America Becoming Racial Trends and Their Consequences: Volume I (2001) / Chapter Skim
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14. Geography and Apportunity
14. Geography and Apportunity
Pages 435-468
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From page 435... ...
Resources and economic dynamism have abandoned central cities, where most racial minorities live, leaving diminished community structures and hazardous waste in their wake. The resulting racially and socially disparate character of cities and suburbs, and the increasing importance of the suburbs in national voting, has led to a declining political will to deal with poverty, race, and urban decline.
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From page 436... ...
, various researchers have stressed that the poor economic outcomes of racial minorities, particularly Blacks, are partly the result of patterns of housing segregation that have prevented minorities from moving in pace with the suburbanization of employment (see Massey and Denton, 1993~. This "spatial mismatch" hypothesis has been particularly important in the work of Wilson (1987)
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From page 437... ...
Looked at another, and a perhaps more politically relevant, way, in 1990, about 44 percent of those living in the 74 central cities were Black or Hispanic; but these groups constituted only approximately 16 percent of the suburban population in these 74 metropolitan areas. Given the documented job shift away from, and the concentration of minorities within, central cities, it is not surprising that joblessness, low wages, and a lack of opportunity disproportionately affect racial minorities, even though formal discrimination has declined in the wake of Civil Rights legislation.
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From page 438... ...
438 GEOGRAPHY AND OPPORTUNITY 70 (n Q ~ 60(n . _ Q o o ~ 40C' 30 _ _ _ _ _ 1 970 % of Whites/Asians in suburbs % of Blacks/Hispanics in suburbs 1 980 1 990 C1=1 Bla k/Hi~^anir relative v - ~ ~ ~ ~ to White/Asian FIGURE 14-2 Suburbanization of the population in 74 metropolitan areas, 1970 to 1990.
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From page 439... ...
To see how this plays out in one specific case, and to get a more detailed analysis that goes beyond broad categories of city and suburb, I combined data on residents from the Public Use Microdata Sample for Los Angeles (L.A.) County with data from the local Association of Governments on the employment base i.e., where the jobs are actually located by census tracts for 1980 and 1990.
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From page 440... ...
The variability of per capita income by region has risen, suggesting increasingly different economic performance by region.
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From page 441... ...
Using PUMAs allows us to go beyond the usual city/ suburb distinction, which is especially important in the case of L.A., where the central city contains many of its own suburbs, and inner-ring suburbs in the County often exhibit economic conditions worse than the city of Los Angeles. The 58 PUMAs were arranged in order of job growth during the 1980s; Raphael (1998)
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From page 442... ...
Many authors have stressed that living in areas of concentrated poverty tends to diminish the relative strength of social networks critical to obtaining jobs (O'Regan, 1993; Pastor and Adams, 1996; Oliver and Lichter, 1996; Ellen and Turner, 1997~. O'Regan (1993:331)
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From page 443... ...
The results, fully presented in Pastor and Marcelli (2001) , suggest that location does matter to individual level outcomes and that the quality of one's network or stock of social capital is important.3 An additional dimension of spatial inequality has to do with the unequal distribution of environmental hazards that are often the byproducts left in central cities by older industrial processes as newer and cleaner employment has radiated outward.
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From page 444... ...
With jobs leaving, social capital slipping, and environmental negatives accumulating, ethnic minorities living in the areas where hazardous waste accumulation is occurring are experiencing distress.5 Of course, both everyday experience and the wage and employment "penalties" evidenced in most multivariate regression analyses suggest that race still 50ne issue not covered here is education, another realm where place and race have often intertwined to produce negative and self-reinforcing cycles. Indeed, the spatial difference in educational quality is, along with the racial composition of schools, one factor that has likely driven trends toward suburbanization; and the resulting shifts in test scores and population simply induce more shifts.
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From page 445... ...
Continuing practices of housing market discrimination ensured that Blacks got left behind in the outward movement. As a result, inner cities increasingly became repositories for low-income individuals, as the suburbs enjoyed higher tax bases and fewer social program costs a process that has deepened fiscal divisions between central cities and their suburbs (Massey and Eggers, 1993; Abramson et al., 1995~.
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From page 446... ...
The increase in the percent of Blacks and Hispanics who are living in tracts within one-quarter mile of a TSDF, however, is 7Obtaining the date sited involved significant archival work; in the case where a tract has two or more sites, we choose the earliest date.
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From page 447... ...
