Where?

Recently, The New York Times has been running a series of articles on white people calling the police on black people for innocuous activities. A summary article published on October 22nd highlighted thirty-nine recent incidents from this past year, many of which have taken place in suburban areas across the United States. In just October, white people have called the police on black people buying drinks at a gas station, at a father yelling at a son at a soccer game and when a black man was babysitting two children. These incidents took place in suburban locales: Ponte Vedra, Florida (suburb of Jacksonville, Florida), North Charleston, South Carolina (suburb of Charleston, South Carolina) and Marietta, Georgia (suburb of Atlanta, Georgia).

While the calls to the police have also occurred in cities, a cursory glance at The New York Times list revealed a majority took place in suburbs and/or small cities. These racist phone calls are motivated by white residents feeling uncomfortable with having black people in their midst. As suburbs are increasingly diverse, white residents used to homogenous communities are responding to an increased influx of black residents and visitors with reactionary racist fear. The legacies of zoning and exclusionary organizations such as Residential Community Associations (RCA) have directly led to this by creating all white homogenous communities.

The basis of these calls have little to due with the activities black people are partaking in (such as a woman using a coupon at a pharmacy, or a women attempting to cash a check at a bank), but with perceptions of place and space. Black people in white spaces are viewed as invasive, and therefore any activity they take part in, no matter how benign, are viewed as invasive. Black people are seen as violating a boundary, and disrupting the “natural flow” of activities in any given area.

Below I have included the link to The New York Times summary article, as well as a selection of articles on recent incidents in September and October. In collaboration with actress Niecy Nash, The New York Times created a satirical video advertising 1-844-WYT-Fear, a hotline for white residents perturbed by the site of black people going about their lives.

New York Times overview: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/opinion/calling-police- racism-wyt-fear.html

Incidents from September and October:

North Charleston, South Carolina – The Charleston City Paper

Ponte Vedra, Florida –  First Coast News

Brooklyn, New York – The New York Times

Marietta, Georgia – CBS46

Boston, Massachusetts – The Charlotte Observer

Dane County, Wisconsin –  The New York Times

Amherst, Massachusetts – Associated Press

 

We’ve talked a lot about the impact of urban renewal and the push for auto-dependant spaces.

I found two very interesting VOX mini-documentaries on these topics.

This video not only explains how highways harmed cities and its inhabitants but also why they were built. There were economic incentives from motor companies and the government for a larger network of roads.

This video states that it is estimated that in America there are eight parking spots for every car, which take up 30% of cities and combine to take up as much land as West Virginia. Before this video, I had never thought about where or why parking lots come from, as I’ve grown up used to free parking at parking lots. There are government enforced policies that determine how many parking spaces there must be for each development. While this parking appears to be free for the driver, someone has to pay for the average 330 square feet of land. Ironically enough, the video explains that everyone except the driver pays for this parking through taxes and higher prices.

The video closes by arguing that if we were able to repurpose the excess parking land and accurately price parking there is a lot of potential for growth.

What is the future of the highways system and free parking in suburban areas as new methods of transportation, such as bike shares and electric scooters, become increasingly popular in city centers?   

The suburban setting is one dreamed about by aspiring young Americans. There is this ideal of a your classic two-story house with window boxes and a white picket fence in the front and a lavish green lawn and swimming pool in the back. Suburban communities seem to thrive off of homogeneity and uniformity, and importantly individuality.  These three intangibles are complemented by physical factors such as architecture and geography as well, but I believe that sidewalks are a significant determinant of suburban identity that does not receive due credit for how they shape communities.

The article, “The surprising politics of sidewalks” written by Eleanor Cummins on Popular Science, illuminates some of the inequalities associated with sidewalks as well as other pedestrian oriented infrastructure.  Having grown up in a place where there were no sidewalks, the idea of one is pretty foreign to me. Obviously, I can imagine how they’re important in urban settings, but I just assumed that there are more sidewalks the closer you get to the city and these sidewalks were pretty much all the same.

A significant point in the article was that people of color “disproportionally live in communities cut off from adequate public transportation and safe design.” For some people, access to buses and trains, etc. is restricted by where they reside, which for a lot of people was historically determined by systemically oppressive institutions. And as a result, these neighborhoods developed in that same way. Sidewalks are expensive and written off as cosmetic, especially when there are more pressing issues to resolve, but actually can do a great deal for the community.

