# Residential Segregation

## November 9th, 2020

-   "Disregarding my previous advice, I was obsessively watching the news this weekend to see when they'd call the election for Biden - and then within a few minutes car horns started honking, and someone walked down my neighborhood beating a pan. It was interesting; kind of an unusual celebration in American politics."
    -   "I heard people comparing the scene in New York to the end of World War 2, which is definitely extreme, but telling"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-   So, in Chapter 6 Young is writing about residential segregation, but in the 20+ years since she wrote this there've been some interesting twists we need to address
    -   Young tries to say that segregation isn't just homogenous groups of people with things in common living together - she thinks there's nothing wrong with people of a shared culture living together, like in a "Little Italy" or something - but is when those separations become ENFORCED and you don't have a choice to live somewhere due to legal or financial or cultural reasons, and those communities have significant differences in influence or privilege
        -   THAT is Young's definition of segregation
    -   Given that, many people assume segregation is primarily a southern problem that's held over from "Jim Crows" laws - and yet the most segregated city in America is Chicago, in the NORTH!
        -   "I've heard others say that people like me who grew up in the midwest have MORE entrenched patterns of segregation because we've never thought of ourselves as having a race problem, and smugly assume it isn't there - whereas southerners have had to have some degree of reckoning over civil rights"
    -   In 1929 during the Great Depression, many people lost their houses because of how these 10-year housing mortgages were structured, and so during the New Deal these were replaced with self-amortizing 30-year mortgages backed by the federal government. The government was basically investing in home ownership.
        -   The problem is that you economically don't want the government backing loans for properties that will LOSE value, and so if a neighborhood was viewed as "sketchy" or "deteriorating," the government wouldn't invest there - and in the 1950s, white neighborhoods with more black people moving in WERE viewed that way, as "less valuable"
        -   Viewed purely in financial terms, this makes sense; you don't want to back bad bets. But what made people THINK those neighborhoods were losing value in the first place was a racial stereotype that integrated neighborhoods were worse than white neighborhoods!
        -   Because of this, the government "redlined" certain districts with high levels of black home ownership, and wouldn't support mortgages there - and that's enough to get the chain reaction going
            -   Nowadays, redlining is officially illegal in the United States (since the 1970s), but the legacy of rich vs poor neighborhoods it established has stayed with us, and real estate investors still use some of the measures it perpetuated
            -   "I grew up in Toledo, and there were more Lebanese students than Black students at my high school; there was literally only 1 black kid in the whole school. I had particular ideas about what a 'normal' neighborhood looked like, and it was only after moving around as an urban professor at Michigan State that I realized white suburbs really aren't normal for a lot of people. I wanted to live in inner-city Lansing, and the real estate agent straight-up told me 'Oh, there are *undesirables* in Lansing; you should look at these suburbs instead.' He was trying to steer me and get a higher commission; so, of course, I hung up on him and found someone else."
    -   So, even if not exactly law, segregation are these strong social structures that actively impede people from doing what they want
        -   Again, Young doesn't think "group affinity" and people choosing to live together in shared cultural groups or with "my people" is bad by itself until that exclusion element comes in
        -   "In Augusta, there's a gated community INSIDE a gated community, which I think is a hilarious example of segregation"
            -   At the same time, a few hundred years ago in London you'd have poor people living right next to poor people; there'd be "rich streets" and "poor streets," but they still all lived in the same neighborhood; they still walked past the same market square, passed each other in the street, and they at least had to acknowledge one another and were aware they had to live together and were interdependent in some way; suburbanization had certain trends that made segregated housing more extreme than it used to be
            -   In Atlanta, for instance, the highway was partially used to keep black neighborhoods like "Sweet Auburn" separated from downtown, and Buckhead was partly (definitely not entirely) created by upper-class white urbanites trying to get out of the city; Druid Hills, a white neighborhood, was able to defend their neighborhood from the highway running through, and so the highway ended up cutting the Old 4th Ward neighborhood in half and exacerbating neighborhood divides there

-   One thing that's started happening since Young wrote this book is gentrification, the idea that white people now WANT to live in cities again and so are starting to buy up inner city neighborhoods, make the prices skyrocket and drive the people out, and essentially turn poor and minority neighborhoods into white neighborhoods
    -   "When I moved into Decatur, I wanted to live in a neighborhood that I could live in on a professor's salary, and unwittingly became a part of the gentrification there"
    -   New Hampshire is one of the most extreme examples I've seen of property taxes, where the state gave no funding and all the schools got funding from their county - so in some counties you'd have fantastic schools, and in others you'd have dirt-poor schools that had literally no budget. "It was basically educational segregation"
        -   Again, Young would say the goal shouldn't necessarily be educational INTEGRATION by mixing everyone together in these different schools, but instead to reallocate resources in a better way. "If education is compulsory in the U.S., it makes sense to provide it adequately for everyone"
        -   You often see in Atlanta that different counties act in their own self-interest even if it makes neighboring counties worse-off, which doesn't work for regional issues like traffic or air pollution or whatnot; the counties actually are dependent on each other, but don't act like it because it's outside their borders - but when you try to create regional boards, people fiercely oppose losing local control. They don't think that what happens in Fulton concerns them in Dekalb; you similarly see white neighborhoods thinking they don't have to care about black ones, and vice-versa

-   ...as you can tell, this is a research area of mine that I could talk about all day

-   So, why is Young writing about this in a book about democracy? Because Young sees this as a problem that makes deliberation difficult; it exacerbates differences in social structures AND puts people in different spaces so they're less likely to interact, or discuss, or for those social structures to change, which impedes self-development and self-determination
    -   Young's alternative to integration (this idea of living in completely mixed neighborhoods where the diversity of the school/etc. should reflect the population) is DIFFERENTIATED SOLIDARITY, the idea that clustering by itself isn't bad or indicative of segregation, but that people need to recognize that they STILL have shared responsibilities even if they don't live in the same neighborhood, and need to engage in deliberation and working together - "it's less of a melting pot and more of a salad bowl"

-   "Believe it or not, this is the last day we're going to talk about the text as a whole class; we're going to start having smaller review sessions. I was hoping to have those in-person, but I'm wary of rising cases across the country and on campus; the country's new cases graph looks scarily like an exponential growth curve, and so I'm not comfortable asking people to meet until we see some sort of damping feedback slowing that growth down"
    -   The 3rd exegesis will be next week, and then after that'll be focused on the final project for a week before we break for Thanksgiving...and I guess that'll be the entire semester