Coloring Opportunity: The Regional Geography of Structural Racism in The NYC Region

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Mar 21, 2009 at 13:30

It's not bad enough that blacks suffer twice the unemployment rate of whites (with Asians and Latinos falling in between), they also suffer inferior housing, health care, and education, along with greater exposure to pollution.  Indeed, the report identified six broad areas, constructing an index of indictors for each, and found similar patterns of racialized opportunity in all six of them.

It's important to realize that none of this necessarily depends on old-fashioned racism.  But that doesn't make a bit of difference when it comes to the effect, which is to place disproportionate, and often debilitating burdens on minorities. (Sub-prime mortages, for example, not only were targeted disproportionately at minorities, in many cases minorities who qualified for standard financing were simply not offered the option that would have been routine, had they been white.) Furthermore, as minority populations grow, and minorities collectively come to constitute a majority, these patterns of suppressed opportunity are increasingly a problem for our society as a whole--as, indeed, was the case with the sub-prime mortgage meltdown.

It's not just a noble sentiment, it's increasingly simply a fact of life-allowing large segments of our population to be held back by substandard opportunities to advance creates mounting problems for our society as a whole.  The converse is also true:  effective strategies for advancement as a whole require a special focus on those who are being held back the most. That's the message behind the report, "One Region: Promoting Prosperity Across Race" [pdf]

AMY GOODMAN: Now, you focused on New York but see that as a microcosm of the country.

MAYA WILEY: That's right. We focused on the New York metropolitan region, so that includes parts of Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Westchester County, Long Island. And the reason we did was twofold. One, obviously, New York is a huge region of the country, and increasingly in this country, we have to look at regions in terms of how we build opportunity, because our jobs flow, our economies flow, and our people flow across our political boundaries of cities and suburbs. But it's also critically important because if we look at the leadership in Washington right now, the New York delegation actually has an incredibly important leadership role to play. So if we can figure out how we implement some of these policies well in the New York region, hopefully we can become a model for how to do this well across the country.

Wiley quickly moved on to raising the example of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown:

AMY GOODMAN: So, what are your chief findings? How have communities of color been hardest hit, and what are the models to bring them out of the global economic meltdown?

MAYA WILEY: Well, I want to step back for a minute, because I think there's one part of this meltdown story that is not getting told enough, although some people are starting to tell it. I mean, obviously everyone knows that we started in this crisis with the mortgage crisis. Well, 35 percent of subprime mortgage holders were actually eligible for prime-rate loans. 35 percent. So imagine if we had had a financing system where people actually fairly got the loans that they should get. Most of those are people of color. And even when you look at the expansion of the subprime industry, a lot of it was around the fact that communities of color didn't have fair access to credit. So we're in this mess in part because we didn't look at the warning signs. The warning signs for our economy were in communities of color. We tend to be first-hit first and hit hardest.

So, as we look at, of course, how this crisis has played out, it's played out across jobs. People are losing jobs. People are in danger of losing their homes, not just if they're homeowners, but also if they're renters, because the developers who own buildings are going into foreclosure, and those rentals are in danger. But, you know, what we really see is that we have to stimulate equality in order to stimulate the economy, and we have to do that nationally. So if we look at the parts of the country, the communities that are most impacted, that have the lowest opportunity, and we think about how direct investments there, there's a lot of good social science that shows that we can build regional economies that way.

It's worth noting that this constitutes a fundamental reversal of conservative economic policy, which characteristically focused on helping those who didn't need it, assuming--but never actually bothering to find out--that the benefits would trickle down to the rest of us.  Former NYT reporter Dacid Cay Johnston's book, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) (discussed on Democracy Now! here) does a good job of mapping out how these policies played out.

Here is an excerpt from the report's executive summary:

The country and the New York region1 are in crisis. Wall Street is the epicenter of the financial earthquake rocking our people, nation, and world. Home foreclosure rates are skyrocketing while families struggle to meet a rising cost of living in the face of lost or reduced earnings. Retirees' pensions are threatened and college is becoming less affordable as banks are less willing to make student loans. The states and cities in the region face huge fiscal crises and search for budget items to cut. These are hard realities, but we can make things better.

The choices we make now and the ideas and strategies we identify will either be stepping stones toward resilient, healthy communities or stumbling blocks that will cause us to falter again in the future. To make the right choices we need to look at the entire region and identify communities with limited opportunities. This will tell us where to make investments. This report looks at opportunity in New York City and the surrounding region to identify directions toward a thriving region for everyone.

There is not one path to opportunity. Opportunity is a complex system of interconnected roads, bridges, and highways. It is a set of relationships between varieties of investments in people. If we live in a neighborhood with good public schools, it puts our children on the road to college and graduate school. The higher our educational attainment, the more likely we are to have a strong social network that connects us to employment opportunities as well as the skills to make and remake ourselves in a rapidly changing and technology-driven economy. But even for those of us in communities with many pathways to educational or economic opportunity, the current economic crisis has shown us that our opportunity system needs repair. We will not be able to prevent collapse unless we inspect the infrastructure. To do that we must locate systemic weaknesses where things have been allowed to decay, and build stronger supports.

This report looks at opportunity regionally because systems of opportunity span the entire region. It takes a regional approach to understand how suburban sprawl and decentralized growth have made all communities more vulnerable. And while municipal and tax boundaries may separate jurisdictions on a map, the fates of cities and suburbs are connected.

The variables used in the study to construct the indexes are as follows:

The Opportunity Index Mapped

Here are two maps showing the distribution of overall opportunity index.  First is the region-wide map:

And here's a map of selected regions:

Here's what the report has to say about the clustering of minorities in low-opportunity areas:

By zooming in to examine a few specific places in the region, we can see more clearly the role race plays in determining opportunity. Communities of color and low-opportunity areas almost completely overlap. People living in these areas don't have access to good jobs, housing, schools, or a healthy environment.

Residents of low-opportunity areas are often completely cut off from high-opportunity areas. Many are literally transit-stranded, lacking a private vehicle or decent public transit options.37 Others are economically-stranded, starved of an education, working in low-wage jobs with little, if any, opportunity to climb a career ladder. High-opportunity areas typically lack affordable housing, which means individuals living in low-opportunity areas cannot afford to move to high-opportunity areas.

The Opportunity Index shows a clear regional trend: Whites are more likely to live in newer, second-ring suburbs and have greater access to opportunity, while new majority and immigrant residents are largely trapped in low-opportunity urban environments and inner-ring suburbs. Blacks, Latinos, and Asians made up 44% of the region's population in 2006, but 88% of the region's very low-opportunity areas and 64% of low-opportunity areas.

Whites, who represent 54% of the region's population, account for 88% and 81% of very high-and high-opportunity areas, respectively.

Here's a table of the demographic distribution of the opportunity levels:

Now let's follow how the report drills down into the different elements contributing to the composite index.  We'll start with a couple of the sub-indices, and then look at some of what goes into them.

The Poverty Sub-index

Here is the map of the poverty sub-index.  This is composed of three negative variables: ousehold poverty; Child poverty (<18 years); and Elderly poverty (>=65 years).

From the report:

Children are victims of our collective failure to distribute opportunity. Child poverty in communities of color is shocking. Regionally, around 40% of Black and Latino children under the age of 18 live in poverty. White child poverty is one fifth of that (8%) and half of Asian child poverty (17%).67 Research has shown that the stress of growing up in poverty can alter brain development in the area responsible for problem-solving, reasoning, and creativity.

Research conducted in Southern California also shows decreased lung function for children who grow up in high-pollution areas (also predominantly minority and low-income), most notably around the ports of LA and Long Beach, and the goods movement corridors away from them.

The Housing Sub-index

Here is the map of the housing sub-index.  The housing sub-index is composed of two positive variables: Homeownership rate, and Percentage of housing units with plumbing and kitchen facilities; and three negative variables: Rent stress (Renters paying over 30% of income on gross rent), Mortgage stress (Homeowners paying over 30% of income on their mortgage) and Percentage of mortgages made in 2006 that are high-cost.

Here's an example of how the geographical analysis leads to significant policy recommendations that would otherwise not be made:

Policy Recommendations: Create Incentives for Opportunity-Based Housing

Leverage the Low Income Tax Credit (LIHTC) program
The federal government, through the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, provides tax incentives for the construction of affordable housing - The Low Income Housing Tax Credit program (LIHTC). Thanks to this program, in the 1990s developers built over 800,000 affordable units.89 But more than half of that housing was built in neighborhoods lacking opportunities, like good jobs and good schools.90 Public housing authorities in the region should work together to consider how to support the location of LIHTC units in high-opportunity areas, as identified by the Opportunity Index. By giving low-income
people of color choices about where to live, we create opportunities for them to increase
their access to decent jobs and schools.91

High-Cost Mortgages

Here is the map of high-cost mortgages alone:

Financial Institutions

Here is a map of financial institutions.  Red Xs are check cashing stores. Green $s are banks.

Air Pollution

Red Xs are polluting facilities:

Bad Process => Good Process

This report is not an act of lamentation.  Far from it, the authors are quite clear in pointing to examples of how things can be done better, and they argue for making systematic changes in the planning process to promote more of what works to provide opportunity for all:

Connections

This is a truly remarkable report in and of itself, which I've barely scratched the surface of.  But it's not just remarkable for what's contained within it.  It's also remarkable for the web of connections it brings together.  Here are just some of threads it brought to mind for me.  First is that of dealing with coordinated systems, as was described earlier in the week by by desmoinesdem, "The best news you didn't hear about yesterday".  This concerned a congressional hearing in which two cabinet secretaries announced a coordinated effort to work together, reflecting how their areas of responsibility are deeply intertwined in people's everyday lives:

But take my word for it: big news came out of yesterday's Congressional testimony by Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan and Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Ray LaHood. The cabinet secretaries announced

a new partnership to help American families gain better access to affordable housing, more transportation options, and lower transportation costs. The average working American family spends nearly 60 percent of its budget on housing and transportation costs, making these two areas the largest expenses for American families. Donovan and LaHood want to seek ways to cut these costs by focusing their efforts on creating affordable, sustainable communities.

I explain why this is important and welcome news after the jump.

The next connection, going backwards in time, was with my discussion last weekend of the regional environmental factors involved in health outcomes in low-income communities of color, such as South Los Angeles. This was in my diary, "Health Care & The Socio-Political-Cultural-Physical Environment--What's Missing w/ Obama's Approach".

Another connection--going back more than a century in our history--is with the role of violence in creating de facto segregation in the north, a specific aspect of which was the subject of the book, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James W. Loewen, a review of which I republished in my Jan 4 diary, "Northern Racism--Yes, I Know It Exists".

Yet another connection is with my repeated discussions of social dominance theory  and how it functions to preserve structures of group dominance, even without the persistence of traditional racism. In particular, the diary, "A Three-Ring Circus On Race This Week", relates social dominance to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's discussion of "color-blind racism" in his book, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States.  Bonilla-Silva's book is included in a Structural Racism Bibliography [pdf] available at Center for Social Inclusion as part of its section devoted to structural racism.

Finally, the more particular strategy of responding to structural racism seen in this report is clearly related to that employed by Applied Research Center, which I drew attention to in a 2006 diary at MyDD, "GOP Racism Visible In Results--CA Scorecard Shows". Both are based on the premise that the particular ways in which communities of color are offered or denied full participation and opportunity is reflective of the overall health of the body politic.

In summary, what this report points to and illuminates is the need for and value of an approach to social policy informed by race, class history and geography as an integrating framework through which all specific issues and systems can be comprehensively better understood.  Of course it will be argued (screamed?) by some that this is all highly ideological.  And, of course, it is.  But it is an ideology that's deeply, firmly, solidly based in reality.  And since ideology is inescapable, what better kind to have?