Are the neighborhoods in your country income-diverse?
A fresher cite, from earlier today on Meet the Press:
A cite for what?
For my contention in post 73, defending myself against the charge of being “obsessed with white people” or (reverse) racist or whatever it was:
Again, that confluence of race and SES comes up again; I’d say that it might work if you dropped some poor white kid into a middle-class or higher school that was predominantly white- he’d want to fit in desperately, and unless the trappings of fitting in are so far outside what he can afford, he’ll fit in just fine, I suspect.
But, throw a black kid into the same situation, and I doubt it’ll have the same results. He’ll feel like an outsider for multiple reasons at that point- not least of which is the fact that he looks very different. Even if he buys the same clothes and listens to the same music, he’ll still be “the black kid” or at best one of a few black students.
This is even the case when the SES is more similar; it’s anecdotal, but my high school graduating class had 2 black guys out of about 105 other boys. Overall, I’d guess the school was something like 5-10% black.
The two guys were from well-off families- one’s father was a doctor, in fact. Yet I know that neither of them felt comfortable in our school; both were sort of “blacker than black” as a reaction to their classmates probably being 80% white and 20% hispanic middle/upper-middle class students.
I’m pretty convinced that without very strong parental support and motivation on their parts to succeed at our school, they probably wouldn’t have done particularly well; they weren’t really part of the social scene on the weekends anyway.
I bet the parents would have it worse; without the forced interaction that school has, there would be little interaction between them and their neighbors, especially if there wasn’t anything in common beyond living nearby.
That argument kind of reminds of my half-Mexican friend who, year after year was put into (mostly Latino) remedial classes despite getting straight A’s, under the argument of “Wouldn’t you have more fun being with your friends?” Every year he’d have to argue to get out back into college track classes.
That’s not what I’m saying; I’m saying that the drive and pressure to “fit in” isn’t there if you’re different than your peers past a certain threshold.
You see it among middle-class white kids as well; past a certain point of “otherness” from the mainstream, you end up with plenty of misfits and others. Typically these misfits tend to band together, but I suspect that being an entirely different race with your own culture might make you even less likely to try and fit in.
In the case of the 2 black guys in my graduating class, I have no doubt that going to our school was a good thing academically, but I wouldn’t say that they “fit in” either.
I’m not advocating that students in schools should be segregated by class or anything like that, I’m just questioning that the idea that poor students in a predominantly middle class neighborhood will be interested in fitting in, especially if they’re black or latino.
Let me put it this way: I’ve seen metro areas above 1M where the neighborhoods were more income-diverse than in some of the small towns I visited in the US; very often, the division between the right and wrong side of the tracks has more to do with which area got developed sooner than with current income levels or job types, and is sort of a running joke (the “wrong” side was “wrong” when it started being developed, which might mean any time between 150 and 50 years ago). In a lot of Europe, by the time you get a large “poor area”, you’re talking metropolis above 4M. Does that mean there aren’t poor areas in smaller towns? No, but very often the areas that are relatively low income and run-down have a mixture of students, immigrants who could afford better but choose to share housing so they can save more, and old folk on fixed income; there also tends to be a mixture of older and newer housing.
And I’ve been in developing countries where you’d see a house with a high decorated wall and hand-carved doors in the middle of a neighborhood of handmade adobes.
Interesting!
Bringing this a bit back to the op - diverse communities (across dimensions, income, ethnicity, race, etc.) seem to me to be A Good Thing, for all involved … so long as they function as communities. Just throwing people within geographic proximity may not be enough to build true communities which I propose involve people actually interacting with each other to some real degree. Living in proximity, city or suburb, does not automatically result in decreased segregation functionally.
Excellent point. Any suggestions on how to accomplish this?
I also wonder how a municipality would enforce mixing housing. Isn’t all of that property privately owned? Would they use some eminent domain power to either force landlords to decrease rents or developers to only build within a certain income range?
If so, I see disastrous consequences for those areas as investment leaves completely. So instead of housing projects, you’d have entire towns destroyed.
They use zoning, and/or threaten not to give those municipalities any money to construct infrastructure, freeways, etc.
Not sure. I have WAGs though.
Community resources that are attractive to all using such as community gardening options and quality public schools that foster family involvement, beginning at a preschool level.
Avoiding the attached garage no sidewalk scenario.
I would be curious about what others think. But percent of units devoted to lower income while neccessary seems unlikely to be sufficient.
Typically this is done through rent control, zoning and government subsidized housing.
“Bussing” between different school districts has also been another unpopular method of trying force people from different socioeconomic groups to mix.
In parts of India, poor people and rich people live right along side each other.
It is a design problem to some extent. One of the goals of the New Urbanism is to be build neighborhoods with more community points-of-focus-and-interaction than are to be found in the average PUD pod – definite neighborhood centers, with local retail stores to which every resident can walk, as well as community centers and theaters and bandstands and things. Not to mention at least some local employment, so the neighborhood should be more than just a bedroom.
Yes that does seem to be the concept. Of note New Urbanism is not something that means “cities” … suburban developments can incorporate the elements proposed perhaps with less difficulty than can city neighborhoods.
Poor people do not live in project housing because government makes them. Poor people live in project housing because government provides it to them, cheap or free; they are, of course, free to leave, but in most cases that would be choosing homelessness. Up to now, most project housing has taken the form of huge apartment blocks in blighted neighborhoods. But if government decides to build project housing in small units in good neighborhoods, poor people will go and live there, willingly. That is not a problem. How the current residents of those neighborhoods react might be a problem.
Just a short pause in the conversation.
Although the topic is still relevant. I’m checking if any cities have changed their policies recently, but I’m not entirely sure what to search for.