re: The ramblings of a St. George opponent

quote:

---

Potentially yes.......however it just appears to me that we have Nero'd this situation long enough. Like I said St. George probably isn't the answer, but is sitting around doing nothing and waiting for it to get worse any better?

---

I'll submit a hypothetical I proposed in another thread on the matter for your consideration.







Meet Janet. She's a single mother with four hoodlums. Janet admittedly made bad choices, but like many mothers, still wants to get her little angels who can do no wrong in a better school district, and get them away from the other little angels, I mean hoodlums. St George passes, and developers do as they are continuing to do in this city, and that's overbuild the hell out of multi family housing, and now even more new developments go up around shopping malls and next to nice neighborhoods to get ready for the flow of people, and so people begin moving out of the old properties into the new ones. Now, there's occupancy issues at the older properties, and so they lower their rent, and Janet moves her and her four street urchins to St. George, things get worse, and more properties are going up, and more properties are having trouble with occupancy. Management changes are everywhere until owners need to get money flowing and people to pay their damn rent, so one after another, whole areas of St. George begin going with secured money by way of section 8 and tax credit, and the more fall by the way side, the more follow until whole areas of St. George are being taken over by this epidemic and the people begin to move to the newer sections of St. George with the new buildings and better housing. More demand for affordable multi family housing is in place, and the process gets out of control, and now many of the people Janet was trying to get her kids away from have now moved to St. George also.

Track housing starts going up, and wooooohooooo, the good times are back and rolling along again... Politicians are patting themselves on the back, and people working in or supporting the construction industry are ALL IN and hoping it can stick around so they can buy that new camp and boat. People living in the new complexes begin buying up homes, and the new properties are taking more people in, and more older pre existing properties get into trouble, and the cycle continues, ad nauseam.

That's what I mean you can't divide the city. There are no lines that keep one problem away from the other, no great body of water, no moat, no wall, no check points. There is no such thing as a South Baton Rouge, and a North Baton Rouge, just Baton Rouge. And so.... When you create this demand because of a perceived draw for a school district, regardless if it's a positive or not, will make Baton Rouge and St. George a bigger ghetto than it's ever been, and quick. The desire for fast money and growth by people, and by politicians seeking to put a feather in their cap politically will escalate and exacerbate a current problem that comes from evacuating the city under the delusion that you can run from your problems instead of facing them.