You may ask, but what's the point? For one thing, I don't live in a home. I rent an apartment. I could provide all kinds of personal stats here, my income, a resume, my ZIP code, my electric bill, and on and on. But that's getting into a Yoshie-looking-up-folks'-paychecks-and-affiliations-on-the-web level of creepiness I'd rather not submit myself to on this public forum, esp. in order to discuss this issue. Surely it can be discussed without me providing my rent, mortgage, utility payments, etc., personally.
[WS:] I did not mean to snoop into your private life. I was just trying to make the point that (1) I am not a rich guy supporting the trickle down economics and (2) Many people who live comfortably in the suburbia espouse various "good causes" that good look in rhetoric but are not so good when applied to real life situations.
It is one thing to champion the cause of the poor while living in the middle class suburbs, and a very different thing to do the same while living in low income areas of the cities. Just to illustrate that point, when Baltimore City started demolishing the slums and replacing them with "gentrified" housing (in reality a mix of subsidized and "market-rate" units), the main opposition came from the suburban residents. Likewise, the main opposition to expanding transit comes form the same areas. In both cases the rhetoric is the same - the new projects would "displace the poor," and that is a thinly veiled fear that the "displaced" people would end up in suburban neighborhoods (which sometimes turns out to be true.) So each time I hear "displacement" my reaction is "why do not you live in those wonderful neighborhoods that you are so desperate to preserve for others?"
As to your comments about the "trickle down" economics - let's not loose the sight of reality in the ideological rhetoric and obfuscations. The fact of the matter is that we live in a stratified society, and this is not going to change any time soon, whether we like it or not. So we can either try to pursue policies that minimize the effects of that stratification to some degree, or wail, stomp our feet, and hope for a better life after the revolution or perhaps in heaven.
What I have seen in Baltimore is that urban revitalization helped a lot of poor people moving from crime and drug infested slums to modest housing, it improved the city finances, transit, retail, schools and quality of life in general. It did not eliminate the ridiculous class inequality from our society to be sure, but it made a whole lot of a real-life difference for a lot of low and moderate income people. And that matters far more than all the hot air emitted by lefty and populist demagogues.
Of course ideological purists and self-styled radicals may denounce that approach as "gradualism," "reformism" and "sell-out" but I stopped treating them seriously long time ago. As they say in the old country "Dogs bark, the caravan moves on."
Wojtek