The maps led me to wondering what a similar diagram of cities in the UK would look like, and I found a map of England and Wales with dots coloured by race.
It's much more mixed. Where black/white/asian areas still exist the boundaries tend to be pretty blurred.
In the UK's case, I'd think that you'd see relatively little race-based self-segregation but a lot of class-based; I've always heard that the UK is classist but not very racist, and that non-whites tend to be higher-class than a lot of the locals.
This analysis clearly doesn't explain everything. If you move bias over to 100% and run the random move simulation segregation quickly falls below 10%. If the simulation were an accurate view of the world the take-away would be everyone should become more biased to prevent segregation, a nonsensical result.
Your assessment is incorrect. It falls below 10%, but the majority of the polygons are "unhappy" and waiting to be randomly moved.
The program gets stuck continually shuffling the polygons around and it looks like it will never finish (I waited several minutes and no progress was made). It seems likely that this is because each polygon that is moved has a high chance of also being "unhappy" at the new random location.
By definition, with 100% bias, the program won't stop until there is full segregation.
Correct, but unbounded continual iteration more cleanly represents real life. The real flaw in the simulation is the limitation of free space, the world is a much bigger place.
Well, if we are talking about a city, space is often somewhat scarce. Regardless, I don't think that would reduce segregation.
I think the biggest limitation is "unhappy" polygons moving to random locations, instead of having some choice in the matter. Reducing this limitation would result in faster convergence towards a stable, segregated state, as the choices made would reflect the bias of the participants.
For those who don't live here I'd say a majority of the places, at least here on the east coast, don't follow this trend. This definitely isn't the case where I grew up, in New Jersey, and is absolutely incorrect for New York City.
I'd hope that this article would have done a better job in explaining that this isn't the rule but that these are a few exceptions to such.
> This definitely isn't the case where I grew up, in New Jersey, and is absolutely incorrect for New York City.
It's not something that's nearly as sharply defined in NYC, but there's definitely some racial separation by neighborhood if you look at statistical maps on the subject.
This is a very, very untrue statement. I grew up in New York and both the city and Long Island are pretty heavily segregated by race. Yes, there are areas where there is more integration but by and large blacks live in one area and whites live in another. Housing costs in the city have made it so that integration happens for a while in some neighborhoods but really only when that neighborhood is gentrifying. Post gentrification it ends up being pretty much just white or, if you're lucky, a mix of upper middle class people of varying ethnicity but still majority white.
I always kind of assumed there was a constant gentrification effect in cheap NYC neighborhoods because young people are price sensitive, no matter what their race or profession.
Ethnic neighborhood is cheap ->
Young professionals start to move in ->
Integration begins ->
Businesses that cater to young professionals establish themselves in the neighborhood ->
Landlords slowly but steadily increase rent ->
New immigrants and children of existing ethnic tenants move to a different, less expensive neighborhood
You have a point -- I note that you did not argue that there is complete mixing in other cities, just that the examples chosen for the OP are particularly stark.
They generally show more mixing than the cities featured in the OP. (Cold comfort if you happen to live in Kansas City, Baltimore, St. Louis, or Chicago.)
I have lived in Kansas City and in St. Louis, and I agree that they are both more segregated than their peer cities in the, say, top 50 US cities. Certainly in Kansas City, the racial covenants highlighted in the article were very much in force when large land developers expanded the city into its suburbs.
It's worth remembering that the racial covenants in force at the time were very popular. Proposition 14 in California, which was specifically written to allow redlining to continue, passed with 65% of the vote in 1964 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_14_(196...).
I disagree. NYC is the same, just at lower resolution. The segregation happens along small blocks and avenues rather than towns. I live along the "tracks" on 4th Ave in Brooklyn. The difference is stark-- both in terms of demographics and steep drop-offs in property prices and rents.
Segregation is not good, but having it at low resolution at least allows some interaction across lines, which is positive. Such interaction is more unlikely when the segregation is at the town or village resolution.
I don't know about NYC, but in terms of east coast, I've noticed my neighborhood in Philadelphia is incredibly racially diverse. I honestly can't say I see more of any one race than another here. I can only speak for one neighborhood, however.
Yes that is where my comment stems from: my personal experience. On my street alone I have black, Hispanic, Italian, Muslim, and Asian neighbors of approximately even distributions. In my school the mix was similar.
They might be mixed better overall in specific areas, but there's some significant segregation... anecdotally you can look at Boston and see very clear cross-neighborhood divides.
Some mixed areas like the South End (50% white), but also the North End (90% white) and Roxbury (8% white). Roxbury and the North End are only 4 miles away from each other.
Not to mention the fact that the fact that Roxbury is only 8% white is primarily due to a huge wave of white flight to the metro Boston suburbs. This happened within our parents' lifetimes. In Boston one of the largest periods of white flight happened to coincide with forced school segregation (bussing).
The east coast may be liberal politically, but it's still also racist. You can see similar themes reoccurring with the rate of gentrification and the rise of charter schools in the city.
Nitpick: "White" is too coarse-grained for the North End; it's an ethnically mixed area near the end of gentrification, with SWPL elites displacing the native South Italians...
A bit shortsighted that you'd call Italians 'native' to the North End — even if we disregard Native Americans, The North End began with Irish immigrants (who managed to push out a small African community in a section called New Guinea).
The Irish were ultimately pushed out by a mix of Jewish and Italian immigrants (the Jews ultimately shifted to Roxbury and the Italians took hold and established the North End as 'Little Italy').
I don't think gentrification is any more over than it was 100 years ago. It simply cycles.
It seems like there's a business opportunity for someone who wants to set up a lending company that offers black families fair and favorable terms on mortgages.
Or maybe racism falsely informs that risk model? If that's the case then one can likely deploy capital like its low-risk to "higher-risk" (and thus higher APR) loans. Of course competition will eventually destroy this model, but initially it could be profitable.
Sadly, this is demonstrably untrue. A purely-math-based approach would still bear the weight of past racist policies and their residual effects, but that's not even what we have today.
It's something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Denying minorities equal access to lending limits demand for houses in minority-dominated areas, which in turn limits the return on housing in such areas. Similarly, when white people start fleeing a neighborhood because of increased minority (especially black) residents moving in, that drives down house prices, driving further white residents out. The resulting price spiral guts what once made the neighborhood desireable.
Thus, it is actually rational for a white home owner to sell immediately after minority residents move into their neighborhood, even if they aren't motivated by any racial animus. It is correspondingly rational for bankers to price loans to minorities at higher rates because of the increased risk they represent. So to a certain extent, bankers don't loan to minorities because bankers don't loan to minorities.
Someone, somewhere needs to break the negative feedback loop.
That was the intention of the Fair Housing Act, but it hasn't been enough. Partially because of inadequate enforcement and partially because home ownership is only one tiny aspect of the vast and complicated beast that is race in America. Even if black Americans had perfectly equal access to lending and housing, the racial income gap would still exclude them from many of the least integrated areas, which also happen to be where the best schools and opportunities for improving income are.
It's shitty and I don't pretend to have any inkling of how to address these problems. But I don't think you can justify bankers or white flighters or blockbusters or whomever by saying they are responding rationally to real risks and incentives. That just means the risks and incentives need to be changed, because the social consequences have been awful for Americans in general and minorities in particular.
Unless I misunderstood various explanations of the sub-prime crisis, this is a Mount Olympus sized characterization is it not? "Favorable terms" doesn't implicitly mean a repeat of the multivariate conditions that caused the housing collapse, just as the housing collapse can't be strictly pinned on "favorable" mortgages.
Welcome to correction here from a more informed perspective.
I'm saying that there at one time was a business opportunity for someone who wanted to setup a lending company that offers black families fair and favorable terms on mortgages. (Granted, there may be some gray area on 'fair and favorable').
Partially because of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Community Reinvestment Act, banks were incentivised. Black families were targeted by predatory lenders who knew the rules well enough to get the loans for the individuals, individuals who perhaps were not in an economic position to be able to fulfill the agreements of the loans, then resell them in mortgage backed securities. At the micro level, the Community Reinvestment Act was "a good thing". We as a society want everyone to have a home. However, it did have negative consequences at the macro level.
So there was a business opportunity at one time. Is there today? I don't know. And yes, it was probably an over-characterization.
The town where I live (SoCal) has 14 elementary schools. Only two of them are between 20% and 80% hispanic student population, with the other 12 in the outer two quintiles.
At least some of this is due to economic reasons. It's about $200k extra on a 3BR house to go from a "bad" school zone to a "good" school zone. That has fall-on effects that includes gerrymandering. The school boundaries are very much not compact. I know of at least one boy who walks through areas zoned for another school to get to his school.
The differences are so extreme, that I have mentioned multiple times that if you were to replace "California" with "Virginia" and "hispanic" with "black" you would have federally mandated cross-town busing of students.
And yet in Connecticut there are many well regarded school systems in affluent towns that spend about the same per student than the failing schools in Connecticut cities.
Cities: Waterbury ($15,859), Hartford ($18,397), Bridgeport ($15,228), Stamford (18,188), and New Haven ($17,084) spend on average $16,951 per student.
Some well-regarded suburban school districts: Simsbury ($15,969), Ridgefield ($17,315), Glastonbury ($15,481), West Hartford ($15,720), for an average of $16,121.
Clearly there is something going on beyond the dollars spent per student.
In this case I was only including the schools in the town's unified school district, so the tax-base is identical. There are a couple of school districts in affluent areas just outside of town that each have only 1 elementary school. One school is funded to double that of the unified district on a per-student basis, and the other triple. On top of that, a lot of activities at schools are funded from donations from parents, which are obviously higher at the more affluent schools.
[edit] The two schools I mention on the outskirts of town are 6% and 8% hispanic, respectively.
This is a very important policy reform. Readers outside the US may not realize that the school funding system has this inbuilt feedback loop: good schools get more funding from property taxes and keep nearby property values high, bad schools get less funding from property taxes and keep nearby property values low. School quality is often key in determining home buyer location preferences.
School quality also affects home buyer location preference significantly in Canada as well. But Canada doesn't feature this particular financial feedback loop (though there's another feedback loop of well-learned students attracting more parents with well-learned children. But that is not institutionalized and far less severe a problem).
