The Seattle Times reprinted a New York Times story on its front page the other day, proclaiming that neighborhood segregation along racial lines was “over.” This fascinating bit of knowledge was imparted by the Manhattan Institute, which only happens to be a right-wing think tank, so naturally we assume it doesn’t have a political agenda—like opposition to fair housing and desegregation laws. All of its conclusions can be disputed by common sense reasoning, but let’s look at some of highlights of the report, quoted verbatim:
•The most standard segregation measure shows that American cities are now more integrated than they’ve been since 1910. Segregation rose dramatically with black migration to cities in the mid-twentieth century. On average, this rise has been entirely erased by integration since the 1960s.
•All-white neighborhoods are effectively extinct. A half-century ago, one-fifth of America’s urban neighborhoods had exactly zero black residents. Today, African-American residents can be found in 199 out of every 200 neighborhoods nationwide. The remaining neighborhoods are mostly in remote rural areas or in cities with very little black population.
•Gentrification and immigration have made a dent in segregation. While these phenomena are clearly important in some areas, the rise of black suburbanization explains much more of the decline in segregation.
•Ghetto neighborhoods persist, but most are in decline. For every diversifying ghetto neighborhood, many more house a dwindling population of black residents.
The decline in segregation carries with it several lessons relevant to public policy debates:
• The end of segregation has not caused the end of racial inequality. Only a few decades ago, conventional wisdom held that segregation was the driving force behind socioeconomic inequality. The persistence of inequality, even as segregation has receded, suggests that inequality is a far more complex phenomenon.
•Access to credit has fostered mobility. At a time when proposed regulations threaten to eliminate the market for lending to marginal borrowers, it is important to recognize that there are costs and benefits associated with tightening credit standards.
•The freedom to choose one’s location has helped reduce segregation. Segregation has declined in part because African-Americans left older, more segregated, cities and moved to less segregated Sun Belt cities and suburbs. This process occurred despite some public attempts to keep people in these older areas.
The Institute reaches these conclusions using Census data and an admittedly imperfect methodology called the dissimilarity index, which measures the “proportion of individuals of either group that would have to change neighborhoods in order to achieve perfect integration.” It also employs something called the isolation index, which “measures the tendency for members of one group to live in neighborhoods where their share of the population is above the citywide average.” Most cities with large black populations saw significant supposed decreases in segregation measures in the past forty years. Some cities, like Boise, Idaho and Ann Arbor, Michigan saw increases in the segregation indexes. Cities and metro areas like Chicago and Milwaukee continued to have high levels of segregation. Communities with Asian and Latino populations tended to be less segregated than black communities, but more so than white.
Although the Institute “study” acknowledged that “more freedom” in housing is “good” on one hand, it saw little else that was positive, since mingling with whites didn’t change “achievement and employment gaps between blacks and whites…far too many Americans lack the opportunity to achieve meaningful success” the authors conclude.
Now, the problem with this report is that it is not actually a “study,” but a compilation of Census numbers that it uses to justify its right-wing ideological points; there is no attempt to actually understanding what the numbers mean (Does having one black resident in an otherwise all-white neighborhood actually mean it is “integrated?”). It is also curiously at odds with a 2009 story the Institute posted, complaining that the apparent hyper-segregation in Westchester County, New York was being skewed by HUD without regard to income disparities; naturally blacks and Latinos lived in segregated communities because they couldn’t afford to live in better-off white communities. At that time it seemed that the Institutes’ “mission” was to excuse segregation; not it is claiming that if it still exists at all, it isn’t really as “bad” as all that. Nevertheless, merely providing a list of numbers does little to illuminate. All of its “conclusions” on what the numbers supposedly signify can be refuted with a little observation and common sense reasoning.
For example, a major driver of neighborhood “integration” has nothing at all to do racial harmony, although certain dynamics make “mixing” more tolerable. Take the recent gentrification phenomenon, such as is occurring in Seattle. It is easy to see how divided Seattle is now along racial and economic lines, by observing who is standing on what side of street at downtown bus stops. On southbound routes, there is a large—and depending on the time of day, a mostly—minority presence, while on the northbound routes you see a largely white presence. But things are changing, slowly, principally because North Seattle is congested and expensive. White people (and Asians) with money who want to live in Seattle suddenly see largely minority South Seattle, with its lower property values, as “attractive” places to live. Of course, they don’t necessarily want to move in next to the present inhabitants; investment companies and developers must persuade lower-income property owners to sell out, and then build condominiums and high-rent properties.
