Prescribing the wrong solution (the heavy hand of government) instead of the correct one (a Judeo-Christian cultural revival)

Thomas Edsall is at it again. The New York Times columnist has a piece today, adorned with all the requisite wonkery, pointing out the pattern of urban centers emptying out as poor minorities get to the point where they can't take them any more than any other demographic, and first-ring suburbs therefore becoming more racially / ethnically homogenous (with high concentrations of said minorities) as middle-class-and-above whites flee to the outer ring of burbs.

Lots of stats and quotes from think-tank types, and then he starts dancing toward the point he really wants to make: He thinks government should impose mixed-housing policies on pretty much everyplace where ostensibly free human individuals and families choose to live.

He does acknowledge that hman nature trumps ideology, even in the Bay Area:

Even residents of Marin County in California, a bastion of Democratic liberalism, have protested proposals to build affordable housing. In May 2014, the California Assembly passed legislationreducing the obligation of Marin County to build low- and moderate-income housing.
If Marin County – as one writer put it a couple of years ago, “the most beautiful, bucolic, privileged, liberal, hippie-dippie place on the earth” — is having a hard time accepting affordable housing, the path out of impoverished neighborhoods for substantial numbers of black children will be arduous.

You won't be surprised to learn that Edsall likes this summer's SCOTUS decision in the Texas Housing Authority decision.

Hey, Tom, here's an idea: instead of going the tyranny route, replete with a view of human beings as cattle to be corralled into pens meeting regime specifications, how about if we try a national turning back to God and the morality and personal responsibility that is the obvious cure for that which made the inner cities such hell-holes that everybody wanted to leave?

It's a rhetorical question, I know. Freedom-Haters such as Edsall have a vested interest in seeing that social ills are perpetuated rather than cured, so there is an excuse to herd the cattle-masses and maintain their own power.