Why Don't American Cities Burn?. