Think Tank Shock: Wealthy Liberals Use Zoning Laws to Create Legal "Border Wall" Around Their Suburbs and Neighborhoods to Keep Minorities Out

My Shocked Face is getting overworked. I'm thinking about upgrading to the Elite version of the Shocked Face. It's 50% more durable.

A new think tank report shows how liberal New York suburbs use restrictive zoning laws to drive up housing prices and prevent poor minorities from moving into their neighborhoods.

The Century Foundation released a study about zoning laws and educational opportunities in Scarsdale and Port Chester, liberal suburban areas in Westchester County, New York, located north of New York City. The study compares zoning laws, demographics and public school performance in the neighboring towns as a case study for how liberal suburbs prevent low-income people and racial minorities from moving in.

"Today, among the most important government policies and practices driving segregation include (1) decisions about where to place public housing; and (2) flagrant income discrimination through exclusionary zoning (which disproportionately hurts people of color)," the study reads.

Scarsdale has a median household income of $250,000 and its population is 71.2% white, with 90.7% of adults having attained a bachelor's degree or more of education, according to data from New York University's (NYU) Furman Center. Port Chester has an $88,093 median income and its population is 64.2% Hispanic, with 31.1% of adults attaining at least a bachelor's degree.

Banning multi-family homes is an easy zoning fix to keep out The Poors.

Which is their right -- but meanwhile they Vote Their Fake Values and insist that America throw its borders open to the teeming billions of poor foreigners.

And when someone in a poorer neighborhood objects to his hometown being flooded with the foreign poor, these same people call that person a racist.

Scarsdale and Port Chester are located in New York's 16th Congressional district represented by Democratic New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman, an outspoken progressive with ties to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). President Joe Biden won Westchester County in the 2020 presidential election with 67% of the vote.

Left-wing policy analyst Richard Kahlenberg used the study's results to describe how liberal suburbs "have their own border wall" in an article for the Atlantic, a liberal magazine.

"One can safely presume that few Scarsdale residents are ardent backers of Trump's wall on the Mexican border. But many of them support a less visible kind of wall, erected by zoning regulations that ban multifamily housing and keep non-wealthy people, many of them people of color, out of their community."

Meanwhile, Hispanics continue trending towards the populist side of the right.

[I]t is first necessary to understand the scale and breadth of the Hispanic shift toward the GOP in 2020. Start with Florida, where Trump won half the Hispanic vote, surging among Republican-leaning Cuban Americans and Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics. But it wasn't just Florida: Trump improved his performance among Hispanics by 20 points in Wisconsin, 18 points in Texas and Nevada, 12 points in Pennsylvania and Arizona and among urban Hispanics in Chicago, New York and Houston. In Chicago's predominantly Hispanic precincts, Trump improved his raw vote by 45 percent over 2016.

Catalist data confirm a nationwide shift among Latinos in 2020. The Democrats' overall margin among this group dropped by 18 points relative to 2016. Cubans had the largest shift of 26 points, but Puerto Ricans moved by 18 points to Trump, Dominicans by 16 points and Mexicans by 12 points. An overall weak spot for Democrats was among Latino men who gave Trump a shocking 44 percent of their two-party vote in 2020.

The unusually broad shift raised the question: Could the trend continue? Since then, the 2022 election contained both good and bad omens for Democrats. The good news is that, with the exception of Florida, they did not lose any further ground among Hispanics. The bad news is that they didn't win back the ground they lost.

Since then, polls consistently find that Hispanic voters prefer Republicans to Democrats on inflation and handling the economy. Nearly all -- 86 percent -- Hispanics say economic conditions are only fair or poor and about three-quarters say the same thing about their personal financial situation. By 2 to 1 they say President Biden's policies are hurting, not helping, them and their families. In a just-released 6,000 respondent poll from the Survey Center on American Life (SCAL) on evolving party coalitions, almost two-thirds believe Biden has accomplished not that much or little or nothing during his time in office.

And in a recent Washington Post-ABC poll, Hispanics preferred the way Trump handled the economy when he was in office to Biden's performance so far by 55 to 36 percent.

Beneath this discontent is an emerging gulf between the cultural outlook of many Hispanics and the increasingly left-wing values of the Democratic Party. In the SCAL survey, half of Hispanics think Democrats are "too extreme" and slightly more than half think Democrats don't share their values. A healthy minority, 42 percent, believe the Democratic Party "looks down on people like me." This is not to say Republicans come out any better on these measures -- they don't -- but simply to illustrate how many Hispanics struggle to identify with Democrats.

Take the issue of racism in our society. Is racism "built into our society, including into its policies and institutions" or does racism "come from individuals who hold racist views, not from our society and institutions?" In the SCAL survey, by 60 to 39 percent, Hispanics chose the latter view rather than the received wisdom in Democratic circles that racism is baked into society and institutions.

In contrast, White, college-graduate liberals chose the "structural racism" position by an overwhelming 81 to 19 percent.

Ultra-MAGA Mexicans.

posted by Ace at 02:09 PM

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