Why don't black and white Americans live together?

http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2008/10/28/game-theory-and...

It didn't hurt that the University of Chicago drove most of the land ownership and maintained a massive private police force.

I'm with you, not sure what the lesson was, but it led to an integrated neighborhood.

It's nearly unbelievable that something as simple as /not allowing the posting of For Sale signs/ can quell a lot of concerns about negative changes to the neighborhood.

https://www.wbez.org/shows/curious-city/not-in-your-front-ya...

1. Provide cheap insurance to homeowners against price declines, so that they would not fear the neighborhood flipping to African American and losing their investment.

2. Creating the Oak Park Regional Housing Center, a essentially a non-profit real estate agency not subject to many of the discrimination laws.

3. Agressive code enforcement against apartment building owners who might let properties decline in anticipation of the neighborhood going African-American and low income, but being willing to negotiate if they put their listings exclusively with the Housing Center.

4. Testing real estate agents for violation of fair housing laws, but agreeing to let them slide if they agreed to list exclusively with the Housing Center.

5. Creating an investment vehicle to purchase blighted apartment buildings, listing exclusively through the Housing Center.

5. Making the housing center staff specifically steer based on race, but in the opposite of the normal direction. They would only show all-white buildings to black customers, and show white customers to majority black buildings. The Housing Center did similar steering for single family houses. The specific goal was "a black a block" so that most residents would have an African American neighbor, but that clusters would not form that could cause momentum for houses to sell.

6. School districts drawn to evenly spread out African Americans among all of the schools.

7. Direct community outreach with police visits and conversations with people on the block that might object to an African American resident on their block.

8. Making For Sale signs on lawns illegal.

All in all, an absolutely amazing and masterful piece of social engineering, that has not to my knowledge been replicated anywhere else. That said, this is all fairly heavy handed, and IMO goes right up to, and perhaps past the line of legality.

But the more expensive center of Oak Park is less well integrated, and some of the same city dynamics that produce disparities elsewhere are at play in Oak Park, too.

It also helps that Oak Park is tiny. You can walk across it in like 20 minutes.

If that was the case (or enough), we wouldn't have this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_steering

and this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_segregation_in_the_Uni...

I don't think many blacks care of being a "small minority" on a posh white neighborhood...

The reverse happens with bad schools.

There are now not any schools with less than 20% hispanic student populations (there is still a charter school with under 20% hispanic, but it was excluded per above), but there is a huge hole between 45% and 75% hispanic, and 6 out of 10 are 80% or more hispanic. If children were assigned randomly to these schools, one would expect a normal distribution around the population mean.

And to clarify, all of these schools are within a single school district and pull from the same funding source.

1: http://imgur.com/a/8iLt9

http://projects.andrewwhitby.com/uk-ethnicity-map/#lat=51.51...

White migration does happen, and we call it gentrification, because it usually means wealthy young (mostly white) folks moving into poor neighborhoods on the edges of "cool" cities, causing rents to rise dramatically over a short period of time, and pushing out longtime residents who are too poor to afford to continue to live in the hip new neighborhood with fancy bistros and cat cafes (yes, there's really a cat cafe...it's in East Austin on the site of a business once owned by a Hispanic family whose business was bulldozed).

Integration almost has to go the other way, or it is more of a disruptive force, and a force for further damaging communities of color. Race and class are so closely correlated in the US that you can't talk about one without the other on most issues. In this case, it means that white people moving into a black or brown neighborhood are often displacing black or brown people who can no longer afford to live there, because wealthier whites have driven up rents (and home ownership among black and brown people is much lower than ownership among white people in the US, so that doesn't provide a very good buffer to protect those black and brown neighborhoods from being "flipped" into white neighborhoods).

In short: Integration is a good goal. But, without some care, moving white folks into black and brown neighborhoods can be harmful.

