Oh, and wanted to point out one thing: Duany is preoccupied with housing because he’s an architect. He’s not a real social scientist. He just plays one at various “charettes.” (And I say that even though I like some of his stuff, paid a special visit to Seaside years ago, etc.)

I agree with you very much that social networks are critical, especially bridging networks that are mutually isolated. But in what I’ve read lately, I keep finding that mere geographic proximity in mixed-income developments doesn’t accomplish that nearly as well as expected, if at all.

Most of all though, my concern is that we have a major housing shortage right now, and waiting longer and spending more to design and build mixed-income developments just exacerbates that problem without any promise that it will be worth the wait for anyone.

Now, as the report suggests, investments in education, worker training, substance absuse, etc., are all needed to fight poverty as well. But aren’t the public housing developments as they stand just a more noticeable example of how little our society actually cares about lower-income people? A physical manifestation of the non-working status quo?

Would trying something else in addition to providing more education, job training, etc., be such a bad idea? I really don’t think things can change much, even with investment in all the above, however, until there is some sort of communication and cooperation between social networks in lower-income neighborhoods and other parts of a city or metro area. But how do you best accomplish that? People in, say, Lakeview or Jefferson Parish have no incentive to care about the fate of lower-income areas, outside of crime bleeding past their borders. But lower-income areas can’t be little islands off to themselves and thrive, I don’t think, or at least not islands with no consistent communication with and resources from networks and institutions outside the borders. They’re not “closed systems,” as someone described Lakeview as being at Sat.’s meeting (and this person was wrong to think even that).

I went to the Lakeview area UNOP meeting on Saturday. Now, if many stores are opening around there, I presume they’ll need some lower-income people to do the service jobs. But someone noted that if developers are allowed to buy property from the LRA or whoever and turn it into Section 8 housing, you might as well shoot the neighborhood, ’cause it’ll already be close to death anyway. (Incidentally, it was one of only a smattering of African-American people in the crowed–among them people from Gentilly who had the wrong meeting–who said this.)