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2 Insightful Articles on Housing in America

Where the White People Live

How self-segregation and concentrated affluence became normal in America

Alana Semuels Apr 10 2015, 7:50 AM ET

RedJar/Flickr

Last summer, the Michigan town of Grosse Pointe Park erected a farmer's market in the middle of one of the few remaining streets that allowed cars to pass between the tony suburb and the urban Detroit neighborhoods at its border. It was the latest of many attempts by Grosse Pointe Park residents to close off roads and block traffic between what has become a predominantly white, affluent suburb, and its poorer, urban neighbor. 

There were protests about the border, and Grosse Pointe Park later said it would tear down the farmer's market and re-open the road, but the incident speaks volumes to the segregation that exists in Detroit, and the tensions that can grow as a result.

The barrier erected in Grosse Pointe (Alana Semuels)

The fact that these two areas are so close is unique—the border between Grosse Pointe Park and the city of Detroit is the only place in any of America's biggest cities where a very wealthy, predominantly-white area abuts a very poor, black one, according to research from a new working paper from the University of Minnesota. But the existence of self-segregated wealthy white areas close by low-income minority ones isn't unique, according to the Minnesota researchers. They have sorted census tracts in 15 of America's 20 biggest cities into "racially concentrated areas of affluence" and "racially concentrated areas of poverty," and find that many cities have more areas of segregated affluence than they do poverty. 

Racially concentrated areas of affluence, by the researchers' definition, are census tracts where 90 percent or more of the population is white and the median income is at least four times the federal poverty level, adjusted for the cost of living in each city. Racially concentrated areas of poverty, by contrast, are census tracts where more than 50 percent of the population is non-white, and more than 40 percent live in poverty.

Detroit has 55 racially concentrated areas of affluence and 147 racially concentrated areas of poverty, according to the research, done by Ed Goetz, Tony Damiano, and Jason Hicks. Detroit's racially concentrated areas of affluence are just 1.1 percent black. Its racially concentrated areas of poverty, by contrast, are 76 percent black.

Cities such as St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore, and Minneapolis have more racially concentrated areas of affluence (RCAAs) than they do racially concentrated areas of poverty (RCAPs). Boston has the most RCAAs of the cities they examined, with 77. St. Louis has 44 RCAAs, and 36 RCAPs. Other cities with a large number of racially concentrated areas of affluence include Philadelphia, with 70, Chicago, with 58, and Minneapolis, with 56.

In Boston, 43.5 percent of the white population lives in census tracts that are 90 percent or more white and have a median income of four times the poverty level. In St. Louis, 54.4 percent of the white population lives in such tracts.

Still, it's the poor areas, rather than the areas where whites have self-segregated, that get the most attention from policymakers, who  have sought to ameliorate concentrated poverty in segregated areas by moving families from black, urban areas to white suburbs. 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

 

Programs may still integrate schools between white and black areas, as I’ve written about before, and they may move black families to white neighborhoods, as I’ve also detailed. But government programs don’t—and probably shouldn’t—move white families from wealthy areas to somewhere else (although they do provide incentives for home buyers or builders to locate in certain lower-income neighborhoods, thus beginning a process of gentrification).

Public policy has “focused on the concentration of poverty and residential segregation. This has problematized non-white and high-poverty neighborhoods,” said Goetz, the director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota, when presenting his findings at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “It’s shielded the other end of the spectrum from scrutiny—to the point where we think segregation of whites is normal.”

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Racially Concentrated Areas of Affluence and Areas of Poverty in Large Metro Areas

                                                                                        Goetz, Damiano, and Hicks/University of Minnesota

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Goetz and his team are still researching the effects of this self-segregation of whites, but he thinks that a high number of RCAAs may be a negative factor for cities.
“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,” he told me. “It can inhibit a sense of shared destiny within a metropolitan area.”
This brings to mind a metro area such as Detroit, which emerged from bankruptcy last year, and was characterized by a poor and segregated urban core and wealthy white suburbs that did not contribute to the city’s revenue. The executive of Oakland County, to Detroit’s north, which is one of the whitest areas in the nation, has said publicly he doesn’t feel any incentive to help the city of Detroit.
Goetz and his team also researched the RCAAs’ and RCAPs’ distance to downtown. Areas of affluence are located, on average, 21.1 miles from a metro area’s downtown. In Detroit, racially concentrated areas of affluence are, on average, 24.2 miles from the city’s downtown. In Washington, D.C., racially concentrated areas of affluence are 25.1 miles from downtown; in Chicago, they’re 22.1 miles. Racially concentrated areas of poverty, on the other hand, are on average 6.6 miles from downtown, and in cities such as Baltimore, St. Louis, and Philadelphia, they’re much closer.
RCAAs and RCAPs in the Detroit Metro Area

RCAPs, in blue, are concentrated in the city of Detroit, while RCAAs, in red, are all in the suburbs (the Grosse Pointe border is on the right side of the right map) (Goetz, Damiano and Hicks/UMN)

There is less self-segregation of metro areas in the West: 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. These western cities have larger populations of affluent minorities, and are, in general, more diverse. 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 a racially concentrated area of affluence. In cities in the North and East, there are also still lingering effects of the housing policies that, for decades, kept non-white families from buying in certain neighborhoods.

The racial makeup of concentrated areas of poverty differs between regions, too: they're predominantly black in Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Washington, predominantly Latino in Houston and Los Angeles, and mixed in Boston, Minneapolis, and San Francisco.

Goetz and his fellow researchers are planning on looking into why these areas form in certain cities and certain places, and whether people pay a housing premium to live in segregated areas of affluence, as opposed to more racially diverse areas of affluence.

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Racially Concentrated Areas of Affluence in the Boston Metro Area

RCAAs in the Boston area are located in both the city and the suburbs (Goetz, Damiano and Hicks/UMN)

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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.

In racially concentrated areas of affluence, federal dollars come in the form of the mortgage-interest deduction. In areas of poverty, they come through vouchers and subsidized housing units. In the Twin Cities, the total federal investment in the form of housing dollars in RCAAs was three times larger than the investment in RCAPs. On a per capita basis, it was about equal.
Federal dollars are now being spent to “subsidize racially concentrated areas of affluence,” Goetz said.

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From Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/

fographic of the Day

Watch The American Home Get Supersized Over 40 Years 

 Mark Wilson April 15, 2015 | 2:00 PM

We had to store all those beanie babies somewhere.

American homes have gotten bigger. From 1974 to 2013, the average American single family home ballooned from 1,560 square feet to 2,384 square feet.
A CNN Money animation from data viz specialist Bård Edlund visualizes that extraordinary growth by taking a two-story house and stretching it sideways. What may at first glance seem like just a cute animation is actually a highly accurate portrait of the changing American home.

The 1970s marked the tail end of the Second Great Migration, a 30-year period during which 5 African Americans moved from rural areas to cities. White Flight ensued, with many middle-class families moving from cities into suburban homes, and the money went with them. Urban areas decayed while suburbs blossomed. This visualization begins in the '70s because that's as far back as this Census data set goes, but it's a good starting point to show the growing aspirations of the American homeowner.(my emphasis)

The square footage in Edlund's home is accurate at each step of the animation. (As for the vinyl-sided, two-story, three-bedroom, two-bath house that Edlund chose to stretch, that format was actually the most commonly constructed home over the entire period—save for 1975 when a half bath was added, removed immediately in 1976, and 2013 when that half bath trick was tried again.)

But that doesn’t mean homes grew consistently over 40 years. "Perhaps naively, I expected the median home had just gotten larger and larger and larger," Edlund tells Co.Design. "As the animation shows, the growth is a lot less straightforward, with several periods of contraction." Indeed, in the recessions of the 1980s and the late aughts, you see blips as homes get smaller.

The data set Edlund used for the animation doesn't capture everything. He points to now-standard luxuries like supersized kitchens with premium appliances and countertops, and bathrooms with double sinks, as trends lost in the spreadsheets of data. I’d add that you don’t see all the furniture filling those extra square feet, or the home theaters, either.

It’s a good example of how source data sets, no matter how deep or well researched, don’t often tell an entire story. And in this case, not only did we distend the average American home to the size of a small castle; we began decorating it like one, too.
See the animation here.

[Images: courtesy of Bård Edlund]

Black Men Are Writing - Book Review

The Washington Post

Books

 

 

WELCOME TO BRAGGSVILLE

By T. Geronimo Johnson

The most unsettling, must-read novel this year: ‘Welcome to Braggsville’

By Ron Charles February 17, 2015

 

The most dazzling, most unsettling, most oh-my-God-listen-up novel you’ll read this year is called “Welcome to Braggsville.” The 44-year-old author, T. Geronimo Johnson, plays cultural criticism like it’s acid jazz. His shockingly funny story pricks every nerve of the American body politic. Arriving smack dab in the middle of Black History Month — our shortest month, naturally — “Braggsville” lashes self-satisfied liberals in the academy and self-deluded Confederates in the attic. As we feign surprise at police brutality and our Twitter outrage flits from Ferguson to Staten Island to Cleveland, this is just the discomfiting book we need.

The story opens with Johnson’s scat-singing introduction to a polite white teen from Georgia named D’aron Little May Davenport. His whole life, D’aron has been mocked and bullied for his academic skill — a sure sign of wimpiness and questionable sexual orientation in a community that “produced more Special Forces soldiers per capita than any other town in America.” Desperate to get out of Braggsville, D’aron composes a series of college application essays — reproduced here in all their pimply teenage earnestness — that would excite any admissions officer’s savior complex.

The class of academic satires has been overenrolled for a while now, but make room for this brilliant send-up of the postmodern, hypersensitive, non-essentializing, gender-neutral world of the University of California at Berkeley. (Johnson must have gorged on its absurdities when he earned a master’s degree there.) In this strange place, “where the elsewhere unimaginable was mere mundanity,” D’aron arrives like some Southern-fried Candide, dazzled by the foreign nomenclature, the “designer-sneaker Zapatistas” and the rainbow of races.

Of course, satirizing this politically correct world is tantamount to euthanizing fish in a cruelty-free barrel, but Johnson is better at mocking academia than anybody since David Lodge, and his narration has such athleticism that you feel energized just running alongside him — or even several strides behind. His sentences are long and jaggy, sparked with stray cultural references. He dips unpredictably into other characters’ voices, volleying their jokes and pet phrases, nesting ironies within ironies. He feints between first and second person, he moonwalks into history, he spins from comedy to tragedy to editorial in a single paragraph. In short, Johnson does things you don’t think are advisable, which makes his success all the more awesome.

But “Welcome to Braggsville” isn’t all linguistic acrobatics at the expense of its characters. Johnson writes about D’aron with real heart. He cradles this young man’s innocence and sympathizes with his desperation to fit in — which D’aron finally does during the second semester, when he meets a group of oddballs who call themselves “the 4 Little Indians” (Ironical reclamation of racist tropes is so empowering!) There’s Louis, a Malaysian American from the Bay Area, who wants to be “the next Lenny Bruce Lee, kung fu comedian”; Charlie, an African American from Chicago who looks like he’s on the football team; and Candice, who claims she’s part Native American and can out-outrage even the most self-righteous posers. (Don’t discount Johnson’s Apache middle name. To D’aron, so long denied any interesting friends, these three are a gift. He “desperately wanted to hug them all, and instead would settle for the huddles between bursts of Frisbee football.”

