Fingerprint and Drug Test Public Housing Residents?

My only thing about the moral concern part of it is: why should these people be more suject to the invasiveness of my moral concern than the people in my (non-public) appartment building?

 

if you listen closely, you can hear yankeefan googling "conservative arguments against HUD".

 

Sure you have.

Let me guess:

Your worldview was set by the time you reached 18, and was influenced by Woodstock, Vietnam, Watergate, and marijuana?

I'm not sure how the rest of this is any kind of response to what I posted.

You accused "House Republicans and the Tea Party" -- and by extent, me -- of wanting to institute these policies as a means of criminalizing the poor.

It's absurd. It ignores the fact that public housing crime rates are much higher than the rest of the city.

You also tried to use a "small government" argument against me, putting words in my mouth I never uttered.

Public Housing is already a big government project. If you are going to provide public housing, you have a responsibility to provide safe public housing.

If you'd like to argue the merits of public housing, we can do that too.

 

Oh no! Gold might have smoked the pot!!! Now he's definitely not smart!

 

Whatever

 

Backing up a bit, this anecdote was very interesting to me. When did this trend begin of young people living in less expensive areas and then seeking to move to nicer areas as they get older? Was it before 2009 or after? I think there should be a New York Times trend piece on it.

 

The only pot smoking I have done is when I left a pot on the stove. Mom was not happy.

 

Public housing residents should be checked for spelling!

But, here's my "thing": liberals always want to be judged on the intentions of their programs, not their results.

And, they do the same thing when judging programs put forward by anyone else. Forget the merits of these programs, what are the intentions?

And, you answer the question with your own biases. The intentions must be to harass the poor, and to make poverty a de facto crime.

But, that's not the intention. The intention is to make a safe environment for the residents of these buildings, and their neighbors. But, if you were to acknowledge that, you might have to debate the programs' merits.

 

LOL. Nail, meet head.

 

All of the stories lamenting the demise of Detroit cited "white flight" and the declining tax base as major reasons.

Well, the reduction of crime in New York, and the building boom (helped by Bloomberg getting zoning changes), as kept high income earners, and their families, in the city, when in decades past, they would have retreated to the suburbs of Whitelandia.

It's pretty simple stuff. If you want to provide services, you need a tax base. Crime drives away the tax base.

 

The intention is to make a safe environment, yet by treating the residents as drug users until proven otherwise, your perhaps unintentional intention is to show that poor people aren't to be trusted. Rather than try to lift their dignity and help them provide a safer environment for their families, all are branded as criminals. You've created a hostile environment among people who presumably would be supportive in trying to rid the buildings of crime. So the program fails on its intention and its merits.

 

Maybe liberals always want to be judged on the intentions of their programs. But that's not how I view the world. So I don't really know how to respond to that line of thinking.

Less crime IS a good intention. But of course we could probably have less crime if we set up a camera in every room of everyone's apartment, or installed microchips into their scrotum that had the ability to tell us the second they sold drugs. Neither one of those is acceptable violations of privacy and I don't think this is, either. There's some lines we shouldn't cross even if it does prevent crime, and for me, this is one of them. (That's not my only objection to this - I question how effective it is at meeting its stated goal, and if the various costs, both monetary and human, are worth what I assume is a very limited overall effect).