Urban renewal, slum clearance

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do-gooder. a well-meaning but unrealistic or interfering philanthropist or reformer.

"they were not going to welcome bossy do-gooders from far away telling them how to run their lives"

What is better, to have many options and you make the decision on what is the best option for you or for the government to decide what is best for you (and to make your choices for you)? The USA has long had its do-gooders who know what is best for everyone and their articles get published in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

See Urban Renewal, Family Displacements, and Race 1950-1966

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Race and Culture. pp. 100 - 103

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Housing is a very heterogeneous product, ranging from hovels to mansions, so the supply and demand for this product in a culturally heterogeneous population offers highly varied possibilities, as does the perception of the outcomes by heterogeneous observers. Many observers have been appalled by the housing inhabited by people of a different class, race, or national origin. Sometimes this has reflected simply a difference in income between the observers and the inhabitants, the latter being unable to afford anything better. At other times, however, the housing choices have reflected different goals, or different trade-offs among goals.

Italian men living as immigrants or sojourners, whether in Europe, the Western Hemisphere, or Australia, have been among the more extreme examples of a group with minimal demands for housing, both quantitatively and qualitatively. During the era of mass emigration from Italy, it was not uncommon for several Italian men overseas to share a single room, when they were saving to take money back home or to bring their families over to join them. This did not mean that housing was unimportant to Italians. On the contrary, once the family was reunited in a new country, housing often became such a high priority that extraordinary efforts and sacrifices then went into buying their own homes. This might include children as well as adults working, and all living within very strict limits, so as to accumulate a down payment on a family home.

Middleman minorities overseas, such as the Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Lebanese in West Africa, or the Indians in East Africa, have likewise often had an initial demand for housing that was minimal in quantity and quality, as the men saved for both business and family reasons. While the mass emigration of Jews, such as transferred the center of world Jewry from Eastern Europe to the United States, was often a refugee flight of whole families, their initial housing demands too were often limited not simply by income but also by high savings propensities found, for example, in the run-down neighborhoods on the lower east side of Manhattan. In short, for these groups as for the Italians, housing choices as of a given time reflected long-run plans as well as short-run trade-offs. All this tended to be ignored by observers shocked at these groups' housing conditions, and especially by social reformers determined to do something about it.

Seldom have the crusades of social reformers been directed toward enlarging the set of options available to the groups whose housing the reformers disapproved. More commonly, housing reform efforts have reduced the existing options, whether by "slum clearance" programs that destroyed lower quality housing, by building codes that forbad construction of housing without amenities prescribed by reformers, or by other regulations limiting the number of persons living in a given space to what reformers found acceptable. In all these ways, less fortunate groups were forced to pay more for housing than they themselves chose. Their incomes could no longer be used to maximize their own satisfactions, according to their own values, goals, and trade-offs, but were partially diverted to making observers feel better.

Reformers often found it sufficient justification to point out the objective fact of improvement in average housing quality in the wake of their reforms. However, this improvement — paid for by higher rents charged the tenants — was equally available before the reforms, if the tenants valued the improvements as much as they valued alternative uses of the same money. Nor should it be imagined that housing quality today would be at the low levels of a century ago without housing reforms. Rising incomes tend to produce rising housing quality, whether or not there is government intervention in housing markets. This applies not only to changes from one era to another, but also to changes within the lifespan of given individuals, as among groups who achieve eventual home ownership by initially paying low rents for lower qualities and smaller quantities of housing. Other groups, such as the Jews or the overseas Chinese, have tended to invest such savings in business or in the education of their children.

Looked at more generally, in a world where people have multidimensional goals, all constrained within the limits of their wealth-generating capacity, government intervention can always improve one dimension and document that improvement objectively as a "success," ignoring the other dimensions sacrificed. Housing is only a special case of that general principle. As with other special cases, the dimension chosen for enhancement is typically one visible to observers, while those dimensions sacrificed are less visible. The future, being necessarily invisible, is often sacrificed, as is the present inner satisfaction of working toward a goal of having home ownership, business ownership, higher education for one's children, the independence of having some savings put aside, or the capacity to send for parents or other relatives or to help them get established in a new setting.

All such goals are retarded or destroyed when third parties are able to force tenants to pay higher rents for amenities chosen by third parties, at the expense of goals chosen by themselves. Such impositions of outsiders' values and preferences have been especially prevalent when reformers have come from a different cultural background and have had little understanding of, or respect for, the choices of the people involved. This in turn has been especially common where reformers have had more years of formal schooling and could therefore feel justified in dismissing the choices of others as uninformed and unintelligent. The most dangerous kind of ignorance is the ignorance of the educated.

One of the leading advocates of social reform during the late nineteenth century in New York was journalist Jacob Riis, who detailed the overcrowded and squalid living conditions in various immigrant neighborhoods. Yet Riis also noted in passing the collusion of tenants with their landlords to evade the new housing reform laws—and, indeed, the tenants' sometimes violent resistance to being evicted by the authorities from housing officially condemned as substandard and marked for demolition. Such observations did not lead Riis to reexamine his own assumptions but were presented in passing as anomalies or perversities. Similar, attempts to evade "benefits" chosen for them by others were apparent earlier, in the mid-nineteenth century, when the British government passed laws mandating better living conditions on ships carrying emigrants overseas. The conditions on the ships of that era were truly appalling, by all accounts. Yet Irish emigrants rushed to get on those ships before the deadline for improvement, indicating that the lower fares were more important to them than the improvements in the conditions under which they would be housed during the voyage.

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22 July 2024