Sidewalks can become places for vendors and performers to carry out their professions as well as places for children to play. The customizable aspects of sidewalks can also allow communities to own the spaces rather than just use them. Planting trees and making art are two such ways of owning the space and creating something more from a slab of concrete in the ground.

We often see suburbs as havens for the affluent and as the safeguards of high living standards, and yet for some the rows upon rows of cozy and occasionally lavish houses are nothing more than a taunting reminder and a cradle for daily struggle and uncertainty. The article “Homeless in the Suburbs” by Jenny Deam unveils a new, overlooked, and difficult to combat type of homelessness. The reality of homelessness is no longer just the downtrodden urban pauper sleeping under a bridge; it is also that of parents and children hopping from shelter to shelter and motel to motel. Whereas individual urban poor stick out on the street, families easily blend into the suburban landscape. This invisible poverty sows the seeds for the disenfranchisement of children in a sea of surrounding wealth. For struggling families in the suburbs, the path to a better life may be not away from but towards the city.

The rising tide of homeless families is disturbing. Deam details that in 2010 families with children made up 40% of the homeless population. In the 1980s that figure was only 1%.

Suburban homelessness is not only difficult to notice but also challenging to combat. Suburban areas lack the infrastructure needed to adequately support a homeless population. Where cities have extensive public transportation systems and multiple (relatively) easy-to-access shelters, suburbs have long stretching roads with shelters few and far in between. 

The rise of suburban homeless families paints a bleak future for many children. Deam points out that homeless children are more likely to “be at least a grade level behind in math and reading,” “repeat a grade,” and experience “behavioral and emotional problems.” Homelessness injures the lives of children in the present while sabotaging their chance for success in the future.

It is important to note that Deam published the article in 2010, shortly after a major economic crisis that left millions of people without jobs and a place to call home. Today, the economy is recovering, and prospects for the future are nowhere as negative as they were back then. However, the problem of homelessness in the suburbs has by no means disappeared and Deam’s message is no less potent. The article brings to light that poverty can take root in areas where there is seeming prosperity.

Unless suburbs develop better infrastructure to address homelessness, the city appears to be the place where people in need can find the most support. Instead of an urban sprawl, there might be an urban return.

Recently, researchers Harvard and Brown, collaborating with the U.S. Census Bureau, have mapped the city of Chicago into incredibly small and detailed sections to illustrate the opportunity for upward mobility depending on where someone grew up. They called this the “Opportunity Atlas,” and the writers of this Chicago Tribune article reached a few conclusions from the data.

Firstly, and perhaps most relevant to the most recent readings we’ve discussed in class, is that there is a clear disparity between the percentage chance that a child who was born between 1978 and 1983 rose out of poverty between white and black children; a child raised in low-income black family “in the top 1 percent of tracts for mobility earned about $30,000 as adults on average, which is less than the $32,000 for whites born to poor families living in the worst 5 percent of tracts.”

Next, the article discussed how certain neighborhoods, particularly in the inner city, have poverty that is statistically nearly impossible to escape. This is shown by some of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago continuing to be some of the poorest to this very day, while some people have moved out.

Another relevant takeaway is the lack of a positive effect on the local, poorer community in the Lincoln Park area, which has undergone gentrification. Although it has become one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the nation, according to the article, it has pushed out many poor families who have lived there for a long time, and the ones who stayed were not lifted out of poverty with the rest of the community who had moved in more recently.

The last pertinent takeaway to the course is how race, income, and place affect one’s chances of incarceration. As many know, across the country incarceration rates are significantly higher amongst black men than any other demographic group. In Cook County, where Chicago is located, 1 in 10 black males had been in prison at some point in their lives, as of 2010. This rate varies not only by race, but also by location within the Chicago area. Overall, however, this data does not attempt to demonstrate causation, but it certainly suggests that more research is deserved in studies like this.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/gentrification-and-its-discontents/308092/

In his essay, Benjamin Schwartz puts into conversation Jacobs and Zukin and is generally critical of both authors, especially from an economic standpoint. He points to some of Jacobs critiques made over the years. Her ideas for what would maintain economic and cultural diversity in cities actually, in turn, have been criticized for leading to gentrification and to the emergence of some of the most expensive real estate in the world. 

