American Apartheid Part 0

I’m working on a research project that, I hope, will one day turn into a series of posts, hence, ‘Part 0’.  But until then, this is good place to store some preview links for future reference:

Foseti links to some Business Insider provocation clickbait, “These Charts Show The Rise Of Income Segregated Neighborhoods In The US” which links, in turn, to a new Report out of Brown University, “Residential Segregation by Income, 1970-2009“. Kevin Drum called it “The Collapse of the American Middle Class“.

You might notice that White and Asian families are only mildly more income-segregated than they were 40 years ago, but that Black and Hispanic families have become much more income-segregated.  Why?  What happened?

Well, for starters, this is some evidence that tends to undermine the hopes of open-borders types who like to assume magical single-generation assimilation and economic integration for every kind of immigrant.  A noble wish, but wishful thinking nonetheless.

But what the racial chart also tells us is that all of a sudden income segregation is correlating with another kind of segregation.

Handle, Brown, Wired, Pew, and Business Insider seem to be on the same vibe with regards to this fascinating topic and, apparently, they can just keep reposting the same information from their own sites and echoing it from other sites.

Actually everyone is there, including the NYT two years ago: Middle-Class Areas Shrink as Income Gap Grows, New Report Finds.  This attention makes sense.  America is dogmatically obsessed with the orthodoxy of equality, and matters of race of wealth are perpetual thorns in the side of that cult.  Unlike the hopes of past generations of American liberals, the size of those thorns has gotten larger, not smaller with time; they are more irritating, more likely to affect individuals on a personal level, and so increasingly difficult to ignore.  Let’s go through the rest of the links quickly:

BI: 12 Maps That Show The Extreme Racial Segregation In America’s Biggest Cities

WIRED: The Best Map Ever Made of America’s Racial Segregation

PEW: Residential Segregation by Income

BI: Maps Of Extreme Income Segregation In US Cities

BROWN: The Persistence of Segregation in the Metropolis

And some of the consequences:

ATLANTIC: Where Even the Middle Class Can’t Afford to Live Any More

BI (via REDFIN): It’ll Cost You Hundreds Of Thousands Of Dollars Extra To Buy A Home Near A Good School

And finally, Dreher at TAC: Can We Ever ‘Fix’ Segregated Schools? leads us to:

Atlantic: Why Are American Schools Still Segregated?

and, Fiel at the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison: DECOMPOSING SCHOOL RESEGREGATION: SOCIAL CLOSURE, RACIAL IMBALANCE, AND RACIAL ISOLATION

The Civil Rights Project: E Pluribus…Separation: Deepening Double Segregation for More Students

Of course, the government and the Department of Housing and Urban Development is aware of this issue and claims it will try to reverse it and achieve real-estate integration by suing communities with insufficient amounts of the officially-approves kinds of ethnic diversity.  Team Obama Steps Up Racial Standards for Neighborhoods.

Of course, this could easily be one of those ‘settlement conspiracy’ games that liberal community leaders like to play with the DOJ (e.g. Austin and the firefighters, HT: Sailer).  The leadership is able to go back to its enraged residents and say ‘There’s nothing we can do! It’s a federal lawsuit, our hands our tied! You certainly can’t vote to change this policy, so don’t bother kicking me out of office.”

This happens all the time (and the same phenomena is at work with government union ‘negotiations’, which are, ahem, not exactly always arms-length adversarial processes) A lot of cities also did the same thing with stop-and-frisk, to include Detroit, which actually invited the DOJ to investigate the city, and then ‘settled’ promising to never do it like that horrible New York City.

In this case, you could triple HUD’s budget and it wouldn’t matter because it would need orders of magnitudes more money to give out in Section-8 vouchers to overcome the economics of the real-estate market.  But the great thing about coercive government ‘law’ is that you don’t need money to work in the marketplace when you can just force people to do what you want (or conspire with them so they can pretend they were forced.

The question, of course, is why is the real estate market acting this way?  What can we say about the future?  What lessons can we extract from the data?

Alas, I am out of time this morning, so I’ll leave it at that.