I was just reading through the transcript of a local town council meeting. The issue that day was how to develop a small plot of land in town. One council member said that they should build senior housing on that plot, because seniors tend to help out the community and they don’t have kids. Kids are too expensive for the town, so we should avoid building McMansions that would attract young families. Even worse, he said, one of them could have a special needs child who would cost the town $100,000 per year.
10 thoughts on “What Kind of People Do You Want In Your Neighborhood”
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Apt. 11d 
Yah well MY kid is going to cure cancer and people will come to the house s/he was raised in like a shrine, like the boyhood home of Davey Crockett, or like Graceland. Tourist buses forever, pumping up the local economy!
But – I think this is a problem with local taxes paying so heavily for schools. Schools are a state-wide, nation-wide benefit. And, my kid, s/he is going to go off to Rice or Stanford or Temple to cure cancer, not stay local.
As long as the incidence of the costs of the schools is so concentrated on localities, and the benefits spread over the whole country, the localities will have a big incentive to under-invest.
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Huh. Oregon funds its schools state-wide. Doesn’t stop people from wanting to attract childless rich couples to downtown condos in Portland.
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Would it be impolite of me at this juncture to say: You’re the one who defends a system of zoning thay makes “who will live around here?” a legitimate and unavoidable question for local democratic decisionmaking?
Ah. It would; I thought maybe. Never mind, then. 🙂
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I’m one of those parents with an expensive-to-educate special needs kid and I don’t take offense. I can see the economic reasoning.
I’m in MA where most school funding is local, and I agree with Dave.
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heh. I like a little needling, Jacob. That’s a fair enough point. Yeah, community decision making can lead to this point where people start choosing what types of people are best for their town. But I would argue that this is an abuse of the system. I think that people can decide on a whole range of legitimate issues (areas for businesses and homes, the types of businesses, the types of homes) without red-lining or discriminating against disabled kids.
You didn’t take offense, Ingrid? I’m still too sensitive on this topic. Anybody messes with my disabled kid, and I get all red in the face.
Gotta have a school funding post soon. It’s weird, but I rarely post about topics that I’ve actually done some research on.
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I started out feeling all superior because our school funding (in Australia) is at a state level, so you don’t get this kind of issue.
But, I have a friend with an autistic child who is trying to get permanent residency, and the existence of the autistic child is making that difficult – so our country tries to keep the disabled child out, even if the local council doesn’t.
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Well, what about the very expensive situation of the senior whose illness requires a lot of community care and intervention?
There’s no frigging way they can screen out for all the possible expenses attendant upon opening the property up for development. I say, if they’re so damned paranoid, they should forego the development and any possible revenue resulting from it, freeze the town as it currently stands and watch their community wither away.
Shortsighted morons!
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Hmmm. I’d like to have families with kids who would like to mow my lawn and shovel my driveway. A political scientist with two adorable kids would be nice, too.
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Providence, here we come!
Thanks, all, for the righteous anger.
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I’m tempted to move to your town just to spite them.
But seriously, there are two things going on here. One is the fact that families simply don’t pay for themselves in general, as opposed to commercial development. Check out this old Kevin Drum review of one of David Brooks’ favorite books (but you should probably read the book anyway).
And the special-education complaint is a more blunt expression of a thought that probably occurs to most people in his position. As long as education financing is localized and special-needs kids represent potential financial liabilites that are uncontrollable (from the locality’s perspective), the incentives will be there to discourage them by any means necessary. Ancarett’s analogy doesn’t work because most of the $$ for the ill seniors comes from the federal & state governments, not as much the localities (I think). If there was the equivalent of a Medicare for special needs kids, you wouldn’t have this kind of ugliness at the local level. (You would, of course, have many other problems instead. Boys and girls, can you say “vouchers?”)
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