The above post was with somewhat old data; I downloaded the relevant database from california, and using the most recent numbers (2014) updated things[1]. There are fewer schools because I originally included schools that were not geographically based, as we are talking about geographic segregation. The blue dots correspond to % hispanic students, the pink is % qualifying for free/reduced school lunch, and yellow is % English learners. The Y axis is state standardized test scores.
There are now not any schools with less than 20% hispanic student populations (there is still a charter school with under 20% hispanic, but it was excluded per above), but there is a huge hole between 45% and 75% hispanic, and 6 out of 10 are 80% or more hispanic. If children were assigned randomly to these schools, one would expect a normal distribution around the population mean.
And to clarify, all of these schools are within a single school district and pull from the same funding source.
Oak Park is a suburb next to Chicago that managed to integrate fairly well, but when reading how it happened I was struck at how draconian it was handled. They purposefully wanted an integrated city and tried to sotftly limit or "steer" how many Black people moved in, and to spread them throughout the whole city. There were restrictions on who could sell your home. For sale signs were banned even. They expanded the police force to assure people they would still be safe. In short they used quite a bit of government force to establish an integrated city with no noticeable Black or White area. And it worked, even today it's one of the most integrated suburbs of the city. I'm honestly not sure what lesson we should take from it.
Hyde Park on the cities south side is similar. It started out in a draconian battle against integration, and then switched to a draconian battle for integration.
It didn't hurt that the University of Chicago drove most of the land ownership and maintained a massive private police force.
I'm with you, not sure what the lesson was, but it led to an integrated neighborhood.
It was a great idea. Singapore is harmonious and everyone understands each other better, to a major part because of this.
People who grow up in singular neighbourhoods simply don't realise what they are missing in understanding each other. Attending each other's weddings, funerals; talking about political issues forms a strong bond above religious lines
Does this try to prevent immigrant neighborhoods from forming as well? In the US at least my perception is that immigrant neighborhoods that mainly have first and second generation residents are viewed much more favorably even though they are a form of segregation. The upshot is they allow people to find others that speak their language and stores that sell their food.
My understanding is that this policy is enforced on government housing. Which is really well done and highly subsidised. Many immigrants rent such units, and that does help them understanding the country better
WBEZ had a great article on the history of Oak Park's for-sale sign ban, and how it helped to shape the town's integration. The ban was effectively born to fight blockbusting, which preyed on homeowners' fears of loss of property values, but slathered with a nice greasy layer of racial fear. Blockbusting represents the scummiest sort of real estate profiteering; but more damagingly, it plays directly into patterns of institutional racism.
It's nearly unbelievable that something as simple as /not allowing the posting of For Sale signs/ can quell a lot of concerns about negative changes to the neighborhood.
That's a fair assessment of how integration was handled in most schools too. On the face of it, its extremely draconian, but how can you reverse 50+ years of institutional segregation without the government becoming involved?
I'm not sure if there is another way. It's a worthy goal, and I'm not opposed to the government being involved. The part that seems the most questionable to me was the steering of Black families to not live next to each other, spreading them out in the city. I understand why it was done but it just seems so controlling and paternalistic.
That's how desegregation of schools occurred---bussing black children to far off neighbourhoods. It was paternalistic, but I think it was less looked down upon because it acted on actual children instead of adults.
Agreed. It is also amazing to think about what would happen if a city were to try to do something like this today. I think it could never happen and it would be all over the national media.
I grew up in Oak Park, and the result is remarkable, I don't know of any other place like it, especially before it got so much more expensive, in the 80s and 90s. I knew vaguely that this was somewhat engineered, but I never knew to what degree until I saw this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4dzaRJfLpo which is an interview with Roberta Raymond, the architect of Oak Park's successful integration. Some of the things that were done:
1. Provide cheap insurance to homeowners against price declines, so that they would not fear the neighborhood flipping to African American and losing their investment.
2. Creating the Oak Park Regional Housing Center, a essentially a non-profit real estate agency not subject to many of the discrimination laws.
3. Agressive code enforcement against apartment building owners who might let properties decline in anticipation of the neighborhood going African-American and low income, but being willing to negotiate if they put their listings exclusively with the Housing Center.
4. Testing real estate agents for violation of fair housing laws, but agreeing to let them slide if they agreed to list exclusively with the Housing Center.
5. Creating an investment vehicle to purchase blighted apartment buildings, listing exclusively through the Housing Center.
5. Making the housing center staff specifically steer based on race, but in the opposite of the normal direction. They would only show all-white buildings to black customers, and show white customers to majority black buildings. The Housing Center did similar steering for single family houses. The specific goal was "a black a block" so that most residents would have an African American neighbor, but that clusters would not form that could cause momentum for houses to sell.
6. School districts drawn to evenly spread out African Americans among all of the schools.
7. Direct community outreach with police visits and conversations with people on the block that might object to an African American resident on their block.
8. Making For Sale signs on lawns illegal.
All in all, an absolutely amazing and masterful piece of social engineering, that has not to my knowledge been replicated anywhere else. That said, this is all fairly heavy handed, and IMO goes right up to, and perhaps past the line of legality.
