Tag Archives: race

Suburbanites who don’t like proposals for affordable housing in the Twin Cities region

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The Metropolitan Council for the Minneapolis-St. Paul region is working on plans for affordable housing but a number of suburbanites are not pleased with where the affordable housing might go:

The Met Council sees a growing problem. Its own newly available data suggest that annual production of affordable housing has dropped by hundreds of units since 2010, even as market-rate housing has rebounded.

An advance peek at the Met Council’s proposed goals, to be released late Monday, shows that communities considered to be prime locations for adding affordable units include upper income suburbs, such as North Oaks and Eden Prairie, and cornfield’s-edge fringe communities such as Minnetrista and Lake Elmo…

The target numbers — released this week for public comment, with adjustments possible from now to July — are part of a once-per-decade planning process that will begin in every city this fall. Each must start to figure out how to accommodate the additional units.

The Met Council is under heavy fire for allegedly pushing too much affordable housing into areas with plenty of it already, intensifying concentrations of poverty and perpetuating racial segregation in the Twin Cities.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The region has a history of metropolitanization, a rare occurrence in American cities, as well as an openness to immigrants, yet advancing affordable housing units in middle- to upper-end suburbs may be going too far. As some of the suburbanites in the article note, they moved to these communities to escape issues like this. But, the quality of life concerns they tend to express (good school, low crime, sense of community) seem to be inextricably linked with race/ethnicity and social class. Just a reminder that part of the benefits of having money in the United States is that one can move to such a place that insulates you against interacting with others.

Gentrification limited in Chicago; should worry more about neighborhoods in severe decline

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Gentrification may get a lot of attention in big cities but one journalist suggests the more influential issue in Chicago is the number of neighborhoods that have undergone severe declines.

At WBEZ, a Chicago public radio station, our neighborhood bureau reporters produced a package of stories, “There Goes the Neighborhood” (found here) in December, about the changing conditions of neighborhoods in racially segregated Chicago. We partnered with the University of Illinois at Chicago, which created a gentrification index for understanding how to measure neighborhood change in the city, for better or worse. The index measures 13 indicators of neighborhood conditions, including race, income, house values, education, and even the percentage of kids attending private schools. The findings confirmed and challenged some of our own notions, but the main takeaway is that gentrification is not as pervasive throughout Chicago as conventional wisdom might suggest.

Scoring neighborhoods based on the index, Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods were grouped into nine categories ranging from “stable upper/middle class,” meaning index scores remained high since the 1970s, to “severe declines,” meaning those scores dropped significantly since the ’70s. The “gentrification” category captured neighborhoods that had low index scores in the 1970s, but grew significantly higher by 2010. There were only nine neighborhoods that fit that “gentrifying” classification, almost all of them in downtown Chicago (“The Loop”) or just north of it, areas that have been historically white. These places were basically immune to the housing crash, but meanwhile a glut of luxury high rises cast shadows over Lake Michigan.

The category you want to pay attention to, though is “severe decline” — 14 neighborhoods found mostly in South and West Chicago have populations that are, on average, two-thirds African American. Add those to the 12 neighborhoods that have remained in extreme poverty since the ’70s, of which 94.5 percent of residents are African American…

Policymakers, hence, must address the concerns of inequitable development across neighborhoods and income inequality, which are both also national issues. According to a City Observatory report examining urban poverty released last year, the problem over the past four decades is not wealthy whites infiltrating black and Latino neighborhoods with designer Pulaski hatchets and vegan cupcake shops. Governing magazine came to similar conclusions, showing low percentages of gentrified Census tracts in Chicago since 1990.

Gentrification might be the sexy topic but addressing the pressing issues in persistently disadvantaged neighborhoods would likely help more people in the long run. Of course, addressing the issues in poor neighborhoods is complex and not change may not come as quickly as it does through gentrification. Given Chicago’s long history of residential segregation, many of these poor neighborhoods – which are often heavily non-white – are not in any danger of gentrification anytime soon because they are far removed from the edges of wealthier white neighborhoods where good real estate deals or trendy spaces appealing to young, white, creative types might be found.

 

Following the ideals of Gautraux to deconcentrate poverty in the Chicago suburbs

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The Gautreaux Program in Chicago preceded Moving To Opportunity and now there are more recent efforts to deconconcentrate poverty in the Chicago region:

After all, suburbs are no longer the bastions of privilege they once were (though majority white suburbs still, for the most part, are). Since the recession, it’s the exurbs in Chicago that have had job growth, while affordable housing near those jobs is often hard to find. Poverty is growing in suburbs across the country, including in Chicago, and moving families blindly out of the city may do more harm than good.

