Comment of the week: ‘you guys are idealists’
March 7th, 2008 by Wayne Garcia in Issues & Wonky Shit, Media Watch, PeopleFrom Roger, who commented on one of our Fix It Now posts about suburban sprawl:
 You guys are idealists. And that’s fine. You believe in living near the heart-of-the-city for its own sake, for the energy, and the easy commute. And that’s cool. But most people aren’t like that. They’re pragmatists. They respond to incentives, not ideals. Some of the neighborhoods just north & east of downtown Tampa look like places you’d find in Johannesburg or off-the-resort Jamaica. That’s not a racist statement, but an observation anybody could make driving around that part of town on a Sunday afternoon – burnt out graffiti covered homes, roofs made of rusted tin & plywood, gang members openly displaying their colors on street corners. You won’t find a lot of idealistic middle-class people moving into those neighborhoods simply for the sake of promoting racial diversity or helping to put the kibosh on sprawl. They need to be properly incentivized to move into those neighborhoods – better standard of living, clean & safe streets, a few entertainment options, and most of all, it must be affordable & make sense to them.
A tip o’ the digital hat to Roger, and read his entire comment here.
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