It was fun reading through that OP thinking “well, this seems like a cool way to just remove poor people from an area while possibly dodging regs about affordable housing, but I will withold judgment until I see what benefits you think that captures” only to to realize that those were the benefits.
Imagine being so evil that you spend your days thinking up cool new ways to help the wealthy avoid contact with the poor while simultaneously saving them (the wealthy) money (which they, definitionally, have plenty of).
Fuckin’ imagine.
I think there’s a difference between wanting the rich to segregate themselves off vs accepting that it’s going to happen and trying to minimize the damage.
Unless I’m missing something, the proposal at hand exactly and only minimizes damage to the wealthy? And for a value of “damage” which means “spending money on housing?”
Come at me with a solution that helps those already subject to disproportionate risk and we’ll talk, I guess.
Become Singapore.
Oh, sorry. Let me try again. You can give people money, but you have to actually take it away if they misbehave. A good program would be to lower the minimum wage while issuing hourly direct-to-employee wage subsidies - thus making the effective wage received higher while simultaneously increasing available jobs and negotiating leverage for low-income workers. This has some backing from economists and can be rolled out and tested incrementally. The Democrats should be hype for it but the Democratic Party is dumb.
There are other factors, like dealing with the simultaneous under/overpolicing, punishing wayward children *before* the end up on the wrong end of a police officer, and so on. Get crime under control and you can fix the zoning laws. Fix the zoning laws and you can build cheaper housing where it’s needed.
None of this will actually happen though because the Democratic party is about as much about helping the poor as the Republicans are about saving money.