The environmental quality of housing is a clear measure of Social Darwinism in society. Anyone who doubts the rigidity of income-based class in America need only drive around a metropolitan area with open eyes. This is a given of the free-market capitalism of the post-Reagan era in the U.S..
The poor still live in communities with inferior infrastructure, bad code enforcement and lack of safe green space. Middle income communities are increasingly transitioning from spacious single-family homes with yards and gardens to converted multi-family apartment houses with asphalt parking right up to the foundations. Sprinkled here and there are the luxury apartment houses and condo complexes of displaced urbanites, drawn by access to commuter transportation.
Coastal inner cities are becoming gated communities, as part of a movement to revitalize them by attracting wealthy young professionals with children. The concept of mixed-income housing has become a developer's joke. Get public support and money. Build a complex for the wealthy buyers or renters. Then offer a handful of low or middle income units through a lottery, which is held covertly to avoid too many applicants. The units end up rented or bought by the connected few. Gradually they are eliminated through legal manipulations.
The net result widens the cultural divide apparent in our politics. Wealthy, liberal metropolitan areas in conflict with struggling, angry areas, outside the metropolis. As the oil economy collapses. this trend will worsen, unless there is a concerted, progressive housing policy in the U.S.. There is none in sight.
Free-marketeers glibly point to the current collapse of real estate values as a "correction" of some of these issues. Glib free-marketeers are at the top of the economic food chain. They are like meat-eaters that convince themselves that cows and pigs are contented sacrificial victims on the altar of human superiority.
The Soviet and Chinese experiments with collective housing under Communism were failures. This was due in part to Political Darwinism, inherent in the Soviet and Chinese models. Politicians and military leaders got the best of everything. Factory workers got the worst. It seems human nature always trumps idealism.
As the walls against human equality and universal rights are slowly chipped and chiseled away, perhaps a solution to the housing piece of quality of life will evolve. Perhaps not. The pressing environmental collapse of the planet's resources due to the dysfunctional oil economy and its accompanying unsustainable human populations may well pressurize the competitive, antisocial elements of the human psyche. So far, things seem to be going in that direction in the U.S..