The city allegedly provides for tax incentives to developers if 20 percent of their construction is for “affordable” housing; how does the city define “affordable,” you may ask? According to the Office of Housing, anything a “moderate wage-earner” can afford, which likely does not describe a large number of the current residents of South Seattle. A “cheap” studio rental unit, for example, must be affordable to a household which earns 65 percent of the city’s median income. The median household income is currently $46,000—meaning that a studio apartment must be affordable for someone who earns $30,000 a year. Presumably this means at least $1,000 a month in rent. For people like me who make considerably less than the median, it is well out of range. For home ownership rather than rental, a “studio” or one-bedroom dwelling requires 100 percent of the median income. Not surprisingly, developers’ definition of “affordable” tends to keep to a minimum or exclude the less expensive options, and in any case, what passes for “affordable” housing certainly would not be defined as such by the present residents.
So what about the original residents of those properties? Most likely they can’t find other housing in Seattle, so they move to outlying cities like Tukwila, Renton, Federal Way or Kent. Some of these communities, like Kent, were bastions of white flight; their “desegregation” is less a function of deracination, but of simple necessity. The loss of working-class jobs in Seattle, and the location of jobs in industrial parks in outlying areas, made it a matter of moving to where the housing was cheaper and closer to where the jobs were. And despite their influx of minorities, these communities still remain divided along racial lines—and like Kent, along political lines. Despite being 37 percent minority, the white majority there remains what they were before—a Republican enclave, mostly east of Central Avenue. There are no minorities on the city council, or ever were; the presence of the minority population is hardly acknowledged, except as an school district and law enforcement “issue.”
There are other factors, such as low minority populations in small towns fostering a “complacency” among white residents who because they come into very limited contact with minorities, they are “tolerated” because they are not viewed as a “threat”—more of a curiosity. This attitude is not entirely consistent, of course. Idaho has a very small black population, but the large presence of white supremacist groups and their sympathizers is such that the state is on the 1965 Voting Rights Act watch list, and as mentioned before, Boise is one of a number of cities that has actually seen an increase in segregation in the past ten years. Census data indicates that whites are also still more likely to live in communities with few or no blacks; in cities where there is a heavy concentration of black residents, like Detroit and Atlanta, gentrification is nonexistent—whites don’t want to live in majority black communities where there influence is minimal. According to Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey, even those previously all-white communities that have seen increased “integration,” it is largely a result of an influx of Latinos and Asians rather than blacks; the process of black/white integration remains an intractable problem. It should also be pointed out that so-called “desegregation” and racism are not mutually exclusive; the influx of Latinos has in fact led to an increase of racial hostility, not just among whites but blacks.
There also continues to be subtle mechanisms in many white communities to bar unwanted “elements” and maintain de facto segregation. Exclusionary zoning rules exclude lower-income people (i.e. minorities) by banning high density housing, like rental apartments. Exclusionary rules were used last year to prevent a disabled black Iraq war veteran and his family from moving into an Evans, Georgia housing development call Knob Hill; the Georgia Homeowners Association halted construction of a house being built on his behalf by Homes For Troops, a charity organization helping disabled veterans. Apparently, the association found that the disable person ramp used to facilitate entry into the house violated some obscure code.
The upshot is that there are ways to explain the Manhattan Institute’s “findings” in ways that show a picture that is less one of “progress” but one that reflects a different reality rather than a deliberate "choice." The widening income gap and loss of middle-class jobs may in fact make social class distinctions less obvious for those below the median income, black or white--especially as reflected in more recent residency patterns. But a more insidious pattern is the so-called gentrification process--which on first blush may appear to be an effort at conscious integration by whites, but in fact is nothing of the kind: It is a measure of whites “taking over” property formerly owned by low-to-middle income minorities. Its long-run effect may be that in a few decades low-income minorities will be completely driven out of their former communities, to reside in suburban or metro “enclaves” that are as segregated as the inner-city neighborhoods they left.
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