BRAINSTORMING FOR MARGULIS (RED-LINING HOUSING MARKETS DISCRIMINATION RACE RACIAL MINORITIES OF OTHER KINDS GAY GHETTO DIFFERENTIAL RETURNS TO LOCATION)

 BRAINSTORMING FOR MARGULIS

Dual housing market: historically de jure until Supreme Court decisions since the middle of the century. Such as Shelley vs. Kramer around 1946, a decision that “restrictive covenants” could not be enforced by any levels of government or the courts. And later in the sixties the civil rights and fair housing legislation and other reversals of separate but equal removed the de jure part. However, there has been relaxed enforcement of fair housing laws since the first Reagan Administration. Some social theories that suggest that as “immigrant- type” groups, such as blacks, gain education and income and become more like middle-class whites, that they will meet with much less exclusion in such thing as job-seeking and the purchase of housing. However, investigations by many social scientists indicate that blacks get less housing benefits from better jobs and more income and education than whites. (see Darden) Blacks are largely confined to less desirable neighborhoods in the central city and suburbs, and when they gain access to suburbs, they tend to be those least desired by whites. Also, blacks usually pay more for less—in location, amenities, and quality of housing—when buying or renting. Blacks face more discrimination than other minority groups, such as Asians, Native Americans, and Hispanics. Those Hispanics who are also black face more discrimination than other Hispanics.

Housing discrimination by real estates agents (through things such as racial and class steering), mortgage lenders, and homestead insurance underwriting companies. Many social scientists have investigated whether there is

 

housing discrimination or bias in the systems for providing housing and whether segregation has been increasing or abating in the past decades. (Logan and Alba; Massey and Denton) Even well-educated blacks and blacks with middle-class incomes tend to meet with racial discrimination when they are shopping for housing.

Many suburbs keep out class and racial groups through their zoning laws. (Harrigan)

Why do people want to live in the suburbs or want to leave the central cities or move to exurban areas or suburbs further out? Better schools, less crime, lower taxes, “classier” neighbors, access to better jobs and housing. (see Bier)

Often even when black move to what is technically “suburban” housing— that is, it is not in the central city—it may be in a district that is as segregated as the central city. So called “spill-over suburbs” are just across the city border from segregated inner city neighborhoods. (Galster) Cleveland Heights and East Cleveland are examples of “spill-over” suburbs.

Some suburbs resegregate: in a relatively short period of time—perhaps a couple of decades—they go from having only a small number of black residents and a white majority to being almost completely black. Galster noted early in this decade that even as blacks move out from the central areas of urban areas, whites are moving even further out than the blacks. This means that segregation mostly persists, even as blacks suburbanize.

Two measures of segregation used by social scientists are the index of dissimilarity and the index of exposure. Galster used a third index that indicates

the relative nearness to the center of a metropolitan area of homes where blacks versus whites live.

The term “white flight” has been used to describe the exodus of middle- class whites from central cities to new suburban and exurban homes. Many have said that the desegregation of central city school systems—sometimes accompanied by the bussing of students—has fueled much of this phenomenon.

Another factor that keeps blacks in segregated housing and neighborhoods, is that many blacks expect they will find themselves unwelcomed by new neighbors and communities in many of the mostly white areas where they in fact can afford to live. Writer David Hatchett quotes Franklin Wilson, a demographer: Blacks often “have a frustration with trying to make integration work [and] when they move into white suburban communities, they find there is no sense of community.” Hatchett also recounts the story of a new home-owner who was repeatedly bothered by his new community’s police when out in his car—clearly because of his race. (176) In the greater Cleveland area, blacks whom have moved to primarily white areas, including Parma and Painesville, have had crosses burned on their lawns and had racial hate words scratched on their automobiles and spray-painted homes and sidewalks. Thus, apprehensions that some black home-seekers have is are hardly unfounded. Black parents may be especially concerned about the effect these possible racial attacks may have on their children. Their children might also face discrimination and racial opposition in the public schools of a new community. If blacks do move to a majority white

neighborhood, it is likely to be already somewhat integrated. That is, many blacks do elect not to be “pioneers.”

