and North Reading folks. I’ve just met a number of people who moved to those places b/c they wanted to get away from the “city.”

Also, can I just say that you kids are pretty cool (but you mostly likely know that already:-) and it is encouraging to see young folks stand up for what is right.

It’s worth repeating, good covenants make good neighbors.

Actually, it sounds to me like the lack of good neighbors requires good convenants. Which is sort of understandable: it’s a large country, and not everyone who is interested in buying a house has the same standards of maintenance as you do. Thousands of individual developments are essentially anonymous and interchangeable, and there’s no reason why prospective homebuyers are going to choose to live in yours rather than another unless you can keep the entire development well-maintained. The shame is that the town has no interest in maintaining roads and public amenities and requires these private entities to do it and that the development itself was not located someplace that had some kind of inherent desirability.

And on that note, I do sort of want to defend Whiteopia a little bit: the residents want the same thing that everyone else wants—decent schools, low crime, neighbors that are either friendly or anonymous, a neighborhood that in some way reflects a sense of financial accomplishment/success that comes with owning a house there, and a home that maintains its value over the long term. Like many material pursuits, they will ultimately find it unsatisfying and wonder if it was really all worth it, but no doubt to them the decisions they’re making seemed to make sense at the time.

Without having time to address the arguments being made here (though I hope to later this afternoon), I study this and have some reading suggestions for Amanda and anyone else who wants to look into this further. I swear these are all readable and not overwhelmingly academic in tone:

James Loewen, “Sundown Towns” (I think someone above recommended this already)
Kevin Kruse, “White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism”
Matt Lassiter, “Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South”

Also, since folks are recommending related titles, I think that Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors touched upon some of these issues (although it was about the rise of the right more generally).

Also, a comment about Carnegie Hill, which gets at the dynamic of Whiteopia very well: I always regarded that neighborhood as a place for people who wanted to say they lived on the “upper east side” but couldn’t afford to buy a place in the 60s and 70s and so extended their home search up into the upper 80s and 90s rather than suffering the indignity of moving to the west side or (shudder) one of the outer boroughs.

In Ottawa, the sketchiest places are certain suburbs.  Downtown?  I’ve always felt safe, no one’s ever bugged me in a serious manner, and stranger-on-stranger attacks are rare as hell (drug-user-on-drug-user, or homeless-on-homeless happen, though).  I know suburbanites who don’t feel safe downtown at all, and I can’t understand that.  It’s an incredibly safe zone—the area’s biggest threat?  Panhandlers (boogah boogah!), which have been made out by certain media and mayoral types to be “aggressive”.  I think the diversity not just of race but class can’t be handled by some people, who like uniform “people like me” areas, and don’t want to see evidence of hardship anywhere.  My husband was in Philly recently with one of these guys, a coworker, who kept saying how disturbing he found “downtown” to be.  They were in the upmarket area…around the gay district, but apparently there was too much buzz in the air and too many black men (especially relative to Ottawa). 

I’ve spent my adult life walking around downtown at 3am as a 5’2 female, never had a problem—nor have any of my friends (OK, I recall one incident where a friend was rolled for a ball-cap back in ‘93).  But I wouldn’t let a teenage girl walk any number of our suburban streets or bikepaths, where the shit tends to go down, or hang out at certain suburban big-box malls.  I lived downtown for 12 years, most of them alone, and 4 of them in the “crackhead” zone between Rideau Street and several homeless shelters—a mix of classes, from homeless to high-end condo.  But it’s the drunk frat boys and suburbanites thronging in on Friday and Sat night to the area (lots of bars) who always put the razors in the air.  They bring their brutish shit to our area for a few hours to act out, piss and puke outside, harass women, fight, swagger, howl at the moon—then go home for the week and complain how “violent” downtown is and how peaceful their little manicured bubble.  I particularly hate those hypocrite fuckers.

@Toria:

I live in Medford, where the kids share their soccer fields, school busses, and classrooms with a demographic mix that comes close to that of the nation at large.

Whitopia = Wilmington in the “they’re all white” soccer field example.  Republican stronghold, that

Middlesex Youth Soccer = our travel league.  It is made up of the following cities and towns/neighborhoods:

Everett
Revere (currently suspended for roster infractions)
Charlestown (new 2009)
Medford
Malden
Somerville
Winchester
Woburn
Burlington
Waltham
Wilmington
Reading
Billerica
Chelmsford
Lowell

Quite the experience.  For some of these kids, it is their only exposure to wealth and privilege.  For others, their only experience of diversity.  I really like that aspect, actually.

They bring their brutish shit to our area for a few hours to act out, piss and puke outside, harass women, fight, swagger, howl at the moon—then go home for the week and complain how “violent” downtown is and how peaceful their little manicured bubble.

I lived near the Fenway Park/Kenmore Square Nightclub zone for five years.  Some of the most extreme acts of violence against my housemates were the result of drunk ass suburbanites deciding that it was okay to attack and brutalize somebody in the city for no good reason.

There are more than a few stupid little pricks going to college in the area who think that city=drunk disneyland.

