Suburban house RedJar/Flickr theatlantic.com |
The recent civil unrest in Baltimore, Maryland and other cities have brought the issue of segregation and concentrated affluence in the United States. The civil unrest in Baltimore highlighted the fact that there seems to be two Baltimores: one for the affluent and one riddled with poverty, pollution, and despair. This is an issue that blogger believes will loom large in the next presidential election and how each candidate will address it will be a deciding factor. While no solution is absolutely perfect, what is important is the conversation. Specifically, the fact that we are talking about it. Alana Semuels lends her voice to the conversation with the article, "Where the White People Live," for The Atlantic. Ms. Semuels focuses her story on the affluent Michigan suburb of Grosse Pointe Park but has resonance for other places.
Detroit-Grosse Pointe border michiganradio.org |
Farmer's Market barrier Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan Alana Semuels theatlantic.com |
Gated mansion Graham Prentice/Shutterstock planetizen.com |
Detroit's Northeast Side (2010) davejordano.com |
Oddly, it is the low-income areas, not the affluent communities that are self-segregated and have gotten the most attention from policymakers who have tried to improve the situation by introducing some form of integration. Alana Semuels writes, "Beginning in 1989, the federal government started dismantling housing projects, spending billions to retool the type of housing available to low-income people in urban cores." Ms. Semuels offers her observations. "Programs many still integrate schools between white and black areas...and they may move black families to white neighborhoods...But government programs don't-and probably shouldn't move white families from wealthy areas to somewhere else." This may sound strange but there are tax incentives available to home buyers and builders to (re)locate in certain low-income neighborhood, which lays down the foundation for gentrification.
"Racially Concentrated Areas of Affluence and Poverty" Goetz, Damiano, and Hicks/University of Minnesota finance.yahoo.com |
has focused on the concentration of poverty and residential segregation. This has problematized non-white and high-poverty neighborhoods.
In presenting his findings to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Mr. Goetz said,
It's shielded the other end of the spectrum from scrutiny-to the point where we think segregation of whites is normal.
Mr. Goetz and his team are still analyzing the effects of Caucasian self-segregation but he speculates "that a high number of RCAAs may be a negative factor for cities." Mr. Goetz told Ms. Semuels,
Some people argue that when whites and affluent people segregate themselves, it can erode empathy, and it can inhibit the pursuit of region-wide remedies...It can inhibit a sense of shared destiny within a metropolitan area.
"RCAAs and RCAPS in the Detroit Metro Area"
Goetz, Damiano, and Hicks/University of Minnesota
finance.yahoo.com
|
Ed Goetz and his fellow researchers also examined the RCAAs and RCAPs distance from downtown. They discovered that affluent areas are located, on average, 21.1 miles from downtown. In Detroit, that distance is lengthened by about three miles to 24.2 away. This distance is even further in Washington D.C., where, on average, RCAAs are 25.1 miles from downtown; in Chicago, the RCAAs are a little closer-22.1 miles. Yet, the RCAPs are closer-on average of 6.6 miles from downtown in the cities of Baltimore, St. Louis, and Philadelphia.
Out west, the metropolitan areas experienced less self-segregation: "San Francisco and Houston have just five racially concentrated areas of affluence each, Seattle has nine, Los Angeles 11. Seattle has just six racially concentrated areas of poverty and San Francisco has 12." The difference is that western cities have larger concentrations of affluent minorities and are, on the whole, more diverse. Alana Semuels writes, "Only 1.1 percent of affluent households live in RCAAs in San Francisco and only 3.1 percent do in Seattle, but in St. Louis, by contrast 23.1 percent of affluent households live in racially concentrated areas of affluence." Why the disparity between East and West; North and South? The northern and eastern United States are still reeling from the effects of housing policies that enforced minority families from buying homes in certain areas.
"RCAAs in the Boston area"
Goetz, Damiano, and Hicks/University of Minnesota
theatlantic.com
|
Alana Semuels reports, "Some of their further research has already generated interesting results. They looked into how federal housing dollars are spent in areas of poverty and areas of affluence in the Twin Cities, and found something surprising: The government spends just as many housing dollars in areas of poverty as it does in areas of affluence." The question that comes immediately to blogger's mind is what is being done with those federal dollars in RCAPs? It seems that in RCAAs the federal moneys materialize in the form of mortgage-interest deductions while in RCAPs they appear in the form of vouchers and subsidized housing units. Ms. Semuels cites, "In the Twin Cities, the total federal investment in the form of housing dollars in RCAAs was three times larger than investment than the investment in RCAPs. On a per capita basis, it was about equal." Ed Goetz sums this up nicely, saying that federal money is being used to "subsidize racially concentrated areas of affluence."
No comments:
Post a Comment