The part that seems flawed to me is that some racial groups are statistically much less likely to be high income earners. As prices increase tremendously, like you said happened here, you're going to be pushing out these racial groups. It seems like this is an experiment in creating gentrification and displacing disadvantaged minority groups.
I live in Oak Park, right on its eastern boundary with Austin (near one of the most homogeneously black neighborhoods in Chicago). One of the things I like about my block is that it's almost evenly divided black/white.
But the more expensive center of Oak Park is less well integrated, and some of the same city dynamics that produce disparities elsewhere are at play in Oak Park, too.
It also helps that Oak Park is tiny. You can walk across it in like 20 minutes.
Oh, yes. It is definitely not uniformly integrated. If you took a census, I suspect you'd find that the distribution of racial diversity in Oak Park is a direct reflection of the distribution of racial diversity plotted against income level, consistent with the geographic area distribution.
Just looking at the map, the ten mile radius around where I work seems like it's got several sharply segregated areas full of Asian people. From the ground, I know those areas are just apartment complexes where (highly skilled and not at all impoverished) Indian people on temporary work visas tend to stay, and most of them would probably be able to buy a house on my block if they intended to be here permanently. The west side of the city has some old-fashioned segregation, though.
'According to the Brookings report, "more than half of blacks would need to move to achieve complete integration". Some have pointed out that the wording of this part of the report itself highlights the challenges in these issues - why can't this be measured in the number of whites who would have to move?'
Because that would be a much less catchy soundbite. Assuming a 1:1 black-white switch, and that the population of the U.S. is 12% black and 72% white, then roughly 8% of whites would have to move to achieve racial integration.
Assuming a simplistic model where households swap locations (without handling population growth and new housing), a black household would have to move for every white household that moves.
Exactly - that's how I got the numbers above. 50% of the black population = 6% of the total population = 8.3% of the white population. My point is to assume self-interest on the part of the publication; it may or may not be representative of deeper unconscious bias in the population (there's no rule against both self-interest and unconscious bias being true), but a simpler explanation is that the Brookings Institute wanted to make their finding sound more dramatic.
Incidentally, phrasing it as "8% of whites need to consciously seek out diversity to end racial segregation" makes the problem seem eminently solvable.
It seems reasonable to give the 50% statistic, because it may show why blacks may be more reluctant or unable to participate in this mass movement. It's easy for a white person to say sure, let's move, given that there's only an 8% chance of any specific white person having to actually move.
Class plays a big role in why white migration is not considered a net good.
White migration does happen, and we call it gentrification, because it usually means wealthy young (mostly white) folks moving into poor neighborhoods on the edges of "cool" cities, causing rents to rise dramatically over a short period of time, and pushing out longtime residents who are too poor to afford to continue to live in the hip new neighborhood with fancy bistros and cat cafes (yes, there's really a cat cafe...it's in East Austin on the site of a business once owned by a Hispanic family whose business was bulldozed).
Integration almost has to go the other way, or it is more of a disruptive force, and a force for further damaging communities of color. Race and class are so closely correlated in the US that you can't talk about one without the other on most issues. In this case, it means that white people moving into a black or brown neighborhood are often displacing black or brown people who can no longer afford to live there, because wealthier whites have driven up rents (and home ownership among black and brown people is much lower than ownership among white people in the US, so that doesn't provide a very good buffer to protect those black and brown neighborhoods from being "flipped" into white neighborhoods).
In short: Integration is a good goal. But, without some care, moving white folks into black and brown neighborhoods can be harmful.
it's more about economic status instead of colors? also there is some culture difference as well, “Birds of a feather flock together", maybe it's just natural and has nothing to do with the political pov.
Ehn, we're pretty segregated too. You notice a big difference in racial distributions going to different malls and bus stations, especially outside of the downtown core (at least in the nation's capital where I live). Not to mention the white/indigenous divide that is particularly prominent in our prairie provinces. Winnipeg has a literal wrong side of the tracks.
Not necessarily. It's possible for individuals to not want to be a small minority in their local area and for real estate brokers to steer them away from the area. There's no rule against overkill.
Racial steering could simply be the result of real estate agents recognizing the tendencies of people's preferences and prioritizing the showing of units that are the likeliest to be a good fit.
I'm not arguing that overt discrimination doesn't occur or that it doesn't matter, just that as long as people don't like being a local minority, eliminating explicit discrimination will not be sufficient to integrate neighborhoods.
At that point, you would need to something like the state to force people to mix.
> I don't think many blacks care of being a "small minority" on a posh white neighborhood...
I respectfully disagree. I'm Chinese-American, grew up in the US, but still see definite advantages to living where there are other Asians: better access to food that you grew up with, a doctor who might be more familiar with your genetics, not being the only person in the room who looks different, better access to Chinese school if you want to send your kids there, etc.
My college roommate was black and we went to school in a town that was >95% white (besides the student population). There wasn't a single stylist in town who knew how to cut black people's hair properly, so a few entrepreneurial black students would actually go around cutting their fellow students' hair on campus, like they would show up at your door and cut your hair in the dorm bathroom. They were in such high demand that sometimes it would take a week or two before you could get on their schedule.
It's these sort of minor annoyances that people do take into account when deciding where to live. Constantly feeling like your own needs and preferences are out of the norm can be a stressful experience, even if nobody is being overtly racist.
Would I necessarily mind living in 90%+ white Middle America? Probably not, but it would not be my first choice, and all that's necessary is for a slight preference to exist.
I don't think many blacks care of being a "small minority" on a posh white neighborhood...
You're implying that they don't have the choice of an equally posh black neighborhood, in which case such a slight preference against being a minority wouldn't be surprising at all.
> I don't think many blacks care of being a "small minority" on a posh white neighborhood...
We do. Besides what a sibling has already mentioned regarding some small cultural difficulties, there's the whole "police killing us all the time" thing which is much less likely to happen if you're in an area where being black doesn't make you stand out
Actually the new york times did a great article on this, blacks do care about being a small minority even in affluent neighborhood and will actively choose poorer neighborhoods where they feel more at home: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/milwaukee-segregation-w...
Originally from Canada, now in the USA. I've noticed palpable distrust and hatred on both sides of the street. Its not just that whites are racist against blacks, its the total breakdown of trust on both sides of the coin, leading to social exclusion. Just as a black person may have trouble breaking into a white man's only club, a white person would have no possibility of entering black only spheres w/o experiencing racism as well. IMO the only solution is deeply intentional integration such that all classes and colors begin to experience all aspects of life together, ultimately including marriage and child birth. Until we see "them" as "us" there will be allegiances.
Did the article answer the question of why black and white Americans don't live together? I didn't seem to see any theories besides saying that real estate agents wouldn't show one black couple houses in the white neighborhoods.
How does black American integration compare with Chinese American integration, and what can we learn from that?
Is there a bigger, subconscious (possibly genetic) reason why black and whites don't live together? Or is it simply due to the the events of American history?
(Half-Chinese here, with an immigrant parent on the Chinese side.)
Interestingly, Asian-American integration seems to happen only within higher socioeconomic classes. Asian-Americans as a group seem bifurcated into South or East Asians who immigrated into highly-technical, well-paying jobs after 1965 (when U.S. immigration policy opened up to let them in), and East Asians who came over for things like the California railroads in the late 1800s or Southeast Asians who arrived as refugees in the 70s and 80s. The latter group is much more likely to live in Chinatown, work in restaurants or laundromats rather than software companies, have few friends of other races (indeed, inner-city Asian-Americans I knew in college seemed more likely to hang out with the black kids than the white ones), and speak relatively poor English.
This makes me think the root cause is economic. It could have to do with these groups not being able to afford houses in nicer areas, or it could be people not wanting to associate with people who they view as a rung down on the socioeconomic ladder.
Genetic? Cultural is more likely. American blacks are mostly descended from Ibo and Ibibo from Biafra -- the best peoples in Black Africa, the market-dominant minority of the whole Gold Coast, a dynamic, energetic, ambitious group -- but they came down with a case of redneck-ism in their long stay in the South, and middle- or upper-class whites don't live among rednecks any more than they live among blacks.
You see a lot of white-on-white conflicts that look almost exactly like white-on-black ones wherever hillbillies and non-hillbillies try to coexist -- particularly in the southern Rust Belt, where it's common for Catholic ethnics to be the middle class and hillbillies/rednecks the former factory hands. I'd recommend reading _Hillbilly Elgy_, Thomas Sowell's _Black Rednecks and White Liberals_, and of course _Albion's Seed_ for details. Jim Webb also had some essays on this subject, before he was elected to Congress; he had plans to unite hillbillies and blacks as a single interest group, and I'm not sure if that would have been a good idea or a bad one.
That article doesn't address other racial groups, but I found this article just as interesting since many of the reasons for white/black racial segregation in the US are pretty well studied.
Tribalism is a natural human condition (maybe it's an instinct, I don't know). It's integral part of us. Comes from evolution, really. Everybody hates everybody. Heck, Russians and Ukrainians hate each other, and you wouldn't find more similar groups of people. (I am from Ukraine.) To deny human tribalism is to deny reality. We need to fight tribalism and hatred but unfortunately it's not going away.
So, the question is why we constantly hear about one minority but not the others? After all, we have people of all colors and origins in America from Chinese and Indian, to Russian and Samoan.
My feeling is that blacks have been highjacked by politicos and turned into pawn for political games. And the result is that children and families suffer. How is it not failure of political science that 72% of black kids are born to single mothers? Blame Republicans all you want, but blacks are represented by the Democrats on all levels of government, from city to state to Congress. How is it not a failure of representation?
I think if we get politicos from dividing us, everyone will benefit, especially blacks.
Tribalism is a natural human condition (maybe it's an instinct, I don't know). It's integral part of us. Comes from evolution, really. Everybody hates everybody. Heck, Russians and Ukrainians hate each other, and you wouldn't find more similar groups of people. (I am from Ukraine.) To deny human tribalism is to deny reality. We need to fight tribalism and hatred but unfortunately it's not going away.
So, the question is why we constantly hear about one minority but not the others? After all, we have people of all colors and origins in America from Chinese and Indian, to Russian and Samoan.
My feeling is that blacks have been highjacked by politicos and turned into pawn for political games. And the result is that children and families suffer. How is it not failure of political science that 72% of black kids are born to single mothers? Blame Republicans all you want, but blacks are represented by the Democrats on all levels of government, from city to state to Congress. How is it not a failure of representation?