”Welcome to Braggsville” 

By T. Geronimo Johnson. 

(William Morrow)

 

The whole novel turns on a stray comment in a class called “American History, X, Y, and Z: Alternative Perspectives”: D’aron mentions that his home town stages a Civil War reenactment every year during its Pride Week Patriot Days Festival.

The class is shocked. “They’d heard tell of Civil War reenactments,” Johnson writes, “but they were still occurring? The War Between the States was another time and another country. As was the South. Are barbers still surgeons? Is there still sharecropping? What about indoor plumbing? Like an old Looney Tunes skit, Tex Avery tag ensued. Charlie gawked at Louis, who gawped at Candice, who generously suggested it as a capstone project to the professor, who Googled the event and announced that it coincided with spring break. Serendipity has spoken.”

“In the wink of a cat’s eye,” a clever, incredibly offensive, potentially disastrous plan is born: D’aron and his three friends will travel back to his hometown and stage a “performative intervention”: a mock lynching. “You can force States’ Rights to take a look in the mirror,” the professor crows, “and they will not like what they see.”

From that bizarre premise hangs a story that will shock and disturb you. The trip to Braggsville — population 712, once a contender for the capital of Georgia — offers Johnson a chance to descend into the fetid pool of Southern pride that still romanticizes the antebellum era. D’aron’s parents and neighbors are perfectly pleasant people who just happen to have black lawn jockeys in their yards and racist bumper stickers on their trucks. It’s all in fun — Don’t you get it? How could these nice people be racists? — Braggsville is, after all, “The City That Love Built.” Everybody knows that the black people who live way off on the other side of town in the Gully are happy there. And that enormous Confederate flag wrapped around the watchtower? Just a symbol of civic pride. Yes, the town’s Civil War “reenactments were reinstated back in the 1950s in response to mandated integration,” but that doesn’t mean those nostalgic battle skits have anything to do with slavery. The war was about states’ rights, don’t you know?

Johnson is a master at stripping away our persistent myths and exposing the subterfuge and displacement necessary to keep pretending that a culture built on kidnapping, rape and torture was the apotheosis of gentility and honor. But “Welcome to Braggsville” is not just a broadside at the South. It’s equally irritated with liberalism’s self-righteousness. The 4 Little Indians imagine that their moral superiority and clever theatricality will somehow shame and cleanse the townspeople who witness the faux lynching.

When that ill-conceived plan goes horribly wrong, the narrative begins to bend and fracture — a virtual reflection of America’s crafty efforts to disguise and obfuscate its history of racial violence. Flecked with surrealism, the novel loops back on the “performative intervention” and its aftermath from different perspectives, exploring the malleability of meaning and the deadly effects of a culture that ignores or misunderstands its own prejudices. (Amid the op-ed frenzy that explodes after the mock lynching goes viral, Berkeley responds with a colloquium called “The Body Linguistic: Syntax, Sexicons, and Civil Rights.”)

At times in this comic novel, I could hear strange echoes of another one about a well-meaning white kid striking out against the racist system of his day: Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” It, too, concludes with a humiliating “performative intervention”: a mock slave escape. But that comparison is clouded with complications as muddy as the Mississippi. A more contemporary soulmate may be Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson, who works in the same disorientingly witty way to explore the persistence of anti-Semitism. You think you know where both men stand, but the ground around them is slick with irony and blood.

T. Geronimo Johnson 

(photo by Elizabeth R. Cowan)

 

In light of new research from the Equal Justice Initiative about the prevalence of lynchings and the country’s demonic success at rendering them historically invisible, this extraordinary novel could not be more relevant. With young D’aron, Johnson forces us to consider our determined ignorance and naivete. Part of growing up in America, he knows, is learning how to negotiate that national amnesia.
Welcome to Braggsville. It’s about time.

Ron Charles is the editor of Ron Charles is the editor of
The Washington Post's Book World.
You can follow him on Twitter @RonCharles.