Denton Publications

Once upon a time, Chicago was the hog butcher for the world and City of the Big Shoulders—now it’s the place where high-rise apartments are deemed adequate only for the Lakeshore Drive upper-income quintile but not for the lower (or no-) income quintile inland. This all explains why such subsidized tower-apartment complexes as Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini Green, built with taxpayer, have now been demolished also at taxpayer expense.

A new generation of sociologists now preaches that the former tenants require garden apartments, or insertion-by-government into single-family neighborhoods, once nice houses readily available as the middle class (first white, now black and white) continues its flight. Chicago is now also the place where such quotes as “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste” are provenanced.

On a much smaller scale, the same taxpayer-funded build-demolish-rebuild pattern is now playing out in Rutland, Vt.

In Rutland, the Forest Park low-rise apartment complex is being replaced with the Hickory Street Apartments, a low-rise-apartment complex Hickory Street planned with expert sociologist advice as a “mixed-income” development. The Hickory Street project is “…designed to look more like a traditional neighborhood.”

We’re told that unsubsidized units are going vacant because “…people don’t want to move in the winter,” but it’s probable that hidden subsidies are now or soon will be built into the supposedly “unsubsidized” rents, so the mixed-income image can be claimed, and it may work because –no surprise—truly unsubsidized housing in the modern Vermont is quite pricey.

As various metrics have shown, the overall cost-of-stay in Vermont is quite pricey, which explains middle-class flight and a demographic re-structuring toward a two-tier economy, with upper-income quintiles at one end and lower- or no-income quintiles at the other.

The top quintiles are economically based in government, financials, and information, with a fast-growing passive-income sub-sector; the lower quintiles are based in low-wage services and a set of subsidies ranging from taxes to food to (of course) housing. Even so, such advocacy groups as the D.C.-based Corporation For Enterprise Development have discerned a crisis-in-the-stats: that “16 percent of Vermont residents have almost no savings or assets.” My guess: most of these folks are also in the bottom income quintile. A f further guess: most vote D not R.