I think if we get politicos from dividing us, everyone will benefit, especially blacks.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadIt's much more mixed. Where black/white/asian areas still exist the boundaries tend to be pretty blurred.
http://projects.andrewwhitby.com/uk-ethnicity-map/
http://projects.andrewwhitby.com/uk-ethnicity-map/#lat=51.51...
http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2008/10/28/game-theory-and...
The program gets stuck continually shuffling the polygons around and it looks like it will never finish (I waited several minutes and no progress was made). It seems likely that this is because each polygon that is moved has a high chance of also being "unhappy" at the new random location.
By definition, with 100% bias, the program won't stop until there is full segregation.
I think the biggest limitation is "unhappy" polygons moving to random locations, instead of having some choice in the matter. Reducing this limitation would result in faster convergence towards a stable, segregated state, as the choices made would reflect the bias of the participants.
I'd hope that this article would have done a better job in explaining that this isn't the rule but that these are a few exceptions to such.
It's not something that's nearly as sharply defined in NYC, but there's definitely some racial separation by neighborhood if you look at statistical maps on the subject.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/27/map-segregation-ame...
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1321377/original.jpg
Just because we all ride the subway together doesn't mean we live together:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2015/12/08/census-...
isnt harlem, the bronx, spanish harlem parts of NYC?
i agree nyc is extremely fast in gentrification - but that doesnt make it mixed on the long run
This is a very, very untrue statement. I grew up in New York and both the city and Long Island are pretty heavily segregated by race. Yes, there are areas where there is more integration but by and large blacks live in one area and whites live in another. Housing costs in the city have made it so that integration happens for a while in some neighborhoods but really only when that neighborhood is gentrifying. Post gentrification it ends up being pretty much just white or, if you're lucky, a mix of upper middle class people of varying ethnicity but still majority white.
Ethnic neighborhood is cheap -> Young professionals start to move in -> Integration begins -> Businesses that cater to young professionals establish themselves in the neighborhood -> Landlords slowly but steadily increase rent -> New immigrants and children of existing ethnic tenants move to a different, less expensive neighborhood
A larger assortment of maps is here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/721576248126749...
They generally show more mixing than the cities featured in the OP. (Cold comfort if you happen to live in Kansas City, Baltimore, St. Louis, or Chicago.)
I have lived in Kansas City and in St. Louis, and I agree that they are both more segregated than their peer cities in the, say, top 50 US cities. Certainly in Kansas City, the racial covenants highlighted in the article were very much in force when large land developers expanded the city into its suburbs.
It's worth remembering that the racial covenants in force at the time were very popular. Proposition 14 in California, which was specifically written to allow redlining to continue, passed with 65% of the vote in 1964 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_14_(196...).
I disagree. NYC is the same, just at lower resolution. The segregation happens along small blocks and avenues rather than towns. I live along the "tracks" on 4th Ave in Brooklyn. The difference is stark-- both in terms of demographics and steep drop-offs in property prices and rents.
Segregation is not good, but having it at low resolution at least allows some interaction across lines, which is positive. Such interaction is more unlikely when the segregation is at the town or village resolution.
NYC is 14 million people -- bigger than lots of whole countries. There are tens of states smaller than it.
Think instead of this trend in NYC as divided into boroughs and neighbourhoods. How many blacks with 5th avenue apartments overlooking the park?
Some mixed areas like the South End (50% white), but also the North End (90% white) and Roxbury (8% white). Roxbury and the North End are only 4 miles away from each other.
Not to mention the fact that the fact that Roxbury is only 8% white is primarily due to a huge wave of white flight to the metro Boston suburbs. This happened within our parents' lifetimes. In Boston one of the largest periods of white flight happened to coincide with forced school segregation (bussing).
The east coast may be liberal politically, but it's still also racist. You can see similar themes reoccurring with the rate of gentrification and the rise of charter schools in the city.
The Irish were ultimately pushed out by a mix of Jewish and Italian immigrants (the Jews ultimately shifted to Roxbury and the Italians took hold and established the North End as 'Little Italy').
I don't think gentrification is any more over than it was 100 years ago. It simply cycles.
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass - Massey and Denton
https://www.amazon.com/American-Apartheid-Segregation-Making...
Thus, it is actually rational for a white home owner to sell immediately after minority residents move into their neighborhood, even if they aren't motivated by any racial animus. It is correspondingly rational for bankers to price loans to minorities at higher rates because of the increased risk they represent. So to a certain extent, bankers don't loan to minorities because bankers don't loan to minorities.
Someone, somewhere needs to break the negative feedback loop.
That was the intention of the Fair Housing Act, but it hasn't been enough. Partially because of inadequate enforcement and partially because home ownership is only one tiny aspect of the vast and complicated beast that is race in America. Even if black Americans had perfectly equal access to lending and housing, the racial income gap would still exclude them from many of the least integrated areas, which also happen to be where the best schools and opportunities for improving income are.
It's shitty and I don't pretend to have any inkling of how to address these problems. But I don't think you can justify bankers or white flighters or blockbusters or whomever by saying they are responding rationally to real risks and incentives. That just means the risks and incentives need to be changed, because the social consequences have been awful for Americans in general and minorities in particular.
