Maggie's Farm

This is yet another case of liberalism's overweening hubris. Liberals JUST KNOW that their pet program will solve the problem they are looking at. Just know. Just hand over the money, and the program will do great. We know what we're doing

I am reminded of something that Ronald Reagan said. The urban renewal people just KNEW that what they were doing was a VAST improvement over what had been there before.

Yes, 99th St in Harlem was a poor area, but that was because poor people were living in it. The building stock had nothing to do with their poverty. The building stock was of good quality, as it had housed well to do people before it became a black neighborhood. Thomas Sowell came from a Harlem neighborhood. In his estimation, the quality of public schools in Harlem in the 1940s were much higher than today. Harlem was poor but filled with people who were trying to move on up, as Thomas Sowell did.

Compare this Harlem neighborhood with SoHo on the Lower East Side. A hundred years ago, SoHo was a teeming slum, full of sweatshops and overcrowded tenements. By contrast, Harlem was a well-off neighborhood at the time. Just looking at the economics, Harlem must have had better quality buildings than SoHo a hundred years ago.

Yet today, although very few buildings in SoHo are younger than a hundred years, SoHo is considered a desirable neighborhood. The buildings that housed sweatshops and overcrowded tenements have been upgraded piecemeal, without the trauma of urban removal. Excuse me: urban renewal.