Housing and Immigration
Post #4: Inman 123-200
I have spent many hours pouring over apartment websites, driving in between leasing offices and touring show units. I feel as if I have mastered the apartment hunt throughout my 6 different moves in the past 2 years. I have come to discover that my living standards differ from some of my friends and even my parents. Some friends of mine refuse to live anywhere that doesn’t have a balcony in their apartment. Another requirement comes from my mother who believes stainless steel appliances are life and death decisions. Everyone has their own preferences in where they want to live, but more importantly, everyone has certain things that will deter them from an area. I have come to discover that it is easier to base housing decisions on your list of deterrents as opposed to your list of likes or bonuses. Although appliances and balconies are rather superficial ways to decide on a house, but price, location, age and maintenance costs are all very important to consider. When reading Chapter 5, I began to understand how important all of these factors are for a city.
When doing apartment searches I would automatically disregard certain places with a really cheap monthly rent. Why? Lower cost of housing is usually correlated with lower quality housing and unsafe neighborhoods. Although this is truly generalizing areas, after this reading I can see that cities need to understand this stereotype or generalization as well. Lower income housing can attract poverty and unskilled laborers. More importantly, lower income housing can deter skilled laborers. A city can obviously have both unskilled and skilled labor in their population, but when a city begins to provide lots of low cost housing the balance can become skewed. I would find it interesting to see the effects of a nation wide voucher to avoid this problem. Personally, I don’t believe it would work that well due to the high costs of transportation and the other factors of relocation. As we have seen in previous chapters, cities need to be reacting to people, not places. I believe that people who have established homes, communities, families and a sense of security in their homes would be reluctant to relocate, even if qualifying for a voucher. I think that people would need more incentive to put place on a higher priority than people.
The chapter on immigration didn’t necessarily provide new conclusions about the effects of immigration on cities, but it helped to provide facts to the arguments we hear almost daily. I have immediate family members who have immigrated from Mexico. My family would not be here in the United States had it not been for immigration. Throughout this chapter I found it interesting to learn more about the specific numbers associated with population growth/decline and wages. Aside from the numbers and graphs, I find the psychological effects of immigration to be the most interesting and plaguing to our society. The “peer effect” of immigration ties back to our previous topics of red lining practices and even our characteristics of suburbia. Our society puts an extremely high priority on the characteristics of our neighbors.
My solution to the peer effect of immigration is to provide more programs and services for immigrants regarding life skills, language classes and even culture immersion. If we provide more opportunities for immigrants to learn about our culture, then maybe there won’t be such a resistance to their presence. Additionally we need to provide more culture appreciation and diversity knowledge within our communities. If both parties can learn that diversity and new cultures can be a positive thing, then maybe we can change the perception that immigrants result in negative consequences. There are many schools and communities that pride themselves on their diverse populations. I believe that this is a new phenomenon, but I hope that it catches on quickly in many other areas. Diverse populations should be celebrated and not avoided.