People don't always know what's good for them

In my little island town, we had a tempest in a teapot over a low income apartment building. The tenants were mostly on Section 8 and some were elderly. There was a lot of criminal activity going on in and around the apartment building. A new owner took over the building and wanted to upgrade the apartments. The tenants were offered relocation money and asked to move. There was a huge hue and cry. The City council got involved and the tenants and City decided to try and fight the owners in court. It got totally out of hand. This went on and on. The upshot was that the tenants did have to move and the City dropped the suit. Other landlords in the city offered places to live, waived fees, etc. The City decided to pass ordinances against people evicting tenants, yada yada. People got ugly at council meetings, accusing others of discrimination, insensitivity to the poor, Black and elderly and a bunch of other spurious claims The people that bought the apartment building got sick of all the shit and sold the building again. I was riding the bus with a city Councilmember the other day. He is getting ready to run for State Assembly. I mentioned to him my devotion to a theory of social engineering, a fairly commonly held theory, that the poor should not be grouped together but interspersed amongst the general population. He said, suprisingly, because he is very Liberal, that he agreed, because the former tenants of the apartment building were coming up to him and saying that having to move from that Section 8 apartment building was the best thing that ever happened to them. My co-worker recently went through the same experience. She was living in the projects last year when it was purchased by another company. She said that she did not want to leave at first and couldn't work up the energy to look for another apartment. They gave her a list of apartments that took Section 8 vouchers and she saw one close by. She went to look at it and it was a duplex with a big back yard and her own personal laundry facilities. She got it that day and has been in heaven ever since. She said that some of the people in her old apartment were threatening to shoot the new owners. Now she realizes that she would still be stuck living around a bunch of antisocial criminals if she hadn't of been forced to move from the projects.