Jacob’s lived in the West Village and called for the preserving of older structures to maintain affordability, which eventually would become highly desirable for their antiquity. In her time, Jacobs fought against an urban renewal plan to build many below-the-market rate homes for blue-collar residents, arguing that it would ruin the neighborhoods character. A proponent of the renewal project predicted rightly…“’If the Village area is left alone … eventually the Village will consist solely of luxury housing.’ This trend is already quite obvious and would itself destroy any semblance of the Village that [Jacobs and her allies] seem so anxious to preserve.”

It seems that Schwartz criticizes Zukin and Jacob’s ideal images for cities by saying that it does not account for the globalization and acceleration of the world economy. He describes their ideal city image as a place “when an architecturally interesting enclave holds in ephemeral balance the emerging and the residual.” But criticizes this ideal as “inherently impermanent nature of this balance, because neither writer comprehends large-scale economic processes.”

“Zukin declares that she “resent[s] everything Starbucks represents,” which really means that her urban ideal is the cool neighborhood at the moment before the first Starbucks moves in, an ever-more-fleeting moment.”

He notes that much has changed since Jacobs’s day, especially, “ the speed of the transition of districts from quasi dereliction to artsy to urban shopping mall.” As a result of economic acceleration.

I think this essay points to the way in which intentions to facilitate the making of a “better” type of city can often go astray or produce just the opposite of what we originally set out to accomplish – especially in the long term. It’s probably important to keep this in mind, especially when considering urban renewal, and globalization. It’s often impossible to know for sure what planning policies will accomplish in the long-term or deem one policy as totally better for the greater good than another.

https://www.thenation.com/article/renewing-urban-renewal/

 

As we have discussed in class, the Urban Renewal projects of the 20th century forcefully evicted often black residents of communities from so called “slums” to make way for supposedly better housing developments.  This article addresses the significance of Chester Hartman’s book ‘Between Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning’, which describes the legacy of Urban Renewal, what we can learn from this period, and what we are still getting wrong.

Hartman states that while Urban Renewal might not be in full swing anymore, racist policies are still being implemented in different ways. Today, Hartman describes public projects like downtown stadiums, “mixed-use” mega-developments, parking garages and “centers” to draw visitors as the goal of urban renewal. The construction of highways in favor of public transport in the US is another example.  While the interstate system was begun in the 1950’s, highways are still receiving investment, and this option of transportation is inherently exclusionary to poor citizens of cities who are unable to own a vehicle. In effect, poorer residents become trapped in urban centers where low level public transportation exists, but cannot realistically venture out of the metropolis.

 

Jane Jacobs has even stated regarding this book that

I had made up my mind…to put in my say that [Hartman’s] book is needed, especially by people too young to have lived through the kinds of events it chronicles.

However, there is hope for the future.  Hartman points to possible scenarios including investment in public transportation infrastructure, which would immensely improve the mobility of people and lessen the reliance on automobiles.  Most of the rest of the world has reliable public infrastructure that a majority of citizens rely on.  Moreover, some foundations are investing in not just projects but people as they recognize the difference between building housing and building communities.  Some of these initiatives are being undertaken by historic preservation and environmental justice movements that might inspire broader support.  No matter which strategy proves to be more successful, we should not forget the mistakes of the urban renewal era in America, and should strive not to repeat them.  As April Baptiste stated, it is vital that inhabitants of communities that will be affected be consulted and incorporated into the decision making process regarding their future communities.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/world/africa/ethiopia-eritrea-peace-talks.html

 

The Ethiopia and Eritrea Border war occurred between 1998-2000, and until July 9th of this year the two countries had existed in an uneasy ceasefire, with strictly no contact between residents of the two countries. Much of the conflict centered around the border town of Badme, and Eritrea’s ports and trade opportunities figured largely in the root of the conflict. Peace discussions began mostly with the election of Ethiopia’s new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed. Ahmed is a relative newcomer and a relative progressive, in marked contrast to the Eritrean president Isaias Afwerki, who presides over the only African country to not undergo elections.

One of the most shocking aspects of this peace agreement is the joy expressed by residents who had been cut off from contact with citizens of either country for the past two decades. There are reports of citizens calling random numbers on the other side just to reconnect with voices from a land that had been closed off from them.