@ 3letterjon

I’m going to speak up in favor of streetlights and various other “unnecessary trappings” of civilization here: dirt roads aren’t wheelchair-friendly, and streets without lights don’t welcome people with seeing difficulties. My mom went through a brief period in a wheelchair, and I thanked God for the even roads, sidewalks and streetlights that made it possible for us to navigate in her neighborhood.

Also, it’s nice to see the stars, but I’d rather see all the way down the street- not to mention, it gives people looking out of homes/buildings the opportunity to see what’s happening outside. More than once I have relied on streetlights because they provide a clear picture of what’s happening outside my apartment- the stabbing, for example, that I called in to the cops. Without streetlights, I wouldn’t have seen a thing. Streetlights are everybody’s friend.

(And of course, if you were joking, forgive my humorlessness!)

Ben D - That’s exactly the kind of suburb I live in.

I always hate that everyone here is always ragging on the burbs - I live there, not because I want to avoid the city, but because it is where my entire family is. We all live within walking distance of each other. Actually, everything in my town is walking distance from where I live, or I can walk to the train and take it to other downtowns that have what mine lacks.

But my burb was mostly built in the 20s and 30s, and the remainder in the 50s. So smaller lots, grid pattern streets spreading from the railroad tracks. 3 downtown sort of areas - central classic downtown with old time theater (from the 20’s) and little shops, and a north and south downtown with a few big box stores, grocery stores, car dealerships and such.

Other than a lot of teardown of, honestly, falling apart little 50’s ranch-box houses and replacing them with attractive homes that are simply too big for the lot, the town has retained the charm because of this structure. We know our neighbors because all the kids walk to school together each morning - public or private because the two are right next to each other. We have block parties and front porches. There are (Very tiny - like one lot sized) parks every few blocks. People naturally end up talking to each other because of the architecture of the town.

KeithM-

No, nah-ah. I lived in Grand Forks, ND.  If there was any difference in temperature between Grand Forks, ND and Winnipeg, MB I’m not aware of it.  I KNOW snowy hell- it doesn’t suddenly become a balmy wonderland when you cross into the Great American Plains.

And, I think there’s way more cross-over than you give it credit for.  I doubt you could tell the difference of being in Manitoba vs. North Dakota if you were driving around and stopped at some podunk little town.  Same accents, same topics of conversations (more than likely, farming and hockey), same white-looking humans.  It wouldn’t be until you handed money that you’d notice, in and a lot of places, that might ONLY be if they give you change.

Manitoba?  Who said I lived in Manitoba?  Manitoba is the subtropics.  I live north of the Arctic Circle.  I can look out my living room window and can see the Northwest Passage, and not in a Sarah Palin way but actually with my eyes.  Unless there’s someone from Point Barrow, I can quite confidently predict I am probably the furthest north of any person reading this, right now, in North America.

It’s below zero (Celsius) here, the bay has started to freeze, there’s snow on the ground, and this is with an unusually warm fall so we’re running a few weeks late of where we should be by now.

Keith, are you in the Yukon, the NWT, or Nunavut? Just curious.

interesting anecdote: I grew up in Baltimore, in an upper-middle class neighborhood, and during the 11 years we lived there we got victimized by crime a few times. Our house got broken into twice, and I got rolled for my bicycle in broad daylight on a main street. The interesting thing about this is when I relate the story about growing up in Baltimore, people seem to assume that my assailants were black, because the city is more than 50% black. They weren’t.

@ Ms. Kate

That is a really interesting group of towns. Malden is where I was thinking of (though I would have been surprised if it wasn’t a slightly diverse team). I used to live in a neighborhood near Maplewood that had a number of “long timers” there that weren’t too happy with new people in town. To be fair, though, there is a lot of that in New England sometimes (said as someone that has lived here nearly all of my life).

Keith, are you in the Yukon, the NWT, or Nunavut? Just curious.

Nunavut.

Linnaeus, exactly. My husband couldn’t understand what the guy’s problem was.  He’s that extreme.

Speaking of cold, one of the things that has long disturbed me about suburbanites who spend most of their time shuffling between cars and buildings in the winter: they don’t know how to dress for the cold for long periods of time.

This is most obvious when Boston holds First Night for New Year’s Eve.  People don’t check the weather and don’t dress for it.  I have seen families traipsing up and down Boylston St. in near zero (-15 to -20C) weather.  The kids are in Chuck Taylors and their feet HURT from the walking and the cold.  They are wearing unreasonably thin coats and no snow pants and they are COLD.  They are whining about walking and considering not staying through to the parade and fireworks and diving in and out of stores to stay warm because they are not dressed to be outside in weather which is not unusual for the time of year.

From the whining about getting back to the car, I can usually tell that they are suburbanites who simply didn’t know how to plan for long walking times outside in very cold weather.  They are dressed in what they think are “city clothes”, but neglected to figure out that cities are not heated.

Oh, and I may add: people I see on the commuter rail don’t make this same mistake because most people have to walk a fair distance to get to/from the station.

