With the decline in crime, Manhattan is turning back into paradise for families — for the tiny handful who can afford it. Via Half Sigma, from the NYT:

Since 2000, according to census figures released last year, the number of children under age 5 living in Manhattan mushroomed by more than 32 percent. And though their ranks have been growing for several years, a new analysis for The New York Times makes clear for the first time who has been driving that growth: wealthy white families.

At least half of the growth was generated by children who are white and non-Hispanic. Their ranks expanded by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2005. For the first time since at least the 1960s, white children now outnumber either black or Hispanic youngsters in that age group in Manhattan.

The analysis shows that Manhattan’s 35,000 or so white non-Hispanic toddlers are being raised by parents whose median income was $284,208 a year in 2005, which means they are growing up in wealthier households than similar youngsters in any other large county in the country.

Among white families with toddlers, San Francisco ranked second, with a median income of $150,763, followed by Somerset, N.J. ($136,807); San Jose, Calif. ($134,668); Fairfield, Conn. ($132,427); and Westchester ($122,240). In comparison, the median income of other Manhattan households with toddlers was $66,213 for Asians, $31,171 for blacks and $25,467 for Hispanic families.

Keep in mind that $284k is the median income of white parents of toddlers, not of teens. I would extrapolate that Manhattan parents of teens going off to college have a median income of somewhere around a half million per year.

You can see how the 1990s fall in crime, which was much sharper in Manhattan that just about anywhere else in America, set off a virtuous cycle (virtuous from the perspective of the extremely wealth), making Manhattan ever more desirable and thus ever more expensive, which in turns drives out more and more of the nonwealthy from south of Harlem, leaving inside traders as the only criminals who can afford to live in most of Manhattan.

By the way, this reminds me that the media routinely gives an unrealistically lowball sense of just how much money it costs to live in the more fashionable parts of the country. It’s common for personal business and advice articles in the press to give the impression that making $100,000 per year would be the solution to all your financial problems, when it’s just enough to introduce you to a whole new world of problems.

Is the cost-of-living variance among places within this country greater than in the past? It sure seems that way, but I’ve never seen a study of it.

[Crossposted at Isteve.com]

Timeswatch has an article on a New York Times immigration piece by Rachel Swarns who seems unhappy that

Key lawmakers in both chambers seem to be moving to the right to assuage conservatives who helped derail immigration legislation last year. Now there are doubts as to whether Congress will actually send an immigration bill to President Bush this year.[Doubts Arise on Immigration Bill’s Chances, March 23, 2007]

Clay Waters at Timeswatch writes

Rachel Swarns, who chided Republicans for daring to use immigration as a political issue before the 2006 Congressional elections, wondered on Friday whether any kind of immigration legislation would pass the Democrat-controlled House.
….
Notice the unbalanced labeling by Swarns — while her story cited conservatives on three occasions, the liberal Hispanic interest group National Council of La Raza (”the race”) was simply termed an “immigration advocacy group.”Times Frets: Congress Not Yet on Board Amnesty Bandwagon

It is wonderful to have Joe Guzzardi back, even if not fully recovered from his dreadful illness. A glance at his archive demonstrates how valuable his VDARE.com work on the impact of the immigration deluge on working people has been: I particularly liked his Cape Cod articles.

Sentimentalism towards those who fought well as allies is, I suppose, commendable. But war is a business, not a bonding event, and consideration of the disaster that importing the Hmong (fine soldiers though they were) to America has been must chill emotionalism about Iraqi imports.

Even the social-issue obtuse Bloomberg News has woken up to the plague of knife assaults in London. (U.K. School Kids Strap on Stab-Proof Vests as Knife Crime Soars By Nick Allen March 22 (Bloomberg News) (They must be hearing anxieties from Ex-Pat investment banker friends.)It is obvious from the names that the problem is not one of English schoolchildren. One poor victim named by Bloomberg , Kodjo Yenja, actually predicted his own murder in complaining of the knife prevelance.

The problem is that some cultures are simply much more prone to murderous assaults than others. Iraqis, judging by the appalling record documented by Iraq Casualties.com, like to torture. Why do we need them here?