There is a largely undomesticated segment of society that lives in the stained shadows of poverty, ignorance, crime and mayhem. These miscreants exist in a world of chaos and filth and care nothing about their home, the quality of the neighborhood or the welfare of their neighbors. These are the schemers, the scammers, criminals, professional failures, reprobates, repeat-offenders and general agitators; the bottom-feeding under-belly of the rest of a civilized society.
Liberals will tell us that putting these people into “nicer-housing” will make them nicer people. It won’t. What it will do is result in that nicer housing being trashed. This is why slums and crappy housing exist, not necessarily because property-owners want it that way, but because providing anything better is rewarded with destruction. Why keep replacing doors and walls that have been punched through with holes when these vermin will simply re-punch the same doors and walls over and over again? Better to let their domain fit their temperament.
Even scum-bags need a place to live, and so some property owners provide exactly the standard of housing these uncivilized people create on their own by the life-styles they choose to live, and by the decisions they choose to make. Ironically, this cohort is by in large representative of domestic, passed-down generational failure generally unique to those born here and rare in those who risked it all to come here.
Just as fathers are treated terribly in family court, property owners are likewise seen as the “bad-guys” in the legal system. There is little if any accountability placed on tenants and the presumption of favorable treatment and outcomes is always pointed in their direction while the property owner is generally perceived as evil.
I took a large financial gamble by purchasing a two-family home in a tough neighborhood because I saw the faint signs of revitalization. After evicting both tenants for months-long non-payment, the clean-up effort was so bad it began by using gas-masks and snow-shovels to remove the filth and debris from the floors. One tenant had buried her dog in the middle of the back yard in a grave so shallow the lawn mower dug it up. After waiting months to drag the one tenant into court, the judge asked her if she wanted free legal help in having her case reviewed. I was paying my lawyer by the hour while this scum-bucket-tenant was being spoon-fed free legal advice by a judge that had no concerns at all with my rights, my losses, and my bad investment.
After thousands of dollars in remediation and months of lost-rental income, I finally got two really good tenants, only to have them regularly frightened by the constant street noise, the fighting late at night the loud-unlicensed motorcycles, the illegal fireworks and on and on. The police and the city were no help, except by reminding me to pay my taxes on time.
These two great tenants had to sleep at night because they had jobs. The street-trash partying all night had no such obligations and had nary a care about the welfare of the very neighbors that actually worked and paid taxes so these same lazy welfare-rats can milk the system and annoy everyone around them.
After 4-years of trying my best and hoping for the revitalization of this neighborhood, it became clear it wasn’t going to happen and I recently sold the building to investors from Boston. My former tenants just reached out to me, asking if I had anything they might rent because the new owners raised their rents by 40%.
Here is my prediction. My former great long-term tenants will be forced to move and the Boston investors, managing from afar, will make the mistake of renting to scum-bags and the cycle of destruction will begin again, the investors will sell and walk away and the street and neighborhood will continue its downward decline. This is what happens when liberal policies paint the world as they wish it were, rather than how it actually is. This fantasy happens when out-of-touch policy makers live in their privileged and completely segregated world that floats above the rest of the wretched humanity they pretend to try and save while privately abhorring.
The City of Binghamton has a dual-system of tolerance regarding law-and-order; one set very high for poor neighborhoods, and the other set low for the wealthy and privileged. This emboldens and encourages the very behaviors that are the least desirable and insures that positive changes will not come. Say what you will about “gentrification”, but without it, the undomesticated amongst us make our communities unsafe, undesirable and a bad investment.
Perspectives from the INTJ angle 