That’s why Chicago’s leaders are now focusing on helping low-income people live in mixed-income neighborhoods in both the suburbs and the city that have good access to transit and jobs, high homeownership rates, low commute times, walkable areas and a low percentage of people receiving public-housing assistance, said Robin Snyderman, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who also works as a consultant on housing policy in Chicago.

Nine housing authorities now participate in a regional pool of resources that began more than a decade ago. They include authorities in counties such as DuPage, Lake, and McHenry, using the money to build nearly 30 mixed-income developments in “opportunity areas” that are near transit and job opportunities.

“Just getting rental housing into some of these communities was hard to do for many years,” said Snyderman said.

A pilot program launched in 2011, the Chicago Region Housing Choice Initiative (CRHCI), encourages families to use vouchers to move to some of these locations, giving them counseling to help them do so.

Regional authorities and mayors have “adopted new tools for promoting inclusion and diversity, building on the lessons learned from Gautreaux,” she said. “I feel more hopeful that the historic segregation in the Chicago region can be transformed—because it’s now not all on the shoulders of the public housing authority,” she said.

See this earlier post about some of the results of the Moving To Opportunity program. These programs aren’t immediate panaceas and progress is often slow. It took decades to get Gautreaux into action and more time to assess results from MTO. Additionally, it can be difficult to get wealthier suburbs to buy in – if they do talk about affordable housing, it tends to involve seniors, young college graduates, or civil servants, not actually poorer residents.

In all, residential segregation is a difficult problem to address. If it is all left to the market, wealthier residents will move to nicer suburbs, maintaining or increasing their life chances, and then limit the access of others to move into their communities (even if they need them as workers in that community). Social programs can help but they can be costly, it takes time to assess their effectiveness, and it requires wealthier communities to get on board. This is one of those social problems that requires patience, active efforts, and time to see social change occur.

Loss of housing wealth hits black suburbanites hard

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The housing and economic crisis of the last decade has hit black suburbanites particular hard:

But today, the nation’s highest-income majority-black county stands out for a different reason — its residents have lost far more wealth than families in neighboring, majority-white suburbs. And while every one of these surrounding counties is enjoying a strong rebound in housing prices and their economies, Prince George’s is lagging far behind, and local economists say a full recovery appears unlikely anytime soon…

The recession and tepid recovery have erased two decades of African American wealth gains. Nationally, the net worth of the typical African American family declined by one-third between 2010 and 2013, according to a Washington Post analysis of the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, a drop far greater than that of whites or Hispanics…

Not only is African American wealth down, but the chances of a quick comeback seem bleak. Just over a decade ago, homeownership — the single biggest engine of wealth creation for most Americans — reached a historic high for African Americans, nearly 50?percent. Now the black homeownership rate has dipped under 43?percent, and the homeownership gap separating blacks and whites is at levels not seen in a century, according to Boston University researcher Robert A. Margo…

Many researchers say the biggest portion of the wealth gap results from the strikingly different experiences blacks and whites typically have with homeownership. Most whites live in largely white neighborhoods, where homes often prove to be a better investment because people of all races want to live there. Predominantly black communities tend to attract a narrower group of mainly black buyers, dampening demand and prices, they say…

Scholars who have studied this dynamic and real estate professionals who have lived it say the price differences go beyond those that might be dictated by the perceived quality of schools, or the public and commercial investment made in particular neighborhoods. The big difference maker, they say, is race.

In other words, simply promoting homeownership – a key part of the ideal of the American Dream and also something taken as a sign that various groups have made it – is not the complete answer for thinking about equality among different groups. What homes people own and where they are located also matter. Decades of research in urban sociology and related areas shows that blacks and other minorities often don’t live in the same suburban settings as white suburbanites. Their homes tend to be located in poorer neighborhoods and neighborhoods that have higher non-white populations. This is due to a variety of reasons including long-term white wealth that gives whites better opportunities to move to wealthier and whiter places, zoning practices in wealthier communities that tend to limit cheaper or affordable housing (examples here and here), mobility patterns among whites that show they leave neighborhoods and communities as they become more non-white (the process of “white flight” continues in some suburban areas), and patterns of mortgage lending as well as renting that tend to take advantage of poorer and non-white residents. Tackling the issue of residential segregation still matters today even as more minorities and poor residents move to the suburbs.

 

MLK streets in the US contained in a “nation within a nation”

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Many American cities have streets named after Martin Luther King Jr. and many are located within black areas:

Across the country there are 730 streets named after civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr…

For his book “Along Martin Luther King: Travels on Black America’s Main Street,” author Jonathan Tilove visited nearly 500 Martin Luther King streets across the country. In his book, he described a “nation within a nation” as “a parallel universe.”

