Since Michael Brown’s death, the cost per square foot of a home has dropped by 47 percent in Ferguson. http://fusion.net/story/104184/ferg...lummeting-and-residents-are-feeling-the-pain/ Anyone moving in?
You reap what you sow. Any wonder why the only businesses you find in ghettos are liquor stores, check cashing and Big Lots?
This is a unfortunate situation. A violence stricken town will always have housing prices drop due to a lack of demand and many people trying to sell and get out. Even speculators (investors) will not try to swap up properties for cheap in this situation (so it's not like a Detroit) because there isn't even demand for rentals... much less any reason to fix up homes for re-sale.
The interesting thing about all this is that the libtards have sown the seeds of their destruction on this race thing. While this country is moving to the left and I doubt that will change soon, the libtards thinking on race is !@&^ed up even worse than their usual stuff. They thought if only they could get enough white people around black people that the white people would see that black people are just like them. So they pushed integration. More and more white people are learning that more black people bring more crime, worse schools, higher taxes, more riots, sinking property values, lower government services because of lower tax revenue (despite higher taxes) and a general lower standard of living. Instead of bringing about universal love and peace (not to mention unicorns and rainbows), the libtards are bringing a healthy understanding of reality to the white race. Oops.
Selma's symbolism By Dana D. Kelley The historic 1965 civil rights march in Selma, Ala., was commemorated by a presidential visit and the release of a major motion picture. Both events focused on Selma's past. Neither paid any attention to Selma's present or future--except to take great pains to intentionally ignore it. The site of "Bloody Sunday" 50 years ago when police battered and tear-gassed civil rights protesters, Selma today is a town of 20,000 people whose atrocious crime rate is the scourge of Dallas County and central Alabama. When the Alabama Policy Institute formulated a study in 2013 to rank the 50 largest municipalities as "business-friendly," Selma scored dead last, by a sizable margin. Scoring for categories such as "Community Allure" and "Economic Vitality" was based on a highest possible 100 points. Overall, Fairhope topped the business-friendly list with a total 73.85 score averaged from the four categories. Only one city was held to a score in the 20s, and the next-to-last finishing city bested Selma's score by nearly 20 percent. Selma got mercy-ruled on several subcategories. For "Recent Job Growth," it scored 1.62 (out of 100 possible). For "High School Graduation Rate" and "SAT Averaged Math and Reading Scores," Selma posted scores of 5.63 and 6.13, respectively. And across all 14 subcategories and 50 municipalities, Selma posted the only 0.00 score--in the category of violent crime, where the report cited its rate to be the worst in all of Alabama and five-and-one-half times the state average. How, it's easy to wonder, does the president of the United States and nearly one-fifth of Congress make a trip to Selma and not address its crime, schools or economy? Yet in President Obama's 3,500-word speech, the word "crime" did not appear. The word "education" was uttered only once in the most general of grandiose contexts. "Entrepreneurs" earned a solitary mention in the same breath as farmers, miners and hucksters in a passing tribute to pioneers. To read the president's speech, you'd never get the idea Selma was any different, and certainly no worse, than any other place. You wouldn't have a clue how dangerous it is. Advanced security for President Obama made doubly sure that March 7 would be a safer-than-normal day in Selma. You wouldn't know that one out of four Selma city school students doesn't even graduate from high school. You wouldn't realize that Selma's poverty rate is twice the Alabama average. Event planners lined downtown with flowers and shrubs in an effort to divert eyes from the numerous unoccupied buildings. A half-century after becoming a focal point for the ugliness of racial voting rights abuses, it's a fair question to venture: What happened to Selma? Freezing all Selma references in 1965 does a disservice not only to the city itself, but its true symbolism. The image of Selma as a specter of white prejudice still serves race-baiters. It's an easy win to flash 50-year-old scenes of police with batons beating up marchers. Tackling modern-day Selma's woes is a little harder. The city population is 80 percent black, and the schools are 98 percent black. It's difficult to blame whites for the robbing and assaulting of black residents, or for stifling black entrepreneurialism, or for keeping local kids from learning. Incredibly, in a town where law-breaking is arguably among its largest industries, the only legal topic for which the president could muster words of concern was the "weakened" Voting Rights Act. That's the whole problem with letting racemongers frame social discussions. What Selma symbolizes most isn't even racial. Selma is symbolic of the problems that arise from focusing on rights rather than their accompanying, and essential, responsibilities. Obviously, and ashamedly, denying voting rights to blacks in 1965 was wrong. But it was corrected, and the reason the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the "pre-clearance" provision of the Voting Rights Act is because black voter turnout is so high in Southern states today. Securing the right to vote is only the first step to self-government, however. Freedom in the abstract is an opportunity, not an end. Freedom includes the right to be irresponsible, criminal, lazy and illiterate. It also includes the right to be virtuous, law-abiding, industrious and educated. Civilized, prosperous self-government can only occur when the people aspiring to the latter traits far outnumber those pursuing the former. Citizenship is work and virtue, and when too many citizens are derelict in their duty, civic deterioration is inevitable. That's what Selma symbolizes. Not a racial divide--its crime rate is 20 times that of neighboring small-town Camden, which is also majority black--but a responsibility divide. Even at this historic moment, nobody really wanted to be responsible for confronting Selma's decline. Consider the irony surrounding the movie Selma, which no Hollywood screenwriter could have dreamed up better. The natural assumption was that the film would open there. But the town's only movie theater was boarded up. Filmmaking is a smoke-and-mirrors sport, so sure enough, the old Walton Theater was re-opened long enough to host a screening. Why wrestle with real questions about why a 20,000-population base can't support a movie house when it's easier to just pretend the town has one? ------------v------------ Dana Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro. Editorial on 03/13/2015
November 28, 2014 The Major Demographic Shift That's Upending How We Think About Race By William H. Frey "The usual way that race labels are applied in the United States in everyday parlance and in government statistics fail to capture a phemenon poised to reshape how race is actually lived in America: the increase in multiracial marriages and births, which almost certainly will lead to more blended populations in future generations. As this trend continues, it will blur the racial fault lines of the last half of the twentieth century. The nation is not there yet. But the evidence for multiracial marriages and multiracial individual identity shows an unmistakable softening of boundaries that should lead to new ways of thinking about racial populations and race-related issues. "Sociologists have viewed multiracial marriage as a benchmark for the ultimate stage of assimilation of a particular group into society. For that to occur, members of the group will already have reached other milestones: facility with a common language, similar levels of education, regular interaction in the workplace and community, and, especially, some level of residential integration. This is what we saw with European immigrants from Italy, Poland, and Russia in the last century. After decades of being kept at arm’s length by “old” European groups such as those from Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia, the newer arrivals finally began to intermarry with the more established ethnic groups as they became more upwardly mobile and geographically dispersed. Hispanics and Asians differ from white Europeans, of course—most significantly, for these purposes, Americans tend to view them as racial groups rather than ethnic groups. And race divisions, especially between whites and blacks, have historically been far less permeable. So the blending of today’s new racial minorities through multiracial marriage is breaking new ground. "Multiracial marriages have been rising dramatically. In 1960 (before federal statistics enumerated Hispanics and before the 1965 legislation that opened up immigration to more countries) multiracial marriages constituted only 0.4 percent of all U.S. marriages. That figure increased to 3.2 percent in 1980 and to 8.4 percent in 2010. More than one in seven newlywed couples are now multiracial. More >> Looks like someone's ideas are headed for history's ash heap. Oops.