It's worth noting that eliminating SFZ doesn't mean that people are coming to take away your home. It's simply legalizing a diversity of other types of housing. Diverse Housing Types Promote Diversity: Research indicates that neighborhoods with a mix of housing types, including single-family homes, duplexes, and multifamily buildings, are more likely to exhibit racial and income diversity. This suggests that single-family zoning, by limiting housing diversity, may negatively impact overall community diversity https://housingmatters.urban.org/research-summary/housing-diversity-makes-communities-more-resilient-against-economic-downturns#:~:text=Past%20research%20has%20shown%20that,promote%20racial%20and%20income%20diversity Impact on Inequality and Efficiency: In the United States, local planning often heavily favors detached single-family homes, known as R1 zoning. This approach is criticized for exacerbating inequality and undermining efficiency, with historical motivations rooted in classism and racism. Such policies might contribute to maintaining these inequalities today. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01944363.2019.1651216#:~:text=Local%20planning%20in%20the%20United,racist%20motivations%2C%20R1%20today

Here's the tricky thing with stressful or slightly traumatic events in your life: if you don't resolve those events through meditation, therapy, or whatever - those events tend to haunt you until they're resolved. And a lot of those things won't go away. They keep prodding you, over and over, bothering you and distracting you from work. So by 2021, I realized I had a huge backlog of those stressful things, to the point where I couldn't work. I couldn't bring myself to finish the last few credits before transferring to a four-year university. I couldn't go through with accepting an internship at a construction firm. I couldn't maintain relationships, I basically felt like a small, nervous rock. Anyway, my parents weren't supportive of my idea to just take an extended, indefinite break to resolve all of that. So I found a friend in Windsor, Colorado who basically offered me a free place to stay for a while. I used that time to relax, and unpack like, more than a decade of trauma.

Of course, you'll find some resentment in my writings about this town, but it's logical resentment. It sucks. And if you care about your children having a well-rounded upbringing, living in Windsor will suck for you, too. There are barely any minorities there. If you google "The Whitest Towns In Colorado", Windsor will pop up as #3. You are not going to learn about other cultures there. Poor people work in Windsor, but they can't afford to live there. And most of the locals are fine with that, because they don't want more development and they don't want to change their neighborhoods to accomodate smaller units. If you look at the actions of the average local, you will see that they will care for poor people, as long as they're far away. And they will continue to express love for the poor, as long as they don't move in next door. You can see this sentiment in the laws of the town: In most Windsor neighborhoods, it is illegal to build anything except a single-family home. And so, the only people who can afford to buy a home in those neighborhoods are people of a certain economic class. And that's the way the locals like it.

Look, I'm not saying that building duplexes will single-handedly solve the housing crisis. I am saying that you can't solve the housing crisis if it's illegal to build density in most populated areas. Papers Upzoning lowered rents in Aukland.

(This was the first version of my blog, talking myself through whether or not I can change this town. I've since given up, and I'm leaving the first chance I get.) Biography To be honest, I really didn't have much of a choice in moving here. Basically I moved to Windsor, Colorado in Spring 2021 because it was the best option for me. I'd come out as trans around 2020, which put my parents on the verge of disowning me, which they eventually did. Anyway, the awkward part was that I didn't have much money to leave my family. Plus I had no ability to work because I needed time to process the past.

I'm pretty sure if they were given enough time to unpack years of suffering, given free therapy, granted a free room, then they would eventually start trying to work. Many of the unhoused have had to deal with very traumatic events in their life that get in the way of being able to focus on doing things. The idea is to let them heal and then they'll naturally want to do things, after they catch their breath. We're not talking about giving them yachts or caviar, we're talking about basic, basic necessities like shelter. To quote Alyse Oneto, " People need to have access to safe, stable housing to be in the best position to receive other care and services and to make progress on achieving other goals they may have."

A mayor or a city council wants to raise the salary for their position. Generally speaking, it's a good thing. Of course, people get mad about that. They look at all the problems that still exist and are like, "well, fix those problems first, and then we'll talk." But there's a better way of looking at it: If we want better, full-time civil servants then we have to pay offer a good, competitive salary. If you offer a low salary for an elected position, then of course there's going to be a very small pool of people who are going to actually try to campaign for it. The smaller the pool, the harder it is to get a competent leader.

So, my landlord on Windsor bumped up my rent. I found a better deal in Denver, and decided to move. I like it in Denver. I'm a lot closer to my friends. I can go on Nextdoor and find a lot more neighbors who actually care about the American Dream. Suburban Purgatory The American Dream is this idea that a poor person can step into town, find work, and build a life for themselves here. In other words, it's a ladder. At some point in the past, Windsor decided to destroy the bottom rungs of that ladder, to allow those steps to decay and rot. I assume that many of the locals used to be poor. I assume that once they climbed up and secured themselves a nice, comfortable single-family home, they stopped caring as much.

See Chapter 1 here. The Powers That Be If your household makes more than $150,000 a year, or has more than $500,000 in net worth, your household is in the country's top 20%. In other words, you are the upper-middle class. Windsor, Colorado is a town for the upper-middle class. If you are upper-middle class, you have time to really explore and learn about what benefits you and what doesn't. To have time to attend the local meetings. To do your research and gather information. More importantly, to spread your message far and wide. If you are not in the upper-middle class, the rent is too damn high to do much of this. In other words, Windsor isn't a real democracy, and most of the UMC is not interested in fixing that.

And some people, for some reason, they think that building more won't affect prices. It's mind-boggling. One Type Of Person, One Type Of House You have 200 people wanting a house, and there are only 200 houses. So the price of a house is high. You build 20 more houses, the price of the houses goes down. Over time

It used to be that people would measure skulls to figure out if they were inferior. Well, it was a really racist thing that people kind of stopped doing. Nobody breaks out the calipers and says, "let me look at your bone structure." There Goes The Neighborhood A lot of people in this town want to be able to choose who gets to live in their neighborhood. A lot of them are worried about the "wrong" kind of people making it in. They assume that a person who can afford a down payment on a single-family home is more trustworthy than someone who can't. So they live in a single-family neighborhood, and they don't want that neighborhood to be more affordable. If their neighbors build apartments nearby, well - now anyone can move in, even poor people.

# What Do You Care So Much About What Other People Think?

Fundamentally, politics is about systems of trust. You can provide clear, logical arguments for why apartments are good, single-family zoning is segregation, and why there's a racism problem in this town - But who's going to believe any of that if they don't know who you are? You try to rush through that first phase, and you can end up with nothing. And really, why am I in a rush?

# Sure, we can

Some people think that institutional racism basically stopped after the passing of the Civil Rights Act. In their minds, the moment President Johnson signed the bill all the racists were like "Whelp, I guess we'll give up our racist institutions now, no use trying to transform them in ways that the law won't be able to reach!" About a hundred years ago, explicit racial segregation was banned, so a lot of towns had this idea to get the same result by making it hard for poor people to live there! The idea was to expand exclusionary zoning, basically making it illegal or really, really hard to build things like apartments. "It's not racist if they're poor!" was the argument, but the end result was still the same. Exclusionary zoning is still rampant, and BIPOC are worse off for it.

"If anyone ever complains about bus lanes, show them this." (Link) If you want to reduce traffic, you stop spreading everything out so much so people don't need to drive everywhere to get things done!

Muh Classroom From this post: "My straight teachers never discussed their sexual orientation.” Uh. We definitely knew who was already married/getting married/having a baby when I was in school. I had teachers tell me stories about their spouses all the time. The poster is describing heteronormativity at work! Live and Let Live