Saunders: Everyone at last week's neighborhood association meeting agreed that the row of abandoned and vandalized ho...

shunhe on July 11, 2020

Hi @elawrencehenderson,

Thanks for the question! So let’s take a look at what’s going on in this stimulus. We’re told that everyone thinks that there’s these houses on Carlton Street that pose a threat to the neighborhood. And no one argues now with the fact that tearing the houses down got rid of the threat. Some people, though, thought it was unnecessary to get rid of the buildings since they could’ve been rehabilitated through some city fund. But the overwhelming success of the demolition strategy proves that the majority who favored demolition were right, and that the people who wanted to go the rehabilitation route were wrong.

So now we’re asked for a principle that would determine that the demolition was right OR would determine that they should’ve gone the rehabilitation route; in other words, a principle that settles the question one way or another for sure.

Now take a look at (B), which tells us that when there’s two proposals, and one precludes the possibility of trying the other approach if the first proves unsatisfactory (in other words, you can’t do the one proposal if you do the other), then you should do the approach that doesn’t make it impossible to do the other. So you have two choices, A and B. If doing A makes it so you can’t do B, but not the other way around, you should do B. That’s what this answer choice is saying. And we can see that if this is true, then the demolition route shouldn’t have been taken. Why? Well, doing a demolition obviously makes it so you can’t rehabilitate the houses (since you destroyed them). But if you rehabilitated the houses and it didn’t work, you could still demolish them. So this situation falls under (B)’s purview, and as such, the proposal that doesn’t foreclose the other possibility (which in this case is rehabilitation, since that doesn’t foreclose demolition) should’ve been taken.

(A) isn’t right because we know that everyone agreed that the houses did pose a threat to the safety of the neighborhood as stated in the first sentence.

(C) isn’t right because it’s about two proposals for renovating (if one of two…), but only one proposal in the stimulus is about renovating. And we aren’t told about funding for demolition anyway.

(D) is wrong because we don’t actually know if the houses were sound, we only know that some people claimed they were sound.

(E) doesn’t tell us for sure that rehabilitation or demolition should’ve been chosen and so is also wrong.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.