“After the start of the Great Migration in 1916, the Chicago Real Estate Board (CREB) instituted racially restrictive covenants that prohibited African Americans from purchasing, leasing and occupying housing outside of a small area on the city’s South Side. These covenants were legal and allowed racially discriminatory housing policies to continue for decades,” notes a recent study by the Metropolitan Planning Council, that takes a wider look at the region, on the whole, a departure from most academic and policy studies that have focused on the city alone.
With the tile of The Cost of Segregation,” the MPC results were shared at the April meeting of the Chicago Fair Housing Alliance last Wednesday, to local service providers, and advocates. As Patricia Fron, executive director of CAFHA, notes, “our region's segregation did not happen organically, it is the direct result of public policy.”
The Council, together with Urban Institute and a team of regional policy advisors, analyzed segregation patterns in the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the country. They were driven by two questions, “What does it cost all of in metropolitan Chicago to live so separately from each other by race and income? And, what can we do to change these patterns of segregation, so that everyone living in our region can appreciate in and create a stronger future?”
For many that are not affected by segregation, there is often a lack of concern, or even awareness of the costs to the city, as well as to the region, on the whole. Study authors sought to show the loss for the region, as well as for the individuals. They examined three types of segregation: economic, African American-white, and Latino-white. That led to a central question: “if the Chicago region reduced its levels of segregation to the median levels of segregation of the nation’s 100 biggest metros,” what would it look like?
Over generations, subsequent policies, and practices, have have created barriers between people of different races and incomes.In turn these have had a profound effect on key areas such as education, employment and residence; making one’s zip code a determinant. The resulting devastation, as MPC, has shown affects “entire city neighborhood and suburban villages, towns and cities,” they noted.
Earning our daily bread is a common factor for nearly all of us, and the researchers found “that economic segregation and income inequality compound and exacerbate each other’s effects.” An examination of the data shows the unfortunate result: ”a self‐reinforcing cycle, in which income inequality creates segregation and segregation furthers income inequality. These lowered incomes have a cost: research has shown that if the average incomes of people of color were raised even beyond the national median, up to the average incomes of whites, our gross national product would increase by $1.9 trillion.”
Using economic standards,”incomes for African Americans in the Chicago region would rise by an average of $2,982 per person per year—or an overall increase of $4.4 billion in additional income in our region—if we reduced the levels of economic and African American-white segregation to the national median,” statistically speaking.
Looking ahead, if those numbers were to change, in keeping with white median figures, there would also have been an increase of more than $3,000 from African Americans, over $8 billion dollar in overall income, and a 30 percent decrease in homicides.
Solutions may, they claim, may not be simple, but one idea is a “local Earned Income Tax Credit to housing policies that avoid concentrating where the wealthy and the poor live, to more transit options to connect workers to jobs.”
There are perhaps few people in the country, much less Chicago residents, who are unaware of the increasing violence, mostly fatal, that has plagued the city and exceeded previous records, especially with homicides. “In 2016, murders in Chicago totaled 764, a 58 percent increase from the previous year. This sudden spike in gun violence has garnered both national and international media attention, earning Chicago the reputation as the murder capital of the United States,” MPC cited in a February article.”
“Using the region’s 2010 homicide rate—the most recent figures available at the regional level—our study found that the Chicago area could have boosted its economy simply by being a safer place to live,” researchers summarized.
Examining the relation between safety and livability, and how can it be proved to save lives as well as increasing the latter are topics for the “next phase of work, which will be “focusing on four areas: police reform, the geographic concentration of crime and violence, criminal justice policy, and how place impacts the re-entry and recidivism of people with criminal records.”
Meanwhile here are some startling statistics: ”167 more people would have lived that year, [2010] earning some $170 million over the course of their lifetimes; The region would have saved some $65 million in policing costs and an estimated $218 million in corrections costs; and the region would have saved some $65 million in policing costs and an estimated $218 million in corrections costs.”
In 2010, the number of African American homicides was over 17 times the number for whites; and, as the media reports of the intersection of violence with race and segregation, and poverty, gives the study results an even stronger understanding of the relationship between factors.
Another widely held misbelief is that, for far too long, is “many have had the misperception that Chicago’s violence did not impact them. In fact, violence has a ripple effect: it removes residents from communities by death and incarceration, unravels families and traumatizes survivors. Each of these factors saps the capacity of students and workers and makes the city and region a less appealing place to live and work. Of the 10 U.S. cities with highest murder rates, Chicago ranks eighth. Most of these cities have high levels of economic and racial segregation as well.”
Frequently overlooked, in the equation, are Latinos who are frequently underrepresented in discussions of segregation, and overlooks some important deficiencies. For example, while 25 percent of this population are available for Chicago Housing Authority units, they occupy only 9 percent of available units.
Going even beyond that measure, Latino household mobility is often the result of displacement caused by real estate speculation rather than the family’s upward economic mobility. Many of them are “displaced by urbanization, and gentrification, in their neighborhoods,” which can be seen in the city’s Pilsen and Logan Square neighborhoods, and is sharply increasing, recently, in the Albany Park neighborhood.
Housing, specifically affordable housing, is becoming a scarcity in Chicago, and even regionwide there is a challenge for middle and lower middle class residents. But, mention the word, affordable housing, and opposition grows, with scaremongers raising the spectre of crime, and decreased housing value. The “not in my backyard” syndrome known by the acronym NIMBY has become part of social service vocabulary.
Andrew Geer, Vice President and Chicago market leader for Enterprise Community Partners, showed the attendees slides of some of the more negative comments gleaned from social media -- nearly all negative, many racist, and largely uninformed.
He also gave several points for those providers and advocates attending, some of which were explaining how the system shapes the discussion, connect housing to community issues, and show how affordable housing is a vaccine to prevent social ills, such as homelessness. But, most of all show what will be lost to communities, if there no affordable housing.
Finally, education, the bellwether of middle class attainment, has been compromised by segregation. Researchers “found a correlation between lower levels of segregation and a higher percentage of the population holding a bachelor’s degree, for both African Americans and for whites, this means the Chicago region is losing out on some $90 billion in total lifetime earnings as a result of our education gap.”
Simply put, “Latinos have the lowest bachelor’s degree attainment at 12% with African Americans at 20%,” and while “the U.S. President’s Council on Jobs and Economic Competitiveness found that by 2020 there will be 1.5 million too few college graduates nationwide to meet employers’ demand,” it’s not hard to conceive how much of a stronger workforce the region could have had.
Without direct and consistent efforts, another decade may pass, with yet another study, released, again deploring the deleterious effects of racial and economic segregation in the Chicago region.
As the current study has shown, change requires effort. And, as Fron noted, “since segregation impacts all residents, limiting individual opportunities, and diminishing our region's economic prosperity, it will therefore take effort to change.”
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