The District of Columbia has some serious fair housing laws. There are 19 protected classes--groups of people that it is illegal to discriminate against. Classes include race, sexual orientation, gender, etc. Some are a little obscure, eg, "matriculation" means you can't say you won't rent an apartment to students.
One thing not on the list: owning a fancy house. And no duh, right? Real estate owners have a long history of oppressing less fortunate Americans, not the other way around.
And yet there I was, in a "community" meeting to discuss pending zoning changes in my neighborhood, when up stands a retired hippie--his 2 1/2 foot gray pony tail neatly fastened in three places, his wife in salt and pepper dreadlocks and a tie-dyed dress beside him--to explain how he was oppressed: DC had declared war on Single Family Homes.
That's right. Hippie Guy owns real estate worth (conservatively) 1 million dollars and this has made him a target of discrimination!
Greedy developers, who don't care [about... who knows?] are looking to make this a neighborhood that welcomes... young people.
(Applause).
And the office of planning tells me that their job is to make the city more dense! The single family home is becoming an endangered species!
(Gasp!)
Never mind that the meeting was at a school on 11th Street NW, a location that no white people would dare visit in the evening before greedy developers started renovating houses there about 10 years ago. Never mind that Northeast Washington has thousands of single family homes that this guy doesn't know about because they are home to black people. Never mind that virtually every private residence in the city was built by a greedy developer.
What I want to know is this: why would anyone care how other people choose to live?
Hippie Guy owns his house. It can't be changed against his will. So this is about how other people live. If you want to live in a multi-unit building, that's your choice, but Hippie Guy doesn't want to see it. Those kinds of living arrangements are offensive to his eyes.
And don't tell him it's not a choice (if we want to save the environment and make housing affordable for everyone). Screw science! Screw economics! Hippie Guy, knows there's no multi-unit living in Walden, so it is a lifestyle choice he does not approve of. Blessed be the real estate owners for their children will inherit a fortune.