Progressive and Not Diverse? Not Really

In urban planning circles, Portland, Oregon is held up as a model of urban planning. It is designed to be highly walkable, has an extensive system of bike routes, good public transportation, and was one of the first cities in the country to make sustainability a priority. As is often the case, being held up as a model by one group invites criticism by another and a recent post at the iconoclastic planning website newgeography.com takes Portland to task for lacking diversity and being all-white.

It is true that Portland is not a very diverse city and, if author Aaron Renn had left his criticism at Portland, he would have had a much stronger argument, but he does not. Instead, he argues that "the best, the most progressive and best role models for small and mid-sized cities" are havens of white exclusivity and goes on to present an array of statistics to demonstrate this point. In his analysis, there are flaws in the way that he presents the data. In particular, despite his claim that these progressive models are "White Cities," he doesn't actually present the percentage white in cities. In fact, he doesn't present data for cities at all — he presents statistics for "Core Counties" (these are counties that contain the central city).

Renn addressed the second of the two criticisms in the comments of his post by saying:

Comparisons between cities are inherently difficult. I generally do not like to use central city corporate limit data as a basis for comparison because the size of central cities is so different. Indianapolis and Columbus are both large because they annexed large amounts of "suburban" territory, while Cincinnati and Cleveland did not and are much smaller geographically.

I agree that it is difficult to compare different cities because cities vary both geographically and administratively. But, the same could be said about cities and, given that Renn is discussing "progressive" policies, then it seems like corporate limits would be exactly what he would want to report because in almost all areas in the country (Indianapolis being a major exception) policies are decided within municipal boundaries. In fact, the political fragmentation is associated with racial isolation/segregation. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that counties vary widely in their administration and autonomy.

Perhaps more problematically, while Renn makes the argument that model progressive cities are white havens, he does not present any statistics on how white cities are. Instead, he publishes the percentage black in the core county. This brings up two problems. First, it assumes that the American population is made up of only whites and blacks and ignores the increasing racial diversity in many cities including the mass immigration by Latinos and Asians. Second, this also assumes that the mere presence of blacks means that cities are diverse; however, if there are lots of African Americans, but they are segregated into a small number of specific neighborhoods (e.g., Detroit, Cleveland, Gary, Milwaukee) then these cities cannot be said to be diverse.

In order to look at what impact these assumptions have on the conclusions that Renn draws, I have taken Renn's examples of model progressive cities: Portland, Austin, Denver, Minneapolis, and Seattle and charted the percentage of residents by racial composition in each central city. The chart gives a much different impression than that given by Renn's charts. Using central cities and charting racial composition by multiple groups shows that both Austin and Denver have only 50% of whites in their municipal limits while Minneapolis is only 63% white. Seattle is slightly higher than Minneapolis with 68% white while Portland — Renn's poster child — is 74% white. In the United States in 2000, only 75% of the population was white meaning that Portland would be right on the average of the entire nation if the entire U.S. population were spread out without clustering. Although the percentage of white residents in Portland is certainly higher than most cities, the fact that one in four residents in the city means that the city cannot be identified as only white as Renn implies.

But, even if a city had a large non-white population, it does not mean that residents are integrated or interact with one another. I downloaded the metropolitan area segregation statistics^[1] from the to see how racially segregated these metropolitan areas are. I use three measures available for download from The Mumford Center. Although there are multiple domains of segregation that can be measured, I focus on two here: the dissimilarity index and the white isolation index. The first measures the extent to which residents of two different races are evenly distributed in neighborhoods (i.e., tracts) within a metropolitan area and the second measures the neighborhood percent white of the average white resident. The former is unaffected by the relative size of the two groups being compared, while the isolation index is dependent on both the size of the white population and its geographic dispersion (a greater percent white in a metro area pushes isolation higher).

Dissimilarity and White Isolation in "Model Progressive" Cities

	Austin	Denver	Minneapolis	Portland	Seattle
DISSIMILARITY
B/W	52.3	61.8	57.8	48.1	49.6
L/W	46.5	50.2	46.6	35.4	31.1
W ISOLATION	70.1	77.9	88.40	95.50	79.60

Generally, scores on either indices above 60 are considered extreme segregation. Denver is the only city above this threshold for black/white dissimilarity, though Minneapolis is close at 57.8. Dissimilarity in the other cities, while high (30 is generally considered high) are not terribly segregated. Latino/white dissimilarity scores were much lower, though Denver again stood out for being among the highest. All of these cities have extreme levels of isolation but, again, Portland is an extreme outlier — probably owing to its disporportionately white share of the population relative to the other cities. Just for comparison's sake, I also queried the segregation indices for the largely Midwestern cities Renn held up as examples of diversity. Those indices are presented below. The comparison is shocking: with the exception of Nashville, all of the cities have higher levels — often much higher levels — of black/white segregation. Latino/white segregation is comparable to those of the "model progressive" cities (with the exception of very low levels in Cincinatti). And, perhaps more tellingly, the isolation index scores for Renn's alternative Midwestern cities are much higher than three of the "model progressive" cities (Austin, Denver, and Seattle), though Portland still retains the highest white isolation score of any of the metropolitan areas.

Dissimilarity and White Isolation in Renn's "Alternative" Cities

	Cincinatti	Cleveland	Indianapolis	Kansas City	Nashville
DISSIMILARITY
B/W	74.8	77.3	70.7	69.1	57
L/W	29.8	58.1	43.8	34.8	46.3
W ISOLATION	90.70	88.40	88.30	86.10	84.70

Thus, while Renn certainly has a case about Portland being held up as a model for progressives despite its lack of diversity, the data simply doesn't back up his arguments for the remaining cities he identifies as models of progressive communities. Even worse, cities he holds up as alternatives because of their diversity tend to be more segregated than the progressive cities that he flogs in his post. While he brings up important points to consider in discussing urban planning and policies — considering the importance of diversity in comparison to "livable" environments — unfortunately, he gives the wrong impression of most of the cities and draws the wrong, sometimes drastically wrong, conclusion about the relative levels of diversity in these cities.

^[1] I know that I am switching geographic units here, but metropolitan areas gives a better impression of what effect differences in urban versus suburban racial composition would have on racial segregation

Racial Discrimination Video from ABC News Show

Today, the blog of journal Sociology Compass had a post about an episode of the ABC News show What Would You Do?. The premise of What Would You Do? is kind of social-psychology 101 meets "Candid Camera" by secretly recording people's reactions to either social breaches or unexpected situations. In this episode, a real estate agent made obviously racist remarks to first a black couple then an Arab couple during an open house. The agent and the two couples were actors and the goal was to see what the other homeseekers at the open house would do when hearing these comments. Although they show many stepping in, many also did not. And, those who did, did so in different ways: some confronted the agent directly, some talked to the agent and apologized to the couple (they felt that the agent had maligned their community with her behavior) but it seemed like most just went to the couple and told them that they should ignore the real estate agent.

Unfortunately, the agent's actions are all too common in the United States. Despite talk of a "post-racial" America with the election of Obama, it is a fact that this kind of discrimination continues. The problem with only exposing racism in this light is that it often hides the more hidden aspects of "institutional" racism that can't be called out in person, but must be confronted institutionally. The producers of What Would You Do? actually ended up accidentally capturing this kind of racism on a previous episode. A group of white teenagers (actors) were trashing a car in a public park to see what people passing by the scene would do. During this segment, the host, John Quiñones, explains that three calls were placed to 911: the first was about the vandalism, the second two were to report two suspicious black men in another car who "looked like they were getting ready to rob something." It turns out, the black men were the family members of another set of black teenage actors (used in a later segment to see if the race of the vandals mattered for the way that passers-by reacted; it did) who were sleeping in the car waiting for their kids to be done. In the last part of that segment, talking to the black teenagers, he highlights the fact that is the most prominent experience from the day that sticks out in their minds.

The show is a little pedantic for me, I can't imagine watching more than the few clips relating to things I'm interested in (there is another episode looking at the experience of Latino day laborers). But, I think that it would be really great as a teaching tool to show students and could lead to an interesting discussion. Also, Sociology Compass has a teaching guide on housing discrimination and racial residential segregation by Robert Adelman and James Clark Gocker. Also, another great resource — also produced by ABC News — is Diane Sawyers' 1991 Prime Time Live episode, "True Colors", described here (I couldn't find the video online) used an "audit study" method to show on camera some discrimination both blacks and women face getting loans, purchasing cars, and renting apartments.

Racial Residential Segregation Readings

A friend of mine who started a few years after me in my program is taking her prelim this summer and asked if I would write up a list of readings that I think represent the literature investigating racial residential segregation. Of course, I did not want to recommend an extremely long list to her - she does have a significant chunk of other readings to get through. I think I failed on the brevity for which I was striving, but I thought that it was a great exercise to really think through the "canons" in an area in which I study. I know that there are at least a few other sociologists who read this blog, so I thought that I'd pass along my list for others. I am sure that there are readings that I overlooked and others which might not be considered "canons" that I did include. If you want to comment, please feel free to let me know what your list would be.

Bruch, Elizabeth E., and Robert D. Mare. 2006. “Neighborhood Choice and Neighborhood Change.” American Journal of Sociology 112:667-709. link. I think that this study is the best to try and engage thoughtfully with Schelling's original study of neighborhood dynamics and looks at the effect that both data collection methods and our understanding of the nature of racialized preferences has on understanding the dynamic nature of housing patterns. But, more than that, it really tries to seriously engage with the implications of racial residential preferences in a way that is unparalleled in the current literature.

Charles, Camille Zubrinsky. 2003. “The Dynamics of Racial Residential Segregation.” Annual Review of Sociology 29:167-207. This is the best review piece on racial segregation out there. It is very clear, lays out dominant theories and implications.

Emerson, Michael O., Karen J. Chai, and George Yancey. 2001. “Does Race Matter in Residential Segregation? Exploring the Preferences of White Americans.” American Sociological Review 66:922-935. link. This is one of the only studies that looks at the role that specifically racial preferences play, net of other characteristics of neighborhoods. It relies on hypothetical neighborhoods, but finds that race is one of the over-riding factors in neighborhood preferences.

Crowder, Kyle. 2000. “The Racial Context of White Mobility: An Individual-Level Assessment of the White Flight Hypothesis.” Social Science Research 29:223-257. link. This paper looks at the individual-level moves of whites and what types of neighborhood factors influence the moves of whites out of and into neighborhoods. It is one of the first papers that looked at the theoretical importance of separating moves out of neighborhoods from the moves into a neighborhoods with an empirical study.

Farley, Reynolds, Charlotte Steeh, Tara Jackson, Maria Krysan, and Keith Reeves. 1993. “Continued Racial Residential Segregation in Detroit: "Chocolate City, Vanilla Suburbs" Revisited.” Journal of Housing Research 4:1-38. link. This paper is a follow-up to the original “Chocolate City, Vanilla Suburbs” paper that Farley wrote with colleagues based on the 1976 DAS. They find some evidence of changing attitudes, but preferences that are still very averse to integration. This is a staple of any segregation reading list.

Frey, William H., and Reynolds Farley. 1996. “Latino, Asian, and Black Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas: Are Multi-ethnic Metros Different?.” Demography 33:35-50. link. This paper looks at the trends in segregation for Latinos, Asian-Americans and blacks in a comparative light and finds that multiethnic metropolitan areas have different dynamics of racial segregation than two-race (i.e. black/white) metropolitan areas. This is a key reading for understanding comparative relationships across racial groups and the importance of other racial groups on the dynamics of black/white segregation.

Harris, David R. 2001. “Why Are Whites and Blacks Averse to Black Neighbors?,.” Social Science Research 30:100-116. link.Harris counters the idea that racially biased preferences expressed by both whites and blacks are biased against living in communities with a significant proportion of black residents. Instead, Harris argues that this is due to the fact that residents are really reacting to the fact that black neighborhoods have higher levels of crime and poverty. Therefore, resistance to living with black neighbors is really the result of race being a “proxy” for these other issues.

Lee, Barrett A., R. S. Oropesa, and James W. Kanan. 1994. “Neighborhood Context and Residential Mobility.” Demography 31:249-270. link.

Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. 1993. American apartheid : segregation and the making of the underclass. Cambridge, Mass. ; London, Eng. :: Harvard University Press. Need I explain?

Quillian, Lincoln. 2002. “Why is black-white residential segregation so persistent?: Evidence on three theories from migration data.” Social science research 31:197-229. link.This is a fascinating paper that uses the probabilities that individuals make particular types of transitions from one neighborhood type to another (i.e. different levels of segregation). This paper examines the possibility that a person’s neighborhood context can change both because of a move by that family, but also of a neighborhood changing around them. It concludes that preferences among whites drive a good portion of the racial residential segregation in the country.

Sampson, Robert J., and Patrick Sharkey. 2008. “Neighborhood Selection and the Social Reproduction of Concentrated Racial Inequality.” Demography 45:1-29. link. In many ways, this paper builds off of Quillian’s 2002 paper, but it examines a much wider set of neighborhood characteristics and uses different methodological techniques and focuses more explicitly on the ways in which African Americans are trapped in high-poverty neighborhoods. Their ultimate conclusion is that race, above and beyond other SES and neighborhood factors, tends to dominate why blacks end up in poorer neighborhoods than whites.

Schelling, Thomas C. 1971. “Dynamic models of segregation.” Journal of Mathematical Sociology 1:143-186. link. This is a famous paper that establishes the importance of understanding the dynamic nature of residential patterns and that rational moves based on integrative (or at least minimally segregationist) preferences can lead to segregated cities. It has fueled a great deal of research into complex systems and dynamic modeling outside of segregation research (cf. Granovetter), but has made a profound contribution on the field of segregation research.

Race & Redevelopment I: Gentrification

In light of my recent epiphany that I need to figure out a way to make my research relevant and interesting, I am posting my first entry concerning one of the topics that I am researching: who would consider moving to redeveloped neighborhoods in Chicago and why would they consider those neighborhoods. This is the first section that describes the central role that "gentrification" has played in framing the debate.

The term “gentrification” was coined by Ruth Glass in 1964 to describe the process of working class Londoners being displaced by the wealthier “gentry” and changing the face of London as people knew it. The term, over the next four decades has been used widely in academic research as well as finding its way into the popular press and everyday vernacular. The popularity of the term as well as the subject probably has a great deal to do with the fact that the process is one that is incredibly visible. Cities, particularly those in the North American industrial “steel-belt” across the Great Lakes and Northeastern regions, were declared to be doomed in the late 1970s and 1980s. Although the reasons why cities were following this trajectory has been a cause of great debate, and included some combination of economic transformations from a manufacturing to service-based economy, the racial segregation of metropolitan areas and the concentration of poverty, there was a fairly universal agreement on the fact that cities were in a state of despair. Throughout the 1990s and the first years of the 21st century, however, many of those cities formally thought to be doomed have seen a resurgence with residents coming “back” to cities.

Perhaps it is because people’s homes and neighborhoods have such an intrinsic value to them as to make them “a special sort of commodity” ^[1] that so much attention has been garnered by the transition of neighborhoods from poor to rich. Or, perhaps it is because the polar change in this transition was so unexpected from what was predicted in the 1970s and 1980s for American urban centers. Yet, the fact is that gentrification has taken one of the leading roles in understanding urban theory both academically and in every-day life.

And, while most evidence points to the fact that migration to suburbs has outpaced that to cities, it seems appropriate that gentrification should be a major component of urban theory given the fact that it is such a visible and recognizable feature of contemporary urban contexts. But, in absolute numbers, gentrification is not a trivial occurrence, either. Two researchers, Elvin Wyly and Daniel Hammel, have found that the size of the "urban underclass" which guided much academic and political debate in the 1980s and 1990s (think: welfare reform), is about the same size as the number of people involved in gentrification.

But, I think that another key element to understanding gentrification in the U.S. context is the fact that there is a strong racial component to gentrification in the United States. As the national economy of the U.S. shifted from a manufacturing to a service base, U.S. central cities were not only divided economically, but also racially. Because of explicit racial policies of And, while many people claim that this is largely due to white flight following the urban riots in the late 1960s, the process actually began much earlier and simply increased the rate at which white flight was occurring (for a great analysis of the 1967 riot in Detroit, read Thomas Sugrue's Origins of Urban Crisis). Whether this racial division was the direct consequence of urban economic restructuring or was primarily the result of high levels of racial segregation in most northern and eastern industrial cities is a matter of debate. What is true, either way, is that the poor urban residents in most northern and eastern cities that are likely to get displaced in the process of gentrification are African Americans. In fact, the perception that white people displace people of color as a process of gentrification is so pronounced that two researchers studying predominantly African American neighborhoods where gentrification is occurring noted that their informants mark the existence of gentrification to the time that they saw white people buying houses in their neighborhoods^[2].

While gentrification is certainly an important component of the urban environment that needs to be understood to fully comprehend the contemporary development of urban environments, I argue that it is important that gentrification not become the only lens through which urban development is considered. The paper that I am working on currently describes why I think that this is the case and how, in some ways, thinking about gentrification—particularly the context in which gentrification is viewed in the U.S.—can be problematic both for understanding what is shaping residential choices among metropolitan residents and it limits the possibilities of potential urban reform. I am working on writing that part up now, and so will let you know why I think that this is the case in a following post.

[1] Logan, John R. and Harvey L. Molotch. 1987. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press. [return]
[2] One of the studies is an article written by Mary Pattillo (for those interested, I have included the entire citation) who studies the North Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood in Chicago. She has very recently published a book, Black on the Block, expanding on that study and which I have not yet had a chance to read. The citation for her article is: Pattillo, Mary. 2003. "Negotiating Blackness, for Richer or for Poorer." Ethnography 4(1): 61-93.
The other study was conducted by Lance Freeman who studied communities in Harlem and the majority-black neighborhood of Clinton Hill in Brooklyn. If anyone is interested in urban issues and wants to read an incredibly written book, I would recommend it to anyone: Freeman, Lance. 2006. There goes the 'hood : views of gentrification from the ground up. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.[return]

WWJD?

This week, Congressman Tim Ryan (D-OH 17), is taking the "Food Stamp Challenge". Basically, he is trying to live on the $21.00 a day that a person receives in food stamps. After the first day, he writes:

So far today I have eaten a quarter container of cottage cheese, one and a half peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and had one cup of coffee. It still amazes me that so many Americans live like this every day. I already notice a difference in my energy level. After only a day on this diet, I’m tired and hungry, but I’m looking forward to talking to people about my experience, and making people aware of the millions across the country who deal with this every day.

To all of those crazies and not-so-crazies who think that the only thing that poor people need to do is "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" does not know anything about what it is like to go hungry on a day-to-day basis. First, there is the simple bad luck. hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has an excellent post on many of the issues raised on Tim Ryan's blog. At one point, Tim Ryan lost the peanut butter and jelly that he was supposed to eat for that week's meals because it was taken by TSA officers at the airport (or, as hilzoy points out, "there are lots of ways for a jar of peanut butter to come to grief. Your kid can eat it when you're not looking. Your grocery bag can break, leaving it shattered on the sidewalk. Similarly, the rats and roaches can get into your corn meal, or your wheat bread.").

But, what I like is that Tim Ryan is also pointing out the structural inequalities that cause much of this hunger:

As several people have mentioned it the comments, a problem faced many across the country, especially the inner-city poor, are the lack of low-cost food stores in an easily accessible area. These people can’t afford to drive to a Wal-Mart in the suburbs for the bargains; they aren’t members of the warehouse club stores. If you are constrained to where you can walk or take public transportation, then you can only shop at the places in your neighborhood, and you are forced to pay whatever they charge. That is EXACTLY what I was doing. I had the option to head out to Costco or Shoppers and decided instead to replicate as close as possible the REAL experience of someone who can't afford a car and is constrained by public transportation. As you'll see when I publish the video blog I'm working on, we took the Metro out to the store.

This being something that I study in my academic life (the unequal distribution of resources in neighborhoods), I will let you guess which areas are traditionally underserved by grocery stores and farmers markets (hint -- in urban areas, think of areas that are not white and not wealthy). Hilzoy also points out other things that make it even more difficult: 1) Tim Ryan had a staff to help him learn to live on $21.00 a day; 2) He wasn't a single parent trying to care for children as he was doing this (and, therefore, needing to pay for extra fares on the subway or find childcare), 3) he was able to spend an hour-and-a-half in the store looking for the food that he could buy for $21.00, 4) he was doing this while living in D.C. and therefore had access to public transportation (as opposed to say, Pheonix).

In other words, for those who idolize Horatio Alger stories, I am not sure that they would understand that, even with the meager help that poor people are afforded, discriminatory policies prevent them from having access to food in the first place, even if they do have access it's not enough to provide strength enough to pull on one's own bootstraps and finally, the safety net is so threadbare that it can't provide against simple bad luck.

Even for all of this, hilzoy leaves out one important factor that is not discussed. Most poor people don't have access to a supermarkt, grocery store, green grocer or fruit stand; however, what they do have access to is convenience stores. In those convenience stores, there are hundreds -- actually, probably thousands -- of different types of processed corn. Combos, pretzels, Fritos, doughnuts, soda pop, "fruit" juices, etc. all contain some kind of processed corn. Why? Because our government subsidizes the production of corn like it was as vital to living as water. At the same time, the prices of healthy fruits and vegetables are too high for a family to be able to afford on $21.00/week/person

I guess the question becomes, what can be done? If the problem is partly that there is not enough money to live on in a week, then that solution seems pretty straightforward - increase the allowance per week. But, if the problem is unequal access to food stores and quality produce, then the answer becomes more tricky. One could offer incentives to invest those types of stores in poor areas - but those incentives are generally tax breaks which come at the cost of defunding many of the programs that are designed to benefit the very people who need the food stores in the first place. Alternatively, a city could "redevelop" areas and provide the kinds of investment that make it profitable for grocery stores to invest - but that would probably come at the cost of pushing current residents out of the city. One option that I think could be successful in not only providing food, but also investment opportunities for current residents is microfinance loans to help people get their own businesses started.

The way that microfinance loans work is there is usually a collective of people [in orginial incarnations, it was only available for women - this was explained in one acadmic talk as the result that men would "simply drink the money away"] who receive small loans individually. They are able to use these loans to build a business that will provide them with the opportunity to make money and pay back the loans, which then becomes capital for the next person in the collective to invest. The idea is that people rely on each other to pay back loans to build a community. The intuition behind this has also been used to explain why immigrant communities have thrived in this country - small investors (convenience store, laundromat, handymen, fruit and vegetable market owners help each other out with loans).

I have to admit, I was a little very dubious of this idea when I first heard it. I mean, it seemed like another avenue through which the "unfallible free-market would prevail" arguments that is part of the larger neoliberal formulation of the 21st century. But, after reading more about it and thinking through what it would mean in precisely situations like this, it seems like a good idea. I mean, it can't take too much to help a small businessperson set up a viable business plan with a small (probably less than $20,000, for which it is surprisingly hard to obtain a loan -- hear Sudhir Venkatesh talk about in conjunction with his new book, Living Underground: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor on Fresh Air), especially if we eliminate some of the subsidies for corn production given to huge agribusiness firms that are causing many of the health problems to begin with! Maybe its a stretch, but I hope to see Congressman Ryan do something about the structural factors since he has identified them as being a problem.

Something looks familiar...

So, walking into Espresso Royale today, I glance over a man's shoulder and see this image on the front page of the Business Section:



Now, two things struck me.

One: Damn, I felt like I've seen that map before. Low and behold, I check through the files on my computer and this is what I find:



Two: This must be something interesting and related to what I study. Sure enough, it is. Basically, the first map shows the areas that are most likely to have "subprime" mortgages -- or mortgages that have really bad terms. If you look at the second map, which is a map of the percent white in Chicago tracts, and then you look at the first map -- you will notice how the areas that have subprime loans are much more likely to be non-white than the areas without, just as the article, Subprime Loans Going From Boon to Housing Bane points out:

For instance, in Cook County, home to Chicago and nearby suburbs, nearly half of all first-lien home purchase loans made in 2005 were subprime in neighborhoods where minority groups make up 50 percent or more of the population, according to mortgage data collected by the federal government. By comparison, only 30 percent of all loans made countywide over the same period were subprime.

It's nice to see something about this get into the national media -- particularly after things like Proposal 2 pass in Michigan...