One usual response is that minorities are choosing to move into toxic areas, perhaps because of lower property values. Our preliminary examination of this TSDF-dated database, however, suggests that neighborhoods that received new TSDFs in any particular decade had a larger percent of minority residents prior to the siting, suggesting at least some disproportionality in the actual location decision process.
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From page 448... ...
Those who sought to make the dream of home ownership accessible via federal loan programs and interest rate tax deductions were not consciously out to raid the central cities of America; tax cutters in California may not have had the irrational fiscalization of land use as their main goal; owners of TSDFs may have been more worried about minimizing political resistance than about poisoning people of color. Still, the impacts have been real and they both reflect a politics of division and isolation by race and place, and reinforce such politics as social distance that result in economic gaps that widen over time.
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From page 449... ...
_ .~ Is . _ C' -10 ~ 8 -20 30 20 ~ 10 ~ -30 O 449 · 0 80 · ~7_:e .e ~~ ~0 · ~ 100 Percent change, per capita income FIGURE 14-10 Per capita income growth and change in inequality in 74 metropolitan areas, 1980 to 1990.
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From page 450... ...
In fact, suburbs may be distinguished by their proximity to the central city, with many older inner-ring suburbs experiencing changing demographics and economic pressures similar to those experienced by inner-city minorities, and many outer-ring suburbs enjoying high tax bases and few social problems. As a result, Orfield argues, the central city and its immediate ringand some low-tax-base cities on the fringe have a common interest in both reducing urban sprawl and shifting fiscal burdens.
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From page 451... ...
In short, overcoming the geography of hardship, in which large-scale forces of deindustrialization and declining wages disproportionately affect particular neighborhoods, requires connecting to the emerging economic dynamism evident in the geography of the region. Fortunately, inner-city advocates have begun to rethink old models of community development in a way that is potentially conducive to such regional linkages.
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From page 452... ...
Louis congregations, led by Black churches, has taken on urban sprawl as a central issue, using this to form alliances with suburban neighbors and redirect resources to urban revitalization (Rusk, 1998~. Clearly, equity can be served under the banner of regional environmental sustainability.
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From page 453... ...
However, although Parker's evidence suggests that federal expenditures favor central cities (although suburbs have been gaining ground) , his analysis is confined to spending from 1983 to 1992, his city-suburb definitions are overly broad, and he includes transfers like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)
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From page 454... ...
In especially successful regions, like the Silicon Valley, leadership has come from the business sector as well as from other civic entrepreneurs from all walks of life (Henton et al., 1997~. What are the conditions that lead to regional collaboration?
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From page 455... ...
Reconfiguring the geography to include the inner city and adding its inner-ring neighbors shows sharp differences in demographics, economic outcomes, and housing values. Trying another cut breaking the county into PUMAs, based on demographic changes during 1970 to 1990 offers yet another view that gives a better idea of the stresses minority residents face whether they reside in the center or in the shifting suburbs (Table 14-1~.
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From page 458... ...
Of course, either outcome results in a worrisome pattern of disproportionate exposure, but the policy implications diverge when tonics are placed in neighborhoods by race, attention should be paid to cleaning up the politics of the siting process; if minorities aggregate around tonics, perhaps because of lower land values, information campaigns should be used to make everyone aware of the risks that are silently (and perhaps incompletely) signaled via market prices.
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From page 459... ...
On the collaboration side, one critical element will be increased incentives for regional approaches. The single most effective lever for regional collaboration in recent years has been provided by the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA)
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From page 460... ...
Allocating low-income housing across the region (via scattered-site approaches and inclusionary zoning) and generating individual housing mobility are necessary to decentralize poverty and allow poorer individuals to connect to acquire new residential networks.
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From page 461... ...
Finally, "face" refers to the networks or personal connections that can help people move out of poverty, but that are often lacking for those living in areas of concentrated poverty. It has been difficult for U.S.
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From page 462... ...
The demographics of hazardous waste in Los Angeles County. Social Science Quarterly 78~4~:793-810.
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From page 463... ...
Paper prepared for Suburban Racial Change, a conference sponsored by the Harvard Civil Rights Project and the Taubman Center on State and Local Government, March 28. Fulton, W
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From page 464... ...
Paper prepared for the Task Force on Reconstructing America's Labor Market Institutions, Sloan School of Management, MIT, June. Kirschenman, J., P
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From page 465... ...
1993 The effect of social networks and concentrated poverty on Black and Hispanic youth unemployment. The Annals of Regional Science 27(December)
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From page 466... ...
United Church of Christ, Commission for Racial Justice 1987 Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and SocioEconomic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites. New York: Public Data Access.
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From page 467... ...
1987 The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
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