Crime won’t go away

People in suburbs often object to high-density housing development because it will change the character of their community. Yet we don’t appreciate how we came to live in homogeneous upper-middle-class neighborhoods.

I feel lucky to be able to own a home in the Bay Area because our parents were able to help us with our down payment.

Thus, we benefited from the generational wealth of our families.

We need to realize the reasons that many people of color have not been able to accumulate wealth through home ownership. This is because of public policies that discriminated against non-whites. African Americans were excluded from benefiting from New Deal and post-World War II GI Bill benefits that created wealth for generations of white people.

Suburban housing developments often included racial covenants that prohibited sale of homes to people of color.

Redlining by banks denied home loans to people of color who were otherwise qualified.

So, the character of the white uppermiddle-class neighborhoods many of us enjoy is the direct result of government-sanctioned discrimination.

We have a moral obligation to accept changes to the character of our neighborhoods through the inclusion of lower-income housing and higher density as the price to be paid for ending America’s shameful history of racist housing segregation policies.

Matt Metzler, Sonoma

Home loan redlining by banks and racist covenants prevented people of color from buying homes in many suburban neighborhoods.

The elephant in the room after Chesa Boudin’s recall is that crime isn’t going to evaporate after he leaves office. If we want clean, tent-free, drug-free San Francisco streets, as a practical matter we are saying every person should be housed, whether they can afford to pay or not. We are now several years into the unreality of that idea, that is, we lack the political will and financial resources to make housing available for everyone. In other words, the system has to work for each of us to work for all of us.

When will we change our approach to get different results? Doing things the same way as always will not make all of us more comfortable.

Rich Legg / Getty Images 2018