Welcome to correction here from a more informed perspective.
Partially because of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Community Reinvestment Act, banks were incentivised. Black families were targeted by predatory lenders who knew the rules well enough to get the loans for the individuals, individuals who perhaps were not in an economic position to be able to fulfill the agreements of the loans, then resell them in mortgage backed securities. At the micro level, the Community Reinvestment Act was "a good thing". We as a society want everyone to have a home. However, it did have negative consequences at the macro level.
So there was a business opportunity at one time. Is there today? I don't know. And yes, it was probably an over-characterization.
At least some of this is due to economic reasons. It's about $200k extra on a 3BR house to go from a "bad" school zone to a "good" school zone. That has fall-on effects that includes gerrymandering. The school boundaries are very much not compact. I know of at least one boy who walks through areas zoned for another school to get to his school.
The differences are so extreme, that I have mentioned multiple times that if you were to replace "California" with "Virginia" and "hispanic" with "black" you would have federally mandated cross-town busing of students.
The reverse happens with bad schools.
A recent court ruling in Connecticut may change that, at least in that state. Some links:
https://www.google.com/amp/mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/nyr...
https://www.google.com/amp/mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/nyr...
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/nyregion/connecticut-ed...
http://www.courant.com/data-desk/hc-in-perpupil-spending-con... https://k12.niche.com/rankings/public-school-districts/best-...
Cities: Waterbury ($15,859), Hartford ($18,397), Bridgeport ($15,228), Stamford (18,188), and New Haven ($17,084) spend on average $16,951 per student.
Some well-regarded suburban school districts: Simsbury ($15,969), Ridgefield ($17,315), Glastonbury ($15,481), West Hartford ($15,720), for an average of $16,121.
Clearly there is something going on beyond the dollars spent per student.
[edit] The two schools I mention on the outskirts of town are 6% and 8% hispanic, respectively.
There are now not any schools with less than 20% hispanic student populations (there is still a charter school with under 20% hispanic, but it was excluded per above), but there is a huge hole between 45% and 75% hispanic, and 6 out of 10 are 80% or more hispanic. If children were assigned randomly to these schools, one would expect a normal distribution around the population mean.
And to clarify, all of these schools are within a single school district and pull from the same funding source.
1: http://imgur.com/a/8iLt9
It didn't hurt that the University of Chicago drove most of the land ownership and maintained a massive private police force.
I'm with you, not sure what the lesson was, but it led to an integrated neighborhood.
People who grow up in singular neighbourhoods simply don't realise what they are missing in understanding each other. Attending each other's weddings, funerals; talking about political issues forms a strong bond above religious lines
It's nearly unbelievable that something as simple as /not allowing the posting of For Sale signs/ can quell a lot of concerns about negative changes to the neighborhood.
https://www.wbez.org/shows/curious-city/not-in-your-front-ya...
1. Provide cheap insurance to homeowners against price declines, so that they would not fear the neighborhood flipping to African American and losing their investment.
2. Creating the Oak Park Regional Housing Center, a essentially a non-profit real estate agency not subject to many of the discrimination laws.
3. Agressive code enforcement against apartment building owners who might let properties decline in anticipation of the neighborhood going African-American and low income, but being willing to negotiate if they put their listings exclusively with the Housing Center.
4. Testing real estate agents for violation of fair housing laws, but agreeing to let them slide if they agreed to list exclusively with the Housing Center.
5. Creating an investment vehicle to purchase blighted apartment buildings, listing exclusively through the Housing Center.
5. Making the housing center staff specifically steer based on race, but in the opposite of the normal direction. They would only show all-white buildings to black customers, and show white customers to majority black buildings. The Housing Center did similar steering for single family houses. The specific goal was "a black a block" so that most residents would have an African American neighbor, but that clusters would not form that could cause momentum for houses to sell.
6. School districts drawn to evenly spread out African Americans among all of the schools.
7. Direct community outreach with police visits and conversations with people on the block that might object to an African American resident on their block.
8. Making For Sale signs on lawns illegal.
All in all, an absolutely amazing and masterful piece of social engineering, that has not to my knowledge been replicated anywhere else. That said, this is all fairly heavy handed, and IMO goes right up to, and perhaps past the line of legality.
But the more expensive center of Oak Park is less well integrated, and some of the same city dynamics that produce disparities elsewhere are at play in Oak Park, too.
It also helps that Oak Park is tiny. You can walk across it in like 20 minutes.
http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/index.html
(it's zoomable)
Because that would be a much less catchy soundbite. Assuming a 1:1 black-white switch, and that the population of the U.S. is 12% black and 72% white, then roughly 8% of whites would have to move to achieve racial integration.
Incidentally, phrasing it as "8% of whites need to consciously seek out diversity to end racial segregation" makes the problem seem eminently solvable.
White migration does happen, and we call it gentrification, because it usually means wealthy young (mostly white) folks moving into poor neighborhoods on the edges of "cool" cities, causing rents to rise dramatically over a short period of time, and pushing out longtime residents who are too poor to afford to continue to live in the hip new neighborhood with fancy bistros and cat cafes (yes, there's really a cat cafe...it's in East Austin on the site of a business once owned by a Hispanic family whose business was bulldozed).
