The City / Suburban Divide

In the years subsequent to the Civil War, African-Americans experienced little advancement in American society and remained on the bottom of the social pyramid. Immigrants as well as African-Americans believed cities would solve their problems of poverty. As a result of their poor background, an image of inferiority was created by the Anglo- Americans for the ethnic minorities. Document C discusses how the urbanization of Birmingham, Alabama, a southern city, demonstrates the old confederacy as the New South. Suburbs were created in close proximity to the city and this suburbanization established further class distinction between the wealthy elite and the working class, particularly African-Americans. As the wealthy white class moved to suburbs, the African-Americans remained in the industrial city. The purpose of this document is to exemplify such segregation through the suburbanization of southern cities such as Birmingham, which became the most segregated city in

During the mid-20th century there was much racial discrimination, specifically in home ownership. During this period there was mass immigration of Southern blacks to the north. In Lawndale Chicago, there was adverse reactions to this. As the

Lipsitz uses practices of the housing market to illustrate how the diverse practices provide the privilege to white people in the current institutional arrangements. The capital resides in suburban houses has proven many white families’ economic mobility, although few white Americans recognize that segregation has historically been the guarantee of suburban real estate values. Housing policy and real estate practices, banking and finance, education, tax codes and subsidies, the behavior of the courts, and the norms of urban policing are all heavily inflected by a racialist logic or tend toward racialized consequences. Lipsitz delineates the weaknesses embedded in civil rights laws, the racial dimensions of economic restructuring and deindustrialization, and the effects of environmental racism, job discrimination and school segregation. Lipsitz describes the centrality of whiteness to American culture, and explains how the whites have used identity politics to forward their collective interests at the expense of racialized groups, including African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos.

The loss of public housing and the expanse of the wealth gap throughout the state of Rhode Island has been a rising issue between the critics and supporters of gentrification, in both urban areas such as Providence and wealthy areas such as the island of Newport, among other examples. With the cities under a monopoly headed by the wealth of each neighborhood, one is left to wonder how such a system is fair to all groups. Relatively speaking, it isn’t, and the only ones who benefit from such a system are white-skinned. With the deterioration of the economic status of Rhode Island, and especially in the city of Providence, more and more educated Caucasians are leaving to seek a more fertile economic environment.

The development of the suburbs has been appointed to be the result of the “white flight” from the inner cities. In the 1950’s black Americans moved northward to cities to find industrial jobs that were within walking distance. Discrimination in cities worsened, crime rates increased and educational facilities’ credentials weakened or gained bad reputations. The upper-class families left the cities and mass migrated to the suburbs to escape the increasing crime rates and worsening conditions. This movement was later termed the “white flight”. Every American wanted to begin building the “ideal family”: two parents, two children and maybe a pet or two. This newly invented middle-class prospered as

This time in the post World War II era, many African Americans had began to become a more urbanized center of population, around 1970. (Inmotionaame, pg. 1) The regular population included about 70 percent of just the natural population to live in more urbanized cities. (Inmotionaame, pg. 1) Soon African Americans dominated, having 80 percent of their community to live and take the same benefits in more urbanized centers of the Unites States. (Inmotionaame, pg. 2) Only about 53 percent of African Americans and others who seemed to migrate stayed in the same area around the South. (Inmotionaame, pg. 2)

Racism is a constitutive feature of capitalism. Along with other modes of domination, racism constructs and enshrines those social hierarchies that legitimize expropriation, naturalize exploitation, and produce the differential value capital instrumentalizes in the interest of profit (Rodney 1981; Robinson 2000; Melamed 2015; Pulido 2016). Historically in the U.S., race has been produced in and through space. Housing, lending, zoning and environmental policies, as well as foundational and ongoing confiscatory processes at the heart of racial capitalism have linked race, place, and power in pernicious, “death-dealing” ways (Gilmore 2002:16; Lipsitz 2007; Fraser 2016). From the frontier to the plantation, the border to the reservation, the constitutive geographies of U.S. nationhood have inextricably bound race and space. Scholars of racial capitalism embed uneven development within this active and ongoing co-production of race and space. They emphasize that social difference is foundational, not incidental, to the production of the uneven spatial forms that underwrite racial capitalism. Race has been produced with and through space via urban renewal, restrictive covenants, systemic abandonment and the ‘racialization of state policy’ (Gotham 2000:14) by which the benefits of housing, lending and other urban policies have been afforded to some and denied to others (see Coates 2014; Shabazz 2015 for Chicago). Thus, vacant land and buildings on Chicago’ s South Side are not

During the Great Black Migration, which lasted from 1916 to 1970, (“Great Migration”) African Americans left the South for the North because of the increasing demand for factory labor after the burst of the First Industrial Revolution. However, the assignment of African American neighborhoods could not accommodate the big increase of population; “black out-migration from the South surged from 197,000 during 1900-1910 to 525,000 during 1910-1920.” (Massey 573) Therefore, some African Americans ended up in the white neighborhoods, and the residential color line crossing infuriated the white in the North, so antiblack riots happened, and the hatred toward African Americans ended up triggering criminal justice. For instance, one of the reasons why the 1919 Chicago riot happened is that the police got an African American arrested while there was a white person who killed an African American by throwing rocks at him. In order to address the chaos caused by riots addressing African Americans’ residential line crossing, in 1924, the National Association of Real Estate Brokers spoke up by “stating that, ‘a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood...members of any race or nationality...whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.’” (Massey 573) Instead of examining the root of black-and-white

Nonetheless, Africans Americans weren’t equally spatially segregated throughout Kansas City. The development of black residential segregation that occurred everywhere including KC occurred at a time when a number of factors pushed African-Americans up from the South, pulling them to different regions of this nation, which came to be known as the “Great Migration” of 1910 to 1930. Factors such as “general dissatisfaction with conditions, the boll weevil’s destruction of crops, the black press, low wages, poor housing on plantations, inadequate school facilities, rough treatment and cruelty from law officers, unfairness in the courts, lynchings, the

He describes the white flight from the inner cities to the suburbs, leaving neighborhoods with high concentrations of poor minorities behind. The Missing Class examines a similar theme of gentrification of neighborhoods, illuminated by the example of the Floyd family in the Clinton Hill neighborhood in north central Brooklyn. “Once in decline, the neighborhood is now on the upswing . . . various factories have shut their doors, the affordable housing has disappeared, and upscale apartments have sprouted.” (Newman & Chen, pg. 12). The Floyds lost their one financial asset, their home, when they were swindled by a contractor who promised to fix up the house, and allow them to pay their loan off over time. The Floyds lament about the influx of affluent white Yuppies in their neighborhood, a place where they know everyone and have lived for the past twenty years, wondering what it will mean for the neighborhood’s identity, wondering if it will still be a black neighborhood. According to another neighbor, despite the rising prices, most black residents won’t sell their homes. “Their family roots are in the South, where property carries with it both tradition and responsibility” (pg. 15). Clearly, the loss of a house or a neighborhood could deeply affect a person’s sense of self and a sense of pride, leaving someone grasping for their once stable identity.

At the start of the twentieth century, America was still facing racial inequality post-Civil War and segregation of whites and blacks after the Reconstruction Era. With the blacks being fed up with their current conditions, they participated in the Great Migration, in which they moved from the South to the North for a better life filled with more opportunities; blacks were ready for real reform of American society. Realizing the seriousness of this

The problems of race and urban poverty remain pressing challenges which the United States has yet to address. Changes in the global economy, technology, and race relations during the last 30 years have necessitated new and innovative analyses and policy responses. A common thread which weaves throughout many of the studies reviewed here is the dynamics of migration. In When Work Disappears, immigrants provide comparative data with which to highlight the problems of ghetto poverty affecting blacks. In No Shame in My Game, Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants are part of the changing demographics in Harlem. In Canarsie, the possible migration of blacks into a working/middle-class neighborhood prompts conservative backlash from a

Segregation proved to be powerful in the city as to this day the South Side still shows remnants of the “Black Belt.” Figure [2] below shows racial demographics of a recent census of Chicago and the resemblance to the map of covenants in figure [1] can clearly be seen. Chicago’s role as a home for it’s residents proved positive for some but problematic for most. A system that always favored the wealthy and white was true for the city and while some areas were strong enough to fight this trend, as a whole Chicago was

As one of the oldest cities in the United States, Philadelphia has been though the suburbanization just like other American cities. As we have discussed above, most nice neighborhood, high-quality school are in suburban area. However, since 90’s, the gentrification is undergoing in Philly. Between 1990-2000, only four neighbors were gentrifying which 1.5% of the total tracts, but this speed has accelerated since 2000 (Philadelphia Gentrification Maps and Data, n.d.). 84 tracts out of 383 total tracts are gentrifying now, which makes up 28.7%. One of the possible sign of this phenomenon is the population is moving back. If the city’s gentrification is successful, the population is expected to grow. According to the Blumgart, J. (2016) Philadelphia’s

With an increase in urbanization, more people are moving to the industrial cities in pursuit of alternative lifestyle and jobs. Life in city and suburbs can be compared and contrasted with various aspects in mind since they share quite some details in as much as they are vastly different. Firstly, the transportation is more accessible in the city as compared to the suburb where there are no apt transport networks as compared to the city, among the transport mode in the city are subways, busses, trams and ferries. These provide easy, fast and cheap means of getting around in the city in as much as the streets are crowded. This is in contrast to the suburbs since owning a car is mandatory since such public transport systems are not available. When the costs of insurance, fuel expenses and time of commuting are added up then transport in suburbs is seen to be expensive when compared to that in the city. The easy transport in the city does not come all rosy since the city is also flooded with traffic jams due to congestion and this can render transport slow. This is contrast with suburb life where there is no traffic and hence with no congestion traveling in suburbs is more peaceful (Boulter, 2005).