Chucking NGO Touts
If You Care About Social Justice, You Have to Care About Zoning
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/opinion/if-you-care-about-social-justice-you-have-to-care-about-zoning.html
Houston, one of the major cities without zoning (is it the only one?) still segregates by economic resources, with wealthy enclaves scattered throughout the vast city limits. Property values are used to separate rich from poor, with some areas serving as buffers and in that role offer a range of residential options.
Decisions to affiliate with income/wealth levels is aided by ostensibly hands-off government but with below the radar policies of health, safety and welfare which just happen to favor the well-to-do and to underserve those doing badly.
Worth keeping in mind how zoning originated as an ostensible social benefit but which has come to be a tool of favoring the select over the many. Same duplicity for health, police, education, politics, economic policy, as professionals, experts and lobbyists develop means to work their arts and crafts for paying clients while maintaining artifice of compliance with laws and regulations.
One of the latest subterfuges is named "affordable housing," others with the word "equity" in titles, and the shopworn "social justice," "diversity," "inclusionary," "lives matter," along with a dictionary of policy promoters, editorialists, opinionators, influencers, political advisors, and, ahem, long-toothed "think tanks" of rainbow-hued persuasions, amply tax-subsidized.
Urban planning has become rancid with recycled ideological garbage and quite-artificial intelligence reworking a small set of choices, none of which urge chucking NGO touts.