Other billboards we can put up in the ghetto to make sure people are fully informed and that experience tells us work just as well:

- Not having sex means no babies.

- Don't do drugs.

- Stay in your local, neighborhood school to perform as equally well as your similarly-aged peers in schools located in more affluent areas.

Well, maybe that last one not so much.

Your argument strikes me as a reason people raise in objection to mass transit: the "undesirables" might come to town. I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to your position. I live in an area of my city that, on paper, has a pretty high average household income but due to history also has a decent amount of petty crime. The answer isn't to redline those people off to somewhere else. There is a huge difference between being poor and committing crime, except that the poor tend to go to jail and the wealthy tend to pay a fine with no admittance of wrongdoing. And the latter also tend to screw over more people in one pop.

The answer is to make it socially unacceptable, in all areas, to commit crime and to demonstrate that the law and society won't tolerate it.

The billboards you describe work to help people understand their choices (an issue raised in the post I responded to). The fact that poor folks continue making bad choices in spite of this is a different issue.

If you scroll up, you'll see that I agree with you about stopping crime. I oppose our current system of anarcho tyranny (to borrow an excellent term).

But that's also my point: How do you stop crime or, more accurately, how do you break the cycle of crime and poverty unless people are given an equal opportunity? My last, fake billboard illustrates the problem with your concentrate-them-all-in-one-spot proposal. We fund everything locally. Schools, transportation, parks, the works. People in nice neighborhoods have opportunities that the ghetto literally does not because the folks in those other neighborhoods won't fund them, believing them to be a waste of time.

It's easy to say "just get a job and leave the slums." It's much, much more difficult to do that, especially when there is a bifurcated society.

So to summarize, poor people are incapable of managing their own lives even given sufficient information. They are also incapable of self governing.

I guess the solution to this is some sort of paternalistic dictatorship? Is the purpose of spreading the poor around merely to dilute their vote?

When I started working at public housing in the early 2000s, I came with this notion that people my age didn't have jobs or didn't work hard enough. What helping friends with their resumes taught me was folks often pursue jobs doggedly -- but because of their race, background, and education, find themselves in dead end work.

It seems to me the classic economic arguments you're making need to be turned around: In an environment where the options in the mainstream economy are unstable, low-reward work and you lack the capital to secure credit to get an education or make serious investments, wouldn't you think about joining the drug economy?

Also both the gangs and community groups were entirely capable of self-governing.

No, and I really think you're either intentionally missing the point or you're just not willing to look at the reality around us. Either way, back to our respective neighborhoods.

I moved from Detroit to Chicago. Do I feel safer / am I actually safer? You better fucking believe it...