
Urban Neighborhoods, Once Distinct by Race and Class, Are Blurring - pseudolus
https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/02/city-race-class-neighborhood-white-black-rich-segregate/583039/
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_red
She's just modeling the bottoming out of the middle-class. Its interesting
that it visually looks a lot like cancer metastasizing.

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amanaplanacanal
What? You seem to be implying that people are forced to move to cities because
it's cheaper?

I think you'll find that a lot of people have decided they would rather live
in cities rather than the suburbs.

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alanz1223
The unfortunate reality of the situation is that a lot of these disparities
have to do with culture. Wealthier neighborhoods tend to be white and asian as
those cultures tend to instill pursuing a higher level of education in their
children as well as a few other positive values I could mention.. As long as
politically correct leftists (a majority in this country) keep turning a blind
eye away from these hard truths, and refuse to put their boot on the ground,
these communities will unfortunately continue to be afflicted by their own
culture.

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alexgmcm
As someone from Europe - I find it really weird they just seem to treat racial
and economic classes as more or less interchangeable.

It's as if white==wealthy and black==poor - is the situation still so dire in
the USA?

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glitchc
Europe is far worse than the US. France, Germany and Italy are full of
ghettos. In the US at least, money buys you a modicum of respect. A black man
can’t catch a break in France, regardless of how wealthy he is. That’s real
classism.

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barry-cotter
Have you ever been to France? Because what you say does not accord at all with
what the French people I know would say. It’s all about class. There are many
fewer black or Arab French who go to good universities and go on to get good
jobs but once you’re middle class and not in les banlieues you’re not going to
be treated badly because you’re visibly different any more than the Vietnamese
are.

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kevin_thibedeau
liberté, égalité, fraternité... pour les blancs.

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austincheney
> What do our metropolitan areas look like—what shape, or model, best
> describes them—today?

I can answer this for Texas, except Houston. Houston is an outlier among all
major US cities.

Large urban centers are a relative modern phenomenon in Texas beginning around
the late 19th century. Cities existed in Texas before that, but they weren't
what we would think of today as urban. In most of the first half of the 20th
century Texas cities weren't that large and everybody lived in the city near
the city center where the jobs were. Things were diverse and there weren't
indicators of racial neighborhoods or stratification.

Then around the 1950s things changed and affluent white people left the cities
in droves to found suburbs on the city edges. This is due to a number of
factors: racial integration of the schools, growing population densities,
traffic, strain on urban services. This movement away from the cities left
neighborhoods lacking the prior diversity and arose racial neighborhoods. Keep
in mind that racial integration started in schools with the Brown decision in
1952, but would not be reflected in much of the rest of society into the Civil
Rights Act of 1964. Most unique though suburbs added larger living spaces than
cities could afford, which was attractive to people who had the means to move.

Growth continued and continued. When suburbs became too dense, too noisy, or
grew away from the previous affluence more suburbs were founded outside the
existing suburbs and living conditions became more spacious still. The pattern
is that city living would become poorer and progressively more affluent the
further away you went. What's interesting though is that several of the large
cities saw this early and corrected for it. Those cities still have some poor
inner-city neighborhoods but have made early efforts to attract money back
into the urban core. This has resulted in wealthy city centers surrounded by a
ring of poverty at the edge of the old city boundaries and inner suburbs.

Another solution of the big cities is to use their voting power and tax wealth
to annex land fast than people can found or grow suburbs thereby growing the
space of the city to create suburbs outside the farther suburbs yet still
within the city boundaries of the big city.

This continually outward expansion and large residential estates created a new
problem: long commutes. Texas has always had really weak public transit. There
have been numerous proposals and bond packages to fix this over the years, but
they are always killed for political reasons. The airline industry is huge in
Texas so that are particularly quick to kill any kind of long distance public
transit. Texas has spent more money on its freeways than perhaps every other
US state and more than a good portion of the remaining country combined, but
the freeways are really nice. If you want to defeat public transportation with
urban areas that wide and populations that large you need a really good
excuse, and limiting traffic congestion is a good half answer.

With commutes getting longer and longer there is appeal to giving up the
larger yards and moving back to the city. People are working longer than they
used to and certainly don't want to be spending a good portion of additional
time driving. The demand is high enough that some people are willing to pay
substantially more for smaller spaces to be closer to work.

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mistrial9
there are many dimensions to this .. just this week in HN, a comment said "the
kind of job that let a person live in one house their whole life, started
getting destroyed sometime in the 1980s" .. and went on to say other things
with that assumption.. Hello! looking around a crowded urban area filled with
houses, there are plenty of houses that are occupied for decade+.. not in high
tech though! apparently.. what about health care and owners of rental
property.. no need to move every 18 months.. so the "disappearing" that was
stated as a fact, in unique to certain high tech.

So you have fast-paced job changers, and slow job changers, on a societal
scale.. How about the empty, expensive home with the owner/investor somewhere
far away ? its here too..

people who focus on race, are focused on race.. there are many other
dimensions to this topic

