tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17629790.post115386304643435521..comments2024-03-16T20:35:23.413-06:00Comments on twin city sidewalks: MPR on "Apartheid Without Apartments"Bill Lindekehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11373780012930618768noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17629790.post-1159933196572889402006-10-03T21:39:00.000-06:002006-10-03T21:39:00.000-06:00Interesting stuff. Thanks for making the effort to...Interesting stuff. Thanks for making the effort to transcribe. <BR/><BR/>I'm organizing a session for bloggers to discuss the Growth & Justice "Invest for Real Prosperity" strategy, and a lot of this fits in.<BR/><BR/>If you're interested in attending (6:30pm, 10/10) or learning more, drop me an email.Charlie Quimbyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06211021430914020025noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17629790.post-1153863229089764362006-07-25T15:33:00.000-06:002006-07-25T15:33:00.000-06:00Caller: What kind of cities were you looking at? A...<B>Caller:</B> What kind of cities were you looking at? And do you have studies that back up your political assertions?<BR/><BR/><B>George Galster:</B> Our research considered all sorts of communities regardless of infrastructure. We used the census definition of a metro statistical area, so we looked at all of the counties connected to the Twin Cities through commuting flows. It would include detached smaller towns on the rural fringe of these counties, as well as the outer- and inner-ring suburbs, as well as the central cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. And as for the politics… our studies didn’t focus on the political aspect of the growing neighborhood homogeneity. That was my opinion of what I’m afraid of this leading to, in terms of a long-term political ramification related to this neighborhood homogeneity.<BR/><BR/><B>Online question:</B> What about schools? Some suburban wealthy communities have 1% poverty while nearby schools have 95% poverty…<BR/><BR/><B>George Galster:</B> We have found many many, many examples in the literature that show one of the strongest predictors of how well kids do in school is the rate of poverty of their classmates. And especially in areas where the vast majority are coming from disadvantaged backgrounds, that makes it a very difficult challenge for even the best teachers in the most well resourced schools educating these children. And we do have to worry about the education consequences of this increasing trend toward homogeneity. As more and more of this homogeneity is created across school district boundaries as well, you make it increasingly likely that schools will basically have a student body of one economic group and a nearby school district will have a student body from a very, very different economic group. We know that those kinds of segregation by income produce a very different set of opportunities for children.<BR/><BR/>And I think that if society is serious about its longstanding motto of having an equal opportunity society that we have to get serious about the vestiges of not only racial and ethnic segregation in our society, but increasingly our trend toward income segregation in our society. Because I think that equal opportunity is a sham in a segregated society.<BR/><BR/><B>Caller:</B> I am wondering if you’ve done anything about how city councils set policy to build only high-income housing. In Brooklyn park our city council deliberately set a policy to only build housing that was $400,000 or more in the northern section of Brooklyn park, and my husband called in the apartheid-i-zation of Brooklyn Park, because you can actually see clear demarcations by streets, if you go north of a certain street all the houses are $400,000, if you go into the middle section, all the houses are middle, and then there’s lower income on the southern section of Brooklyn Park. And at the same time the city council was setting this into policy, they were also trying to dismantle the lower-income apartments in this middle section, and trying to raise the income of that too. I’m wondering of you’ve done any studies on that?<BR/><BR/><B>Kerry Miller:</B> How much control are city councils having on this, professor?<BR/><BR/><B>George Galster:</B> I haven’t personally done studies about how frequently this phenomenon is occurring. I have read lots of other studies that suggest that what you’ve talked about is becoming more and more a common incident. And I loved your use of the language there. You’re getting apartheid with no apartments. Good system. And why are city councils doing this? I think they’re doing it because they perceive it as sound fiscal management. They see higher income residents both providing a higher tax base for the city coffers that they occupy, but also there are studies that have shown that higher income residents on a per household basis are smaller users of city services than lower income people are.<BR/><BR/>So, if they’re simply taking a bottom line perspective, they are thinking “A Ha!” In order to run my government on my own resources, that might drive me toward these kinds of exclusionary practices aimed at just attracting or allowing higher income people to come to my community. That may be how the rules of the game say that local planners or townships, or councils or trustees, have to play the game now, but there’s no reason why that’s the rules of the game.<BR/><BR/>Fortunately the Twin Cities has a system of revenue sharing across the metropolitan area that few systems in the United States do. You at least have the start of a revenue sharing regional system. That takes the pressure off local communities at least somewhat to make these exclusionary decisions. Now in your case it’s apparently not sufficient to take all the pressure off.<BR/><BR/>But you can imagine what its like in my region where there’s no region wide revenue sharing, where the state has cut back on its revenue sharing, and so every boat has to float on its own financial bottom. Ad we have hundreds of little townships and municipalities that surround the city of Detroit, and they’re all making these exclusionary decisions trying to attract the highest income people to their community. And it’s vicious. Its one group trying to fight the other and we’re getting this tremendous class segregation as a consequence of this. And its all because the rules of the game suggest aht every local government has to support itself on its own financial abilities. And we have to look at the state government and ask, why do you make us play this ridiculous game?<BR/><BR/><B>Kerry Miller:</B> you outline some potential ideas that might address this at some point. You write that if the construction of homogeneous high-income developments or exclusionary zoning contributed to this polarization, how politics to mandate inclusionary zoning might provide an appropriate response. That sounds like academic lingo, but it sounds like someday we may be zoning for mixed income, and that might be what we have to do to solve this.<BR/><BR/><B>George Galster:</B> Absolutely. We’ve heard lots of your callers complain how their communities are using zoning to restrict their communities to high-income groups. That can be flipped on its head and be used to mandate mixed income communities. And, fortunately, we have some precedents.<BR/><BR/>The most famous and well-studied one is Montgomery county Maryland, which is a county adjacent to Washington DC on the north side. I contains a lot of the northern suburb areas around the DC metro area. And it’s probably 25 years ago now, they mandated as part of a comprehensive planning structure for the county an inclusionary zoning law, which basically said if a development had more than a minimum number of units, I think it was more than 10 units in the development… whether that be apartments or single family homes it didn’t matter, if the development was over that minimum size it had to set aside 15% of those units as affordably housing. And of that 5% of the units were purchased by the county wide housing authority for use as public housing. Scattered sites. Public housing. And so the developers had no choice because f the zoning regulations to include in their developments a mixture of housing for people of different incomes. To live in the same community as neighbors.<BR/><BR/>I think it would be a worthwhile public policy to consider, as opposed to the direction we’re going in.Bill Lindekehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11373780012930618768noreply@blogger.com