Interestingly, Asian-American integration seems to happen only within higher socioeconomic classes. Asian-Americans as a group seem bifurcated into South or East Asians who immigrated into highly-technical, well-paying jobs after 1965 (when U.S. immigration policy opened up to let them in), and East Asians who came over for things like the California railroads in the late 1800s or Southeast Asians who arrived as refugees in the 70s and 80s. The latter group is much more likely to live in Chinatown, work in restaurants or laundromats rather than software companies, have few friends of other races (indeed, inner-city Asian-Americans I knew in college seemed more likely to hang out with the black kids than the white ones), and speak relatively poor English.

This makes me think the root cause is economic. It could have to do with these groups not being able to afford houses in nicer areas, or it could be people not wanting to associate with people who they view as a rung down on the socioeconomic ladder.

You see a lot of white-on-white conflicts that look almost exactly like white-on-black ones wherever hillbillies and non-hillbillies try to coexist -- particularly in the southern Rust Belt, where it's common for Catholic ethnics to be the middle class and hillbillies/rednecks the former factory hands. I'd recommend reading _Hillbilly Elgy_, Thomas Sowell's _Black Rednecks and White Liberals_, and of course _Albion's Seed_ for details. Jim Webb also had some essays on this subject, before he was elected to Congress; he had plans to unite hillbillies and blacks as a single interest group, and I'm not sure if that would have been a good idea or a bad one.

https://psmag.com/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessing-whi...

White flight happens the other way as well when there are "too many" Asians in a neighborhood.

It's not something that's nearly as sharply defined in NYC, but there's definitely some racial separation by neighborhood if you look at statistical maps on the subject.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/27/map-segregation-ame...

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1321377/original.jpg

isnt harlem, the bronx, spanish harlem parts of NYC?

i agree nyc is extremely fast in gentrification - but that doesnt make it mixed on the long run

This is a very, very untrue statement. I grew up in New York and both the city and Long Island are pretty heavily segregated by race. Yes, there are areas where there is more integration but by and large blacks live in one area and whites live in another. Housing costs in the city have made it so that integration happens for a while in some neighborhoods but really only when that neighborhood is gentrifying. Post gentrification it ends up being pretty much just white or, if you're lucky, a mix of upper middle class people of varying ethnicity but still majority white.

A larger assortment of maps is here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/721576248126749...

They generally show more mixing than the cities featured in the OP. (Cold comfort if you happen to live in Kansas City, Baltimore, St. Louis, or Chicago.)

I have lived in Kansas City and in St. Louis, and I agree that they are both more segregated than their peer cities in the, say, top 50 US cities. Certainly in Kansas City, the racial covenants highlighted in the article were very much in force when large land developers expanded the city into its suburbs.

It's worth remembering that the racial covenants in force at the time were very popular. Proposition 14 in California, which was specifically written to allow redlining to continue, passed with 65% of the vote in 1964 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_14_(196...).

I disagree. NYC is the same, just at lower resolution. The segregation happens along small blocks and avenues rather than towns. I live along the "tracks" on 4th Ave in Brooklyn. The difference is stark-- both in terms of demographics and steep drop-offs in property prices and rents.

Segregation is not good, but having it at low resolution at least allows some interaction across lines, which is positive. Such interaction is more unlikely when the segregation is at the town or village resolution.

NYC is 14 million people -- bigger than lots of whole countries. There are tens of states smaller than it.

Think instead of this trend in NYC as divided into boroughs and neighbourhoods. How many blacks with 5th avenue apartments overlooking the park?

Some mixed areas like the South End (50% white), but also the North End (90% white) and Roxbury (8% white). Roxbury and the North End are only 4 miles away from each other.

Not to mention the fact that the fact that Roxbury is only 8% white is primarily due to a huge wave of white flight to the metro Boston suburbs. This happened within our parents' lifetimes. In Boston one of the largest periods of white flight happened to coincide with forced school segregation (bussing).

The east coast may be liberal politically, but it's still also racist. You can see similar themes reoccurring with the rate of gentrification and the rise of charter schools in the city.