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Why don't black and white Americans live together?

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Re: Why don't black and white Americans live together?

#81
post #32

All you need for self-segregation to occur is that individuals don't want to be a small minority in their local area. As people exercise that preference by moving around, they will create enclaves where certain groups dominate. http://nifty.stanford.edu/2014/mccown-schelling-model-segreg... http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/12/an-immersive-game-show...

> All you need for self-segregation to occur is that individuals don't want to be a small minority in their local area. 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...

Actually the new york times did a great article on this, blacks do care about being a small minority even in affluent neighborhood and will actively choose poorer neighborhoods where they feel more at home: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/milwaukee-segregation-w...

Re: Why don't black and white Americans live together?

#82
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a vicious cycle: good schools -> increase demand -> high home prices -> affluent residents -> more tax revenue -> better schools -> repeat The reverse happens with bad schools.

This is why schools should be funded evenly per student by the state or federal government. Not municipal.

This is a very important policy reform. Readers outside the US may not realize that the school funding system has this inbuilt feedback loop: good schools get more funding from property taxes and keep nearby property values high, bad schools get less funding from property taxes and keep nearby property values low. School quality is often key in determining home buyer location preferences.

Re: Why don't black and white Americans live together?

#83
post #2

The maps led me to wondering what a similar diagram of cities in the UK would look like, and I found a map of England and Wales with dots coloured by race. It's much more mixed. Where black/white/asian areas still exist the boundaries tend to be pretty blurred. http://projects.andrewwhitby.com/uk-ethnicity-map/

Still quite a bit of segregation, but yes, much less than many (most?) large American cities.

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

Re: Why don't black and white Americans live together?

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe racism falsely informs that risk model? If that's the case then one can likely deploy capital like its low-risk to "higher-risk" (and thus higher APR) loans. Of course competition will eventually destroy this model, but initially it could be profitable.

I don't think the models for giving loans are racist, they are based on facts and reality.

Sadly, this is demonstrably untrue. A purely-math-based approach would still bear the weight of past racist policies and their residual effects, but that's not even what we have today.

Re: Why don't black and white Americans live together?

#85
post #3

Vi Hart and Nicky Case made an interactive demonstration of how easy it is to accidentally create segregated neighborhoods: http://ncase.me/polygons/

This analysis clearly doesn't explain everything. If you move bias over to 100% and run the random move simulation segregation quickly falls below 10%. If the simulation were an accurate view of the world the take-away would be everyone should become more biased to prevent segregation, a nonsensical result.

Your assessment is incorrect. It falls below 10%, but the majority of the polygons are "unhappy" and waiting to be randomly moved.

The program gets stuck continually shuffling the polygons around and it looks like it will never finish (I waited several minutes and no progress was made). It seems likely that this is because each polygon that is moved has a high chance of also being "unhappy" at the new random location.

By definition, with 100% bias, the program won't stop until there is full segregation.

Re: Why don't black and white Americans live together?

#86
post #17

Oak Park is a suburb next to Chicago that managed to integrate fairly well, but when reading how it happened I was struck at how draconian it was handled. They purposefully wanted an integrated city and tried to sotftly limit or "steer" how many Black people moved in, and to spread them throughout the whole city. There were restrictions on who could sell your home. For sale signs were banned even. They expanded the p…

I grew up in Oak Park, and the result is remarkable, I don't know of any other place like it, especially before it got so much more expensive, in the 80s and 90s. I knew vaguely that this was somewhat engineered, but I never knew to what degree until I saw this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4dzaRJfLpo which is an interview with Roberta Raymond, the architect of Oak Park's successful integration. Some of the things that were done:

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.

Re: Why don't black and white Americans live together?

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This analysis clearly doesn't explain everything. If you move bias over to 100% and run the random move simulation segregation quickly falls below 10%. If the simulation were an accurate view of the world the take-away would be everyone should become more biased to prevent segregation, a nonsensical result.

Your assessment is incorrect. It falls below 10%, but the majority of the polygons are "unhappy" and waiting to be randomly moved. The program gets stuck continually shuffling the polygons around and it looks like it will never finish (I waited several minutes and no progress was made). It seems likely that this is because each polygon that is moved has a high chance of also being "unhappy" at the new random location…

Correct, but unbounded continual iteration more cleanly represents real life. The real flaw in the simulation is the limitation of free space, the world is a much bigger place.

Re: Why don't black and white Americans live together?

#88
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how desegregation of schools occurred---bussing black children to far off neighbourhoods. It was paternalistic, but I think it was less looked down upon because it acted on actual children instead of adults.

Agreed. It is also amazing to think about what would happen if a city were to try to do something like this today. I think it could never happen and it would be all over the national media.

When did the situation in Chicago happen?

Re: Why don't black and white Americans live together?

#89
post #12

The town where I live (SoCal) has 14 elementary schools. Only two of them are between 20% and 80% hispanic student population, with the other 12 in the outer two quintiles. At least some of this is due to economic reasons. It's about $200k extra on a 3BR house to go from a "bad" school zone to a "good" school zone. That has fall-on effects that includes gerrymandering. The school boundaries are very much not compact.…

I'm guessing either Riverside or MoVal?

[deleted]

Re: Why don't black and white Americans live together?

#90
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is school funding distributed in such a small district that tax revenue in the district itself affects the school budget?

That is often the case in the US, yes. A recent court ruling in Connecticut may change that, at least in that state. Some links: https://www.google.com/amp/mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/nyr... https://www.google.com/amp/mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/nyr... http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/nyregion/connecticut-ed...

And yet in Connecticut there are many well regarded school systems in affluent towns that spend about the same per student than the failing schools in Connecticut cities.

http://www.courant.com/data-desk/hc-in-perpupil-spending-con... https://k12.niche.com/rankings/public-school-districts/best-...

Cities: Waterbury ($15,859), Hartford ($18,397), Bridgeport ($15,228), Stamford (18,188), and New Haven ($17,084) spend on average $16,951 per student.

Some well-regarded suburban school districts: Simsbury ($15,969), Ridgefield ($17,315), Glastonbury ($15,481), West Hartford ($15,720), for an average of $16,121.

Clearly there is something going on beyond the dollars spent per student.

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