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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
A story about neighborhood change (that starts with a little politics in the US, to be on topic.)
In Minneapolis a few decades back, K-Mart built a really big store that covered two city blocks, and as part of the deal, cut off a street thanks to some dubious zoning changes pushed through the city council. The neighborhood "behind" the K-Mart had been a lower-income one with businesses that mostly relied on the through traffic on the street for income.
But people didn't come down the street any more, because they couldn't get through there, and they could get the stuff that the neighborhood stores sold cheaper at K-Mart. The businesses slowly died off, local unemployment rose, crime went up a notch, and property values plummeted as the inhabitants moved out.
However, just as the neighborhood looked doomed, the wave of Asian immigrants who'd come to Minnesota in the wake of the Vietnam War started getting more prosperous. They'd learned enough English to get by, many had found decent jobs, the second generation was almost grown—time to move out of the cramped apartments and public housing that they'd had to take as refugees.
But they weren't wealthy, so they needed places they could actually afford the payments on. And gee, here was a neighborhood with people desperate to sell. So families started moving into that neighborhood, and businesses to cater to them started popping up. And that neighborhood became known as the place to go for "Oriental Groceries" and fine Asian restaurants and imported knick-knacks, all things K-Mart didn't have.
So the neighborhood that was dying became prosperous, and a destination instead of someplace to avoid driving through. And if there's signs in languages I can't read, well, they're not the "Closed" or "For Sale" signs that were so prevalent thirty years ago, or boarded-up windows. I can live with that.
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Quite. A non-American story from me, but I'm pretty sure there's a correlation between large Asian immigration to North Glasgow and areas like Maryhill undergoing a recovery.
Schild und Schwert der Partei
Thats pretty common, actually. One of the major reasons half of my hometowns downtown is dead is because of walmart sucking up all the business of the local white population. However, the result has been those stores that didnt go under have retooled into spanish groceries or whatnot.
edited 8th Jun '13 8:40:49 AM by midgetsnowman
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Heard about it yesterday, I wish the best for the families of the victims and that all the injured victims make a successful recovery.
But damn it, this just proves the current system is broken in all respects!
Bad guys get guns and kill innocents, innocents can't defend themselves. There has to be some kind of compromise.
edited 8th Jun '13 2:17:21 PM by Mr.Didact
Stand Fast, Stand Strong, Stand TogetherWell, until one party silences idiots who think having their gun rights restricted is a greater loss than that of losing a child, I don't think we're going to have sensible discourse about the subject. The president can't brute force gun safety laws.
@As regards change; We shouldn't be afraid of changing demographics. What we should be is prepared to make sure that those changes are economically and socially healthy.
Closest I could find to an official, recent statistic was from a Reuters article in 2008.
18.6 million vacant properties. However, I didn't read the article, so these properties may be seasonally vacant or otherwise not being used for one reason or another.
Do we have a Poverty and Labour Issues thread? I keep on wanting to post links to stuff like this
and I'm not sure this is the place.
On the Santa Monica Shooting:
California has ridiculously tighter gun control than the rest of the country. Handguns are registered, 10 round magazine limits, and that guy had an illegal AR 15, not a legal one, as it didn't have a bullet button or fixed magazine, otherwise he would have needed a tool to drop the magazine out to reload it. The shooter was a criminal who didn't care about gun laws, what the fuck do you guys suggest? Our tight gun control didn't particularly do anything to help keep him at bay.
I'm only ok with this if a gun license also means I can carry. That would be my compromise "I've proved I'm sane, now let me conceal carry." Maybe if someone had been carrying when that dude went on his little rampage, it could have ended sooner. The school being a gun-free zone didn't keep the shooter from going onto school grounds, but it sure meant that nobody there was armed. One of the guys in my unit is a student at that school, and is a civilian cop. He is a police officer and wasn't carrying his off-duty gun, because the school doesn't even let cops carry at this school. So his gun was sitting in his glove box being useless.
I'm ok with gun control, but let me prove by reasonable means that I am of sound mind to buy the guns I want and carry so that I can protect other people.(hypothetical, I have a CCW, the only thing is I have to re-apply to keep it every year, and in California that means I never know how long I'll have it before we get some new Sheriff or a new law and they go "nope!")
^
On the one hand there are good reasons to videotape a police officer, on the other hand I think it's absolutely fucking annoying to have a bunch of smartphones materialize whenever I'm just talking to someone, and I'm not being an asshole. I get really sick of that.
edited 8th Jun '13 6:33:49 PM by Barkey
Psst, Barkey. While I agree with you as far as mental health checks allowing full gun rights, one: the record for heroes with CCW stopping shootings is really sad, and two: seriously, aside from the mental health thing even you support no one was talking about making Cali gun laws more restrictive on this thread.
^
If there wasn't anyone around with a CCW in that situation, how can we know?
And my comment about California laws was in response to Ace of Spades saying this:
In the course of incidents happening in the places where gun laws are at their most restricted(New York, California, Illinois, DC) nobody ever says "Hmm, maybe their brands of gun control don't work." the response is always "Well it's obvious then that they just need more gun control."
It's like whenever a shooting happens in a "gun-free zone" in a state or location where gun control is at one of the highest levels in the country, the attitude amongst liberals seems to be that they just aren't hitting the square peg into the round hole hard enough, and that a bigger hammer is the answer instead of a different peg. That just seems counter-intuitive to me, and that anyone with half a brain cell would say "Maybe we need to look at gun control from a different angle, and that what we're doing right now isn't working or helping and needs to be done away with, and that perhaps different ideas need to be tried out."
I'm not saying that whenever a shooting happens in these places it illustrates that we should just not even attempt gun control period, just that maybe what we're doing now is silly, inneffective, and only hurts honest citizens, and that maybe we need to get some folks together to really examine statistics of gun violence and the methods of distribution to try to come up with a different method which can be a happier medium between preventing firearms related crime and not bending over our civil rights and raping them.
edited 8th Jun '13 7:09:05 PM by Barkey
I have to agree with Barkey. The constant "evil Republicans" argument also reads like Ace's comment, "Well clearly those nuts have to be silenced."
How about the liberal Democratic idiots that refuse to see the facts? The areas with the most relaxed gun control laws are also the ones with the lowest instances of gun violence. The gun violence is happening in New York and Chicago and DC in the big cities. Hell in New York, Fuhrer Bloomberg passed the gun bill making it an automatic 3-year sentence to be caught with one.
But let's talk gun control and not talk about the poverty, racial profiling, problems with illegal immigration, and all the real issues that lead to people getting shot left and right.
It was an honorFor the record, I still believe in poverty mitigation and municipal right to set gun restrictions. And you can't accuse left-wingers of not banging the "schools and SNAP, not private prisons" drum hard enough.
Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

Sorry; wrong in the sense of "inaccurate", not "morally".
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman