Order ID | 53563633773 |
Type | Essay |
Writer Level | Masters |
Style | APA |
Sources/References | 4 |
Perfect Number of Pages to Order | 5-10 Pages |
Relationship Between Racial Background and Segregation
The relationship between racial background and segregation is brought out
clearly by research on housing discrimination in suburban communities. Government
regulations and real estate agents prevent African Americans from moving outside
the large city even if they can afford to do so. Most often this is the result of a
kind of racism that is called “exclusionary zoning.” Such measures have been confirmed
as the cause of segregation by a long research tradition.
According to a report published in 2004:
Much has been written in recent years on continuing high levels of racial segregation
and growing income segregation within urban areas in the U.S. Black and Hispanic
households tend to live in different neighborhoods than whites, while within these
groups high-and low-income households are also spatially separated. Among the factors
that contribute to segregated housing patterns are local land-use regulations that
tend to exclude lower-income households from suburban communities. The specific
regulations that are most often criticized as exclusionary are those that specify a
minimum lot size for single-family homes. Large lots artificially inflate the cost of
R A C I S M A N D P O V E R T Y
build or, in some cases, don’t have the money to finish the work. . . . New Orleans
has regained about 75 percent of its pre-storm population, though a recent report by
the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program and Greater New Orleans
Community Data Center said slowing of school enrollment suggests those moving
in are single or childless couples. . . . By one recent estimate, less than 20 percent of
the Lower 9th’s pre-storm population is back. A pocket of new, built-to-last houses
in another part of the neighborhood—spearheaded by Hollywood star Brad Pitt and
slated to expand—is like a hamlet surrounded by open, vivid-green land.
Overgrown lots and homes that have scarcely been touched since Katrina spill
from the cluster of Pitt homes, creating a virtual wilderness. On a recent afternoon,
feral chickens scurried across a road that attracted little notice before Katrina but
has become a landmark since.” The city is recovering but growth is clearly uneven
with large areas of the poorest sections comparatively abandoned. Overall, one indicator
of recovery is revealing: Prior to the hurricane in the prosperous year the
total number of residential addresses actively receiving mail was 188,251. Now, in
June of 2009, that number is 154,592 up by slightly more than 8,000 since immediately
after the storm. Recovery is happening but, obviously, at a slow pace.
SOURCES: “Four Years After Katrina: The State of New Orleans,” AP/Huffington Post, August 28,
2009; Dan D. Swenson and Bob Marshall, “Flash Flood: Hurricane Katrina’s Inundation of New
Orleans.” Times-Picayune, May 14, 2005; Jed Horne, Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the
Near Death of a Great American City (New York: Random House, 2008).
owner-occupied housing within suburban communities, making it difficult for lowand
moderate-income households to buy into these communities. In addition to
large lot zoning, there are a myriad of other zoning and building regulations that
raise home prices and apartment rents within America’s suburbs. (Ihlanfeldt, 255)
As a result, there is a scarcity of affordable housing within many communities,
and region-wide racial segregation is compounded by poverty. Ihlanfeldt goes on to
say, “There are some hard facts obtained by people doing research on exclusionary
zoning. It has been found that neighborhood median income increases property
value while racial diversity reduces property value. The evidence provided demonstrates
that there is a cash payoff to suburban property owners from excluding from
their community low-income and minority households.”
Recent research on segregation shows that the forces of isolation and discrimination
afflicting the black and the poor have deconcentrated just as minority populations
have spread out unevenly across the metro region. As a result, an overall
locational pattern has emerged with minority communities fragmenting into irregular
enclaves throughout the area rather than being confined to specific ghettos. This
is even more so for poor Hispanics who have been more successful in overcoming the
barriers of exclusionary zoning in suburbia. While affordable housing and mixed
communities are not increasingly present, strict ghettoization is giving way to a more
dispersed, regional array. Thus, research shows that there is an exclusionary and discriminatory
dynamic operating at the multicentered metro regional scale rather than
the simple dichotomy of city vs. suburb that characterized earlier perspectives on
race and income segregation. These results confirm in a different way the emergence
of the new form of multicentered regional space than earlier arguments in this text.
In a 2008 study, the author looked at nine metro areas: Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit,
Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. He
compared segregation in these regions within suburban communities, between suburban
communities, between the urban poor and the suburban region, and within the
principal cities. In all the regions tested, there was significant segregation within the
core cities, between the urban core and the suburban rings in the region, and between
suburban communities in the region. Atlanta had most of its segregation within and
between suburban communities. Chicago had a large component of segregation within
its core area. Detroit possessed a large component of segregation between and within
its suburban communities but also within the central city. Segregation in Houston was
dominated by its presence in the core central city. Miami’s picture was the reverse:
Most of the segregation was between and within suburban communities. New York,
among the entire sample, had most of its segregation within the principal cities of the
region. San Francisco was equally balanced between segregation in the city and in the
suburban area of the region, while Washington, D.C., like many of the other cities,
was dominated by segregation in the suburban region (Farrell, 2008).
218 9 : M E T R O P O L I TA N P R O B L E M S
Most metropolitan areas became less segregated during the 1990s, but this effect
obscures the more complex and fragmented nature of segregation involving multigroups
and differences in community segregation patterns within the larger metropolitan
region. Another reason there is not more fragmentation of minority and poor
neighborhoods, especially in the central city, is because of gentrification. In the large
cities like New York, young adults are moving into former ghetto areas that were once
predominantly black or Hispanic. The same is true in many other large cities; however,
it is probably not the case in the smaller cities where there is still room for affordable
housing close to the city but located in suburban regions, or in the cities of the
south which still maintain racial barriers to locational mobility, such as in New Orleans.
We shall discuss gentrification below. Farrell’s comparative analysis clearly demonstrates
the way discrimination operates to produce variable patterns of settlement
for the poor and minorities because of the way those populations have filtered out
from central cities according to the different limitations imposed on them by exclusionary
practices in the different cities.
At the end of the last century, a growing number of black people have returned to
the South, thereby reversing decades of movement north. According to a report by the
Brookings Institution (2005), the South outscored net gains of black migrants from
all three of the other regions of the United States during the late 1990s, reversing a
thirty-five-year trend. Of the ten states that suffered the greatest net loss of blacks
between 1965 and 1970, five ranked among the top ten states for attracting blacks between
1995 and 2000. Southern metropolitan areas, particularly Atlanta, led the way
in attracting black migrants in the late 1990s. In contrast, the major metropolitan
areas of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco experienced the greatest
out-migration of blacks during the same period. Among all ethnic-racial groups,
blacks were more likely than any other to move to the South. Both Atlanta and Washington,
D.C., were the major recipients of black migrants. Most importantly, collegeeducated
individuals led the new black immigration into the South. Georgia, Texas,
and Maryland attracted the blackest college graduates from 1995 to 2000, while
New York suffered the largest net loss. There was also a large out-migration of African
Americans from California. They moved to the “spillover” states of Arizona and Nevada
as well as back to the South. Due to the higher level of education and income
characteristic of these return southerners, inner-city hyperghettos continue to lose
their more affluent residents, assuming, as in the case of New Orleans, there are any
left at all.
One effect on U.S. culture of significant segregation is that increasingly whites
learn about blacks and blacks learn about whites only from the mass media because
they have little direct contact with each other. Styles of dress and language among
teenagers, in particular, are highly influenced by the media and the mass-marketing of
youth-related fashions in clothing, cinema, and music. In the 1990s, an urban style of
ghetto dress among black teenagers that is associated with rap music and inner-city
R A C I S M A N D P O V E R T Y 219
dance styles were marketed nationwide. Many youths in suburbia copy the style that is
marketed to them through television and films. At the same time, suburban fashions
associated with active leisure wear, especially influenced by Southern California, such
as skateboarding and beachwear, are also marketed through the media nationwide.
Teenage culture represents a battleground of these and other spatially generated
lifestyles that are diffused across the country by the mass media (Chambers, 1986),
and it is here, in popular culture, that urban African American culture has had its
greatest impact on whites.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
GET THIS PROJECT NOW BY CLICKING ON THIS LINK TO PLACE THE ORDERCLICK ON THE LINK HERE: https://www.perfectacademic.com/orders/ordernowAlso, you can place the order at www.collegepaper.us/orders/ordernow / www.phdwriters.us/orders/ordernow |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|