Blacks have been suburbanizing rapidly in the last few decades. Inner-ring suburbs are likely to be the ones with the oldest and most worn-out housing, for which blacks may still have to pay a premium. (Bier) Some use the term “black tax” to describe the effects of housing, mortgage, and insurance discrimination of black people, such as worse access to good employment, that they face simply for the color of their skin. Some researchers found that blacks tend to live in suburbs that spend and tax more for services like police protection and that receive more subsidization from higher levels of government (Federal and state) for human services such as welfare, healthcare, and xxxxx. The administration of these human services programs and spending on other government services may be an important source of local jobs.

The building of the interstate highway system has allowed the development of bedroom suburbs distant from their residents’ central city job locations and inner city dwellers. The highways have also led to the growth of manufacturing facilities in the suburbs and exurbs, or the movement of manufacturing facilities from central city locations. Often this means that job growth is distant from the types of areas where (trapped) blacks can easily find and purchase housing. Suburban centers, sometimes called “edge cities,” often do the kinds of business and offer the types of jobs central business districts traditionally have but are far from many blacks’ homes.

Sometimes blacks who move from the inner city to a suburb find increasingly poor municipal government services, yet these may actually be an improvement over those they were accustomed to in there old neighborhood. Thus they do not move again or fight for better services. Integrated suburbs and neighborhoods are very fragile and it can be very difficult to avoid resegregation. Lauber offers suggestions for preventing this but not for creating these kinds of communities.

There are theories of neighborhood succession which describe newer in- migrants to metropolitan areas moving into areas being abandoned by older groups (perhaps Jews or Italians) who may be replacing other previous residents (such as German or English stock whites). These theories are often judged to pertain to blacks who have in the past moved to cities from rural areas instead of coming from abroad and may be similar in some ways to foreign immigrants. But empirical evidence suggests that all racial-ethnic groups are not equivalent as the theories suggest they should be.

Hatchett reports “that 38 percent of whites begin to consider moving when close to 50 percent of [a] neighborhood becomes black”—exactly when it is demographically a very desirable place to black home-seekers. (175)

 

References Cited

Bier, T. E. 1995. Housing Dynamics of the Cleveland Area, 1950-2000. In Keating et. al., 244-259.

Darden, J. T. 1990. Differential Access to Housing in the Suburbs. Journal of Black Studies 21 (1): 15-22.

Galster, G. C. 1991. Black Suburbanization: Has It Changed the Relative Location of Races? Urban Affairs Quarterly 26 (4): 621-628.

Harrigan, J. J. 1993. Political Change in the Metropolis. 5th ed. New York, NY: HarperCollins College Publishers.

 Hatchett, D. 1994. The Black Flight to the ‘Burbs’. In Kellogg, 174-7.

Keating, W. D., N. Krumholz, and D. C. Perry, eds. 1995. Cleveland: A Metropolitan

Reader. Kent, OH: Kent State Univ. Press.

Kellogg, W. A., ed. 1996. African Americans in Urban America: Contemporary

Experiences. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co.

Lauber, D., 1991. Racially Diverse Communities: A National Necessity. In Kellogg,

180-98.

Logan, J. R., and R. D. Alba. 1993. Locational Returns to Human Capital: Minority

Access to Suburban Community Resources. Demography 30 (2): 243-68.

Marshall, A. 1994. The Quiet Integration of Suburbia. In Kellogg, 178-9.

Massey, D. S., and N. A. Denton. 1988. Suburbanization and Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas. American Journal of Sociology 94 (3): 592-626.

Phelan, T. J., and M. Schneider. 1996. Race, Ethnicity, and Class in American Suburbs. Urban Affairs Review 31 (5): 659-680.

Schneider, M., and T. Phelan. 1993. Black Suburbanization in the 1980s. Demography 30 (2): 269-79.

Squires, G. 1993. All the Discomforts of Home. In Kellogg, 158-73.