“For many whites, a street sign that says Martin Luther King tells them they are lost,” Tilove wrote. “For many blacks, a street sign that says Martin Luther King tells them they are found.”

And Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. drive in Chicago has its own complicated past:

Instead, a South Side designation was boosted by Mayor Richard J. Daley. It was a move Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor describe as “disingenuous” in their Daley biography “American Pharaoh.”

Foes when King was alive, Daley, by supporting the renaming, was attempting to portray himself as a forward thinker on race relations ahead of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the biographers said.

In dedicating the street, Daley “invoked King’s devotion to nonviolence in a verbal formation that made it sound as if Daley had the idea first,” Cohen and Taylor wrote.

Par for the course in a racialized country: where the effects of race extend even to street names. That said, I wonder what would happen in some major cities if there were efforts to extend MLK street into white and/or tourist areas…

Finding residential segregation in the Long Island suburbs

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Long Island might be suburban New York but there are sharp racial divides across suburban communities:

Two villages, Hempstead and Garden City, lie adjacent to one another in Nassau County. Hempstead has a medium household income of $52,000. Garden City’s is $150,000. Hempstead, in parts, resembles an inner city—with bodegas, laundromats, low-rise apartment buildings. Garden City is a suburban idyll, with tree-lined streets, gourmet grocery stores, and large colonial-style homes. Garden City is 88 percent white; Hempstead is 92 percent black and Hispanic (split about evenly). The transition between the two villages occurs within one block, a visual whiplash. See for yourself. Travel up North Franklin Street on Google maps.

“Long Island is becoming more diverse, Nassau County is becoming more diverse,” says John Logan, a Brown University sociologist who has been studying demographics since the 1970s. “But within Nassau County there’s been hardly any change in the degree of segregation. The predominantly minority areas are becoming more minority. And the predominantly white areas are staying mostly white.”

That demographic story of Nassau County, Long Island, is the story of the nation’s suburbs at large. Zoom way out, and it looks like the suburbs are becoming more diverse—a welcomed reversal of the racist housing policies of the last century that kept minorities in the cities. But zoom in, block by block, and you see that within those suburbs, stark segregational divides like the one between Hempstead and Garden City still exist…

Here’s the one data point to make that case: When Logan controls for income, he finds that blacks and Hispanics who earn over $75,000 a year live in areas with higher poverty rates than whites who make less than $40,000.

This is an old and ongoing story. As numerous scholars have pointed out, one of the first mass suburbs in the United States, the Levittown on Long Island, refused to have black residents for years. And, even as more minorities have moved to the suburbs in recent decades, whites and minorities don’t always live in the same places.

Read more about sociologist John Logan’s findings regarding Separate and Unequal in Suburbia here.

The irony of a Chicago area march to support police held in…Oak Brook

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Hundreds of people gathered on Sunday to march in support of police near the Oak Brook Center mall:

King took to Facebook a few weeks back to recruit backing for a community march that would support police officers. She envisioned it as a kind of counterprotest — a response to the marches against police brutality that have taken place in the Chicago area and around the country in recent months…

The march stepped off from a parking lot at Oakbrook Center mall, moved south on Route 83, then headed east on 22nd Street, ending in a parking area on the other side of Oakbrook Center.

Marchers yelled “Go blue!” as they walked, and they held up signs that said “Blue lives matter” and “Blue protects, serves and defends us all.”…

Oak Brook police closed portions of Route 83 and 22nd Street to accommodate the march. Marchers expressed their thanks to the officers as they walked by.

Why is this setting particularly interesting? Here are a few reasons:

1. According to the Census, Oak Brook had 8,041 residents in 2013 and the median household income was $135,880.

2. Oak Brook Center is one of the largest shopping malls in the Chicago region and one of the more upscale.

3. The community has low crime rates.

4. According to Wikipedia, “it is home to the headquarters of several notable companies and organizations including McDonald’s, Ace Hardware, Blistex, Federal Signal, CenterPoint Properties, Sanford L.P., Tree house Foods, and Lions Clubs International.