@Torie

You really have to be involved in youth soccer to see how diverse communities are or are not.  Malden has a lot of tenement housing still, and that housing is occupied by immigrants right now - from Africa and Central America and Haiti, mostly.  The last game I coached against a Malden team, the coaches were an old town Irish-American woman who mostly communicated in French with the head coach, who hailed from Cote de Ivoire.  That team, like mine, was a mix of African American, African, Hatian, Latino, Brazillian, and white kids.

I remember wandering around at Grasshopper Game Night (under age 6) in Medford and seeing dads and moms in suits, dads in greasy coveralls, moms in cleaning uniforms, classic “soccer moms” and dads in polo shirts and everything in between.  That, and counting at least nine distinct languages that I could identify being spoken by people standing in clumps around the field, watching adorable little kids play “magnet ball” and sometimes run the wrong way and score.

Last night’s game with Somerville had to be played on the lighted field and didn’t start until 7:30.  Their team gained 4 players, mine gained 3, as Yom Kippur ended at sundown and the kids needed time to eat.

Still, it is quite damn cold down here- it’s merely colder for longer there.

And really, the difference between -30 and -40 is the difference between the time it’ll take to get hypothermia.

“Merely” longer?

You get -30 weather for a day, maybe a week for a real cold snap, once during a winter.

The day I arrived here, it was -42 C.  That was January 3.  It didn’t get above -38 until the middle of February, and not above -30 until the middle of March.

And how to phrase this…the difference between -30 and -40 is the difference between starting to go into hypothermia and beginning to die if you take off your jacket.  With a moderate wind, the onset of frostbite on exposed skin is measured in seconds.

From #84

The former are the kind of place I’d want to be if I ever got married and had kids. And I even say this as a guy who really enjoys living downtown. The latter would be a living fucking personal hell for me. I wouldn’t live there if you paid me a billion dollars.

Yeah, some suburbs aren’t bad, and I get a little frustrated when people lump all suburbs together. Some of them are actually designed well, and are honestly more like good city neighborhoods with a little less population density. In the Chicago area, some of the inner ring suburbs are more racially integrated than the city itself!

The “Whitopia” tendency, though… it’s a real tendency, and it’s getting worse, and its dangerous.

I will have to second KeithM’s comment; I’ve only felt -40 sporadically here in the Ottawa/Montreal corridor (second coldest capital in the world) through my life—and I mean very sporadically, it’s an event—but -30 pretty much every winter, natch.  -30 = instant hand pain when you take off a mitten to key open a door.  -40 = cannot even breathe outside.  My body has adapted to endure -30 but not -40.  I cry just thinking about it.

@Ms Kate: Word.  Or walk around a college campus up here; under-dressed students who don’t understand that the first rule of style is dressing for the weather always make me a bit sad.  Ballet flats and bare heads look ridiculous when it’s -20.  You know what the Norwegians say: there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.

Sorry if this posts twice….

G Porgery #45: Most of the refugees from the city being the conservative and libertarian types who complain about every government program as being intrusive into their lives, I wonder why it is that they have no problem living under the restrictions of their new community.

Because government programs might benefit people poorer than them, while bizarre HOA regulations at worst benefit no one at best might hurt people poorer than them enough to keep the rabble away.

Genrally, community rules are very much a sliding scale. On one end you have “no hazardous waste on your front lawn, no breeding ferrets in the common laundry room, if people want to sleep and it’s past 11pm, tune it down”, on the high end is, “all these little boxes must look exactly the same and your care must be less than 3 yo and from the following list of approved models”. Unfortunately, control freakery has the “if it spares us just one eyesore it’s worth any restiction of liberty” fallacy on its side.

3letterjon: Why do you need streetlights?

So you find your damn house in the dark, and don’t break your ankle in a pothole. Starlight is all good and fine, but if half the winter is thick overcast and rain, and full darkness lasts for 14 hours, you need to carry a flashlight or navigate by touch to get home. (Lived there, done that. Flashlight batteries do no last long in the cold.)

The “Whitopia” tendency, though… it’s a real tendency, and it’s getting worse, and its dangerous.

Comment #121: atheist on 09/30 at 06:48 AM

This is probably the point of the book. Something like this isn’t written for just the interest value.
I am waiting for the “solution” to emerge. I want to see how creative it is going to need to be to restrict one group of people’s economic and mobility choices to fix this problem.

Maybe the Russians have seen the solution:

  According to Macedonian Radio and Television On-line (MRT), a Russian professor predicts the United States will fall apart in July 2010. MRT   reports,

“‘Mr. Obama is similar to the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev was also making great promises for the Soviet Union, but the situation was only getting worse,’ he said. By next summer, according to Professor Panarin, the US will disintegrate into six blocs—and everyone will get their piece. ‘The probability that the United States of America fall apart in July 2010 is more than 50 percent,’ said Igor Panarin, Professor at Moscow’s Diplomatic Academy within the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

“the U.S. will break up into six parts—the Pacific coast, with its growing Chinese population; the South, with its Hispanics; Texas, where independence movements are on the rise; the Atlantic coast, with its distinct and separate mentality; five of the poorer central states with their large Native American populations; and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong.”

Panarin further suggested that Russia might even “claim Alaska.”