Integration almost has to go the other way, or it is more of a disruptive force, and a force for further damaging communities of color. Race and class are so closely correlated in the US that you can't talk about one without the other on most issues. In this case, it means that white people moving into a black or brown neighborhood are often displacing black or brown people who can no longer afford to live there, because wealthier whites have driven up rents (and home ownership among black and brown people is much lower than ownership among white people in the US, so that doesn't provide a very good buffer to protect those black and brown neighborhoods from being "flipped" into white neighborhoods).
In short: Integration is a good goal. But, without some care, moving white folks into black and brown neighborhoods can be harmful.
As people exercise that preference by moving around, they will create enclaves where certain groups dominate.
http://nifty.stanford.edu/2014/mccown-schelling-model-segreg...
http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/12/an-immersive-game-show...
If that was the case (or enough), we wouldn't have this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_steering
and this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_segregation_in_the_Uni...
I don't think many blacks care of being a "small minority" on a posh white neighborhood...
At that point, you would need to something like the state to force people to mix.
> I don't think many blacks care of being a "small minority" on a posh white neighborhood...
I respectfully disagree. I'm Chinese-American, grew up in the US, but still see definite advantages to living where there are other Asians: better access to food that you grew up with, a doctor who might be more familiar with your genetics, not being the only person in the room who looks different, better access to Chinese school if you want to send your kids there, etc.
My college roommate was black and we went to school in a town that was >95% white (besides the student population). There wasn't a single stylist in town who knew how to cut black people's hair properly, so a few entrepreneurial black students would actually go around cutting their fellow students' hair on campus, like they would show up at your door and cut your hair in the dorm bathroom. They were in such high demand that sometimes it would take a week or two before you could get on their schedule.
It's these sort of minor annoyances that people do take into account when deciding where to live. Constantly feeling like your own needs and preferences are out of the norm can be a stressful experience, even if nobody is being overtly racist.
Would I necessarily mind living in 90%+ white Middle America? Probably not, but it would not be my first choice, and all that's necessary is for a slight preference to exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
You're implying that they don't have the choice of an equally posh black neighborhood, in which case such a slight preference against being a minority wouldn't be surprising at all.
We do. Besides what a sibling has already mentioned regarding some small cultural difficulties, there's the whole "police killing us all the time" thing which is much less likely to happen if you're in an area where being black doesn't make you stand out
How does black American integration compare with Chinese American integration, and what can we learn from that?
Is there a bigger, subconscious (possibly genetic) reason why black and whites don't live together? Or is it simply due to the the events of American history?
Interestingly, Asian-American integration seems to happen only within higher socioeconomic classes. Asian-Americans as a group seem bifurcated into South or East Asians who immigrated into highly-technical, well-paying jobs after 1965 (when U.S. immigration policy opened up to let them in), and East Asians who came over for things like the California railroads in the late 1800s or Southeast Asians who arrived as refugees in the 70s and 80s. The latter group is much more likely to live in Chinatown, work in restaurants or laundromats rather than software companies, have few friends of other races (indeed, inner-city Asian-Americans I knew in college seemed more likely to hang out with the black kids than the white ones), and speak relatively poor English.
This makes me think the root cause is economic. It could have to do with these groups not being able to afford houses in nicer areas, or it could be people not wanting to associate with people who they view as a rung down on the socioeconomic ladder.
You see a lot of white-on-white conflicts that look almost exactly like white-on-black ones wherever hillbillies and non-hillbillies try to coexist -- particularly in the southern Rust Belt, where it's common for Catholic ethnics to be the middle class and hillbillies/rednecks the former factory hands. I'd recommend reading _Hillbilly Elgy_, Thomas Sowell's _Black Rednecks and White Liberals_, and of course _Albion's Seed_ for details. Jim Webb also had some essays on this subject, before he was elected to Congress; he had plans to unite hillbillies and blacks as a single interest group, and I'm not sure if that would have been a good idea or a bad one.
https://psmag.com/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessing-whi...
White flight happens the other way as well when there are "too many" Asians in a neighborhood.
So, the question is why we constantly hear about one minority but not the others? After all, we have people of all colors and origins in America from Chinese and Indian, to Russian and Samoan.
My feeling is that blacks have been highjacked by politicos and turned into pawn for political games. And the result is that children and families suffer. How is it not failure of political science that 72% of black kids are born to single mothers? Blame Republicans all you want, but blacks are represented by the Democrats on all levels of government, from city to state to Congress. How is it not a failure of representation?
I think if we get politicos from dividing us, everyone will benefit, especially blacks.
So, the question is why we constantly hear about one minority but not the others? After all, we have people of all colors and origins in America from Chinese and Indian, to Russian and Samoan.
My feeling is that blacks have been highjacked by politicos and turned into pawn for political games. And the result is that children and families suffer. How is it not failure of political science that 72% of black kids are born to single mothers? Blame Republicans all you want, but blacks are represented by the Democrats on all levels of government, from city to state to Congress. How is it not a failure of representation?
I think if we get politicos from dividing us, everyone will benefit, especially blacks.