5. The history of Oak Brook was influenced by one influential landowner: “It is sometimes referred to as Paul Butler’s realized dream. As the largest landholder, he had consulted with such experts as Robert Kingery of the Regional Planning Commis­sion, Carl Gardner Associates, and Garson Rohrback of General Planning & Research…A unique feature is the village-owned 270-acre Oak Brook Sports Core, purchased from Paul Butler in 1977 pursuant to a vote by the residents. The Sports Core now boasts an eighteen-hole golf course, bath and tennis club, polo fields, other recreational areas, all sup­ported by user-fees and available primarily to Oak Brook residents. The Sports Core was originally developed by Paul Butler, who was instrumental in bringing polo, the so-called sport of kings,” to the midwest. Mr. Butler, whose accidental death, the day after his 89th birthday in 1982, proved a great loss to the village, had always been an enthusiastic sup­porter of excellence in all fields of athletics. The Sports Core has over the years been the location of numerous fashionable benefit horse shows, international polo matches, golf tourna­ments and other events for which Oak Brook was noted long before it developed residen­tially and commercially.”

All together, Oak Brook is a wealthy suburban community with a significant retail and office base and a history connected to polo fields. If the recent protests regarding Ferguson and New York City are about police conduct and more broadly about race, Oak Brook, Illinois is (1) a community removed from these everyday concerns and (2) is exactly the sort of protected place that represents the white establishment. To hold a march in favor of police could be construed then as advocating for the status quo in Oak Brook and similarly safe and well-off places.

(An alternative explanation might be that Oak Brook is near multiple highways, making it easy for marchers to travel to the community.)

“The ghetto has moved to the suburbs”

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Several sociologists discuss the patterns of residential segregation in the American suburbs which are increasingly non-white:

Logan found that, despite a decline in racial segregation and improvements in incomes marked by the rise of the black middle class, blacks and Hispanics continue to live in the least desirable neighborhoods – even when they can afford better – and their children attend the lowest-performing schools…

“Moving to the suburbs was once believed to mean making it into the mainstream,” he said. “There is something to this idea that moving on out is moving up … Yet minorities are not finding equal access to the American dream.” When neighborhoods where blacks live are compared to those where whites or Asians live, “the inequality is quite stark,” he said…

But suburban diversity clearly does not equal racial integration. Just over 10 percent of the suburban population was black in 2010, but the average black suburbanite lived in a neighborhood that was more than 35 percent black. And although about 69 percent of suburban residents were white, fewer than 45 percent of the average black suburbanite’s neighbors were white…

“Thirty years ago, it would’ve been in the city of St. Louis, but blacks moved out of St. Louis to this place [Ferguson], and whites fled,” Anderson said. “The ghetto has moved to the suburbs. It’s happening to many places in the country.”

The suburbs are no longer the sole retreat of wealthier whites but they are not exactly equal either. The study discussed here corroborates a lot of evidence that shows that even as the suburbs become less white and less wealthy (more people in poverty than cities), people are not evenly spread throughout suburban areas. Just as cities have wealthier and less wealthy neighborhoods, suburbs have a variety of communities and a number where wealthier residents have found ways to limit the arrival of others. (Property values, exclusionary zoning, gated communities, a lack of affordable housing, a lack of social services, etc.)

In other words, residential segregation is alive and well in the United States even if more people have “made it” to the suburbs.

Three graphics showing more non-whites in the American suburbs

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William Frey discusses the increase of non-whites in American suburbs with three graphics:

These findings are not new though the trend continues: the suburban populations of the three largest minority groups have increased in recent decades. William Frey and others at the Brookings Institution have been tracking these findings quite effectively. Yet, as Frey notes, population growth doesn’t mean that non-whites are evenly spread throughout the suburbs:

While Hispanics, Asians and blacks are now main players in suburbanization, they do not yet have a substantial presence in the outer suburbs and show some clustering in same-race communities, in many cases as a result of quasi-legal exclusionary practices.

Thus, the headline of this piece – “The Suburbs: Not Just for White People Anymore” – might be a bit misleading. This does not mean that wealthier whites and non-whites are living in the same places even if more non-whites live in suburban areas. Given the role of social class in the suburbs where more wealth and money means living in more exclusive communities, many non-whites haven’t exactly attained the same suburban life.

Looking at Black America as a separate country

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A long infographic looks at how a country solely comprised of Black Americans would compare to other nations. Here is a brief summary:

In the infographics below, two pictures emerge. The first is of a strong nation with considerable manpower and purchasing power. The second is of a troubled, fragile state suffering from socioeconomic disparities and structural subjugation in ways that degrade life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (on some measures, black America resembles countries like Brazil, China, and Russia—emerging powers that are struggling with stark economic inequality). Essentially, what we’re witnessing is a nation that is comparable in certain ways to a regional power existing in the state of Disparistan (or, perhaps, Despairistan). This is more than an inconvenient truth; it fundamentally undermines the United States’ greatest contribution to humanity: the American idea.

Intriguing thought experiment. It would then be interesting to do this for each major racial/ethnic group in the United States to see the clear differences.