Amerika

Six months ago, the fastest growing part of North America has hit by a giant hurricane and flooded when the Army Corps of Engineers released water from the reservoirs in a state of panic, destroying many of the city’s oldest neighborhoods. Since that time, people have been wondering if Houston will do anything about its flooding problem.

The answer, resoundingly, is a double underlined NO. Houston is out of money, having spent most of it on pensions and public schools. Both of those overwhelmingly benefit its minority population; the public schools give free education to a mostly-Hispanic and often illegal alien population, and for African-Americans especially, a government job that requires twenty years of “work” before a fat pension is the good life.

Houston’s African-American mayor, Sylvester Turner, who apparently models himself after Detroit’s Kwame Kilpatrick, has announced no plans to deal with any of the serious problems that Houston faces, such as having no place for the water to go after having overbuilt the city over the past two decades.

Why would he? Turner presides over a minority-majority city, with whites making up less than a quarter of residents, and as we have seen time and again in American politics, minority groups do not support majority interests. If a bunch of white neighborhoods flood, who cares? Keep those benefits coming.

Currently, Turner is back in the news for having kept Houston’s sanctuary city status by negating its participation in a federal program that links up local law enforcement with immigration authorities:

(T)he measure known as 287(g) – which allows the federal deportation force to deputize local police officers – has emerged as one of the Trump administration’s most potent tools in the crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

…Liberal-leaning Harris county, which includes Houston, terminated its 287(g) agreement in February last year, but several surrounding counties – less populous and heavily Republican – have signed up.

Turner and those he has assembled around them know that going along with any policy that is perceived as pro-majority is a loser for them. Mass immigration and diversity turned the city blue back in the 1980s when its population shifted from majority white to majority Hispanic.

Since that time, despite having a budget crisis almost every year, the city has consistently elected Democrats who emphasize a “pro-business” message, which generally means opening the city up to cosmopolitan business of every variety. This brings in more new residents, who stay for an average of 3-5 years.

In particular, most Houston residents came here from California or New York, both high-tax Democrat strongholds that have become expensive and dysfunctional through their pursuit of liberal-style policies. Despite being a blue city, Houston leans to the libertarian edge on many issues like gun ownership and lack of a comprehensive safety net.

This saves Turner from having to do anything. As long as the flood of illegals continues, the large industries that rule the city — builders, oil, and food service — will continue to churn record profits; as long as he does not support majority rights, the coalition of minorities and women that elected him will continue to do so.

Despite that cozy little arrangement, problems are visible on the horizon because the narrow margin for error which is caused by such corrupt cycles falls apart when challenged by a large storm. Among other things, Houston’s school district has gone broke:

As HISD begins to prepare a budget for the upcoming 2018-2019 school year, the district is estimating a $208 million shortfall as result of the financial impact of Hurricane Harvey and recapture.

Recapture is the term for the money the State of Texas collects from “property-rich” districts for distribution to “property-poor” districts.

HISD has seen a decline in student enrollment and expects even fewer students during the coming school year, according to the district. That would mean a decrease in state funding.

The district anticipates the storm will have a significant impact on the city’s property values. HISD’s main source of funding is property tax dollars.

In other words, Houston has been subsidized for years by the rest of Texas because of cheap land costs, which has enabled its district to skate by without being financially responsible. Rising housing costs, driven mostly by Californian immigration, eliminated the “Robin Hood” subsidy that HISD received.

On top of that, Houston flooded its oldest and some of its wealthiest neighborhoods in order to save the newer, mostly-minority communities to the west. Turner had to represent his voting base, and if we are just counting warm bodies, there are a lot more of those people than there are white people.

As a consequence, property values have dropped and many people have abandoned homes that would not be worth the money to restore unless Houston had a drainage plan in the works. If these homes, which had not previously flooded, were safe again from flooding, they would retain their value and it would be worth paying off the mortgages.

However, in most cases, what Houston did was to potentially halve the value of many of these homes because whoever buys them will now have to purchase expensive flood insurance every year and expect a flood about every decade or so. This means that costs will be higher, so purchase prices will be lower.

Instead of trying to tackle the cause of the flooding — over-development of the land to which reservoirs once drained — Houston has simply redefined many areas as flood plains, reducing the value of the homes in them.

Since Houston sits at sea level, the obvious solution to its problem could be found in a plan to pipe water to the wetlands to the north where it can be absorbed or stored. This plan, proposed by private industry several months ago, has seen zero action by Houston officials.

Like Detroit and Chicago, Houston shows us the future of America: as minority-majority communities, our cities and states will be unable to react to real threats because the “new Americans” will not vote for them. Instead, as they did in their third world homelands, they will vote for gimmes in the short term and ignore long-term problems.

America is predicted to become a minority-majority nation by 2050. If you wonder what that future will be like, look no further than Houston, Texas, which recently put its minority-majority government to the test when Hurricane Harvey dumped thirty-one to forty-six inches of rain on the city.

Harvey deposited only slightly more water than 2001 Tropical Storm Allison, which dropped thirty-six inches of rain on the nation’s fourth largest city which is situated fifty miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. In both incidents, the city widely flooded; in the case of Harvey, however, there were two floods: first one similar to Allison, and then a second flood caused by the release of water from its reservoirs in order to save outlying areas of the city from flooding, but in turn flooding its oldest neighborhoods that lined the bayous through which reservoir flow drains to the sea.

What necessitated this release was the doubling of size of Houston since 1990, thanks mostly to immigration from below the Rio Grande and people from coastal cities in the USA fleeing the rising tax burden there which makes home ownership unafforable. In contrast, Houston offers very affordable housing if you are willing to live in the exurbs, or little sub-cities far from downtown, and this plus its sanctuary city status has caused an explosion in its minority population, to the point that the city itself is 24.9 percent white and its metropolitan area — including those sub-cities — is 38.8 percent white. The vast majority of these immigrants are from Central America or Asia, reducing the black population to 22 percent.

Houston has unwaveringly elected Democrats for the role of mayor since 1982, when Kathy Whitmire was elected mayor, and has been a de facto “sanctuary city” since 1992. Its primary industry, oil and gas, has a massive influence over city politics, as does another large industry, that of builders or “developers” who take raw patches of Texas landscape and transform them into neighborhoods which are then resold to new residents. Thanks to the Obama administration policy of relocating Section 8 housing to the suburbs, many of those new neighborhoods are occupied by non-whites. The Houston Independent School District (HISD) proudly boasts that its student body is 8.4 percent white, a sign of how rapidly minority-majority status has overtaken this city.

For at least two decades, the city has known of the risk of extreme flooding, but every plan has been voted down. Primary suspects include the builders, who want access to as much land as they can in order to keep manufacturing neighborhoods, and the minority population, who have voted Houston into debt by choosing pensions and benefits over infrastructure plans, such as a widening of the bayous or, even better, a new aqueduct to drain water from the city. As a result, Houston’s residents are paralyzed: the floods keep happening, and the city does nothing, mainly because minority voters are not interested in sacrificing benefits to pay for white people to have their homes not flood. Diversity holds the city hostage with the power of democracy.

Most stories on diversity focus on disadvantages like crime, high education costs, lower average IQ and loss of competence. But much like Detroit, Houston and the American Southwest face a more profound crisis, which is that when minorities can vote, they vote against infrastructure and prefer instead to keep increasing the benefits, even as a budget crisis looms. This situation resembles that found in Venezuela where candidates promised more benefits despite knowing the country was bankrupt, and won the election anyway. As is the case in most of the third world, in Houston the voters simply double down on what they want instead of what is needed. In addition to the usual problems with democracy, the minority-majority dimension ensures a fatal spiral of failure to invest in the future while draining any income today to spend on the citizens themselves. This is not surprising, because every group votes in its own interests, and for minorities, anything that decreases the power of whites while taking tax income from those whites to benefit minority groups is a winner at the polls. Minority rule takes prosperous cities and leaves them financially underwater, or at least physically underwater as happened when Houston flooded 4,000 homes to save minority housing.

We can see the future of America in this snapshot of a diversity-induced crisis. Houston could easily have afforded to stave off this problem in the 1990s, 2000s or early 2010s, but did not, despite being a place frequently hit by hurricanes. Minority groups breed faster than whites, and once they have the majority, will influence politics to be like that of a third-world nation at the expense of the white population. Much as in Israel politicians fear that faster Palestinian reproduction will lead to a dispossession of the Israeli Jews who built that nation, in Houston the descendants of those who fought at the Alamo are being out-voted by a wave of immigrants. When this hits the rest of the USA, there is no reason to think that the result will not be “Detroit everywhere,” where voters choose — as they have in Chicago and California — to keep increasing benefits and salaries for government workers, all while ignoring the debt exploding around them and the failing infrastructure that desperately needs investment.

America thrived when it was settled by pioneers who were willing to adapt to harsh conditions and do what was necessary to make a society out of raw wilderness. They sacrificed wealth so that the future would be more secure, and by doing that, were able to create great cities with infrastructure and investment in the future that guaranteed future greatness. With the demographic shift that is replacing this genetic group with another, America is shifting toward a different model, one in which the population votes to sacrifice the future to enjoy the present, and as a result, none of the infrastructure or investment that is needed can happen. That America will be like Venezuela a poorer place, and worse, a country which cannot extricate itself from the spiral of debt and spending that dooms it.

Tags: chicago, democracy, detroit, flooding, houston, kwame kilpatrick, minority-majority, sylvester turner