Friday, December 26, 2008

Chicago, America's most segregated big city

Tribune:
The paths taken by Colin Lampark and Rosalyn Bates help illustrate why Chicago is the most racially segregated big city in America.

Both are young professionals with handsome earning potential. Both moved to the city a few years ago—Lampark, 28, to Lincoln Park; Bates, 31, to Bronzeville. And both chose neighborhoods reflecting their race, a practice common in Chicago.

Their personal stories, and many others, explain why blacks in Chicago are the most isolated racial group in the nation's 20 largest cities, according to a Tribune analysis of 2008 population estimates. To truly integrate Chicago, 84 percent of the black or white population would need to change neighborhoods, the data show.

The calculations paint a starkly different picture from the ones broadcast across the nation during Barack Obama's Election Night rally last month, when his hometown looked like one unified, harmonious city.

The fact is, racial patterns that took root in the 1800s are not easy to reverse. Racial steering, discriminatory business practices and prejudice spawned segregation in Chicago, and now personal preferences and economics fuel it.
 Also note...
Blacks make up about 35 percent of Chicago's population of nearly 3 million and are largely concentrated on the South and West Sides. Whites make up nearly 28 percent, largely located to the north and in slivers of the South Side, while Hispanics, about 30 percent of the population, are scattered to the Northwest and Southwest Sides of the city center.
Furthermore:
Some studies show that blacks tend to prefer a more diverse neighborhood, something closer to a 50-50 split of blacks and whites, but those tend not to exist in a city as old as Chicago.

Research indicates that whites tend to have a lower tolerance for blacks and other minorities. A 2000 study found that whites prefer neighborhoods where they are nearly 60 percent of the population and blacks represent about 17 percent.

One theory posits that whites associate black neighborhoods with high crime and poor-quality schools. A recent study conducted in the Chicago and Detroit areas by the University of Illinois at Chicago and University of Michigan found that whites consistently rate a neighborhood higher when its residents are white regardless of the physical quality of the neighborhood.

Not only do the studies show a white reluctance to move into black neighborhoods, research shows that the share of whites who say they would leave a neighborhood grows as the proportion of black residents increases. That has proved true in Chicago.
Another important note...
A final factor often cited as a reason that segregation persists is economics. Poor end up living with poor, and because blacks maintain the lowest place on the socioeconomic food chain, they are often lumped together.

But research shows that blacks largely remain segregated from whites across income levels, though to a lesser extent than 30 years ago.

Many higher-income African-Americans who could afford to live anywhere in the city choose to live among blacks, even at the expense of wealth accumulation in their homes.

"It provides a certain comfort for middle-class African-Americans who may work in a corporate environment where they are minorities to live in a neighborhood where they aren't a minority," said Richard Pierce, chairman of the Africana studies department at the University of Notre Dame.

Via Newsalert!

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