How Mortgage Finance Affects the Urban Landscape
March 10, 2015 5:00am by
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Ever cheaper mortgages and low costs of transportation have together had also a profound political effect, the spontaneous gerrymandering of voters.
Cheap monthly mortgage payments and cheap transport have offered consumers the opportunity to move into suburban developments, and these suburban developments tend to be designed and marketed to specific demographics, primarily (but not only) segmented by income and age; just customer segmentation, as it also happens in hotel chains, restaurant chains, supermarket chains.
But since voting is based on residence, the construction and marketing of residential developments designed for particular market segments has also resulted in spontaneous gerrymandering of voters.
Organically grown, highly mixed cities where segmentation happened “microscopically” floor by floor in apartment buildings, or otherwise block by block, has been replaced by “macroscopically” segmented areas targeted at highly uniform communities. Suburbs with very few dark skinned residents, subsidized housing with very few middle class residents, gated communities with just very affluent residents have taken the place of “melting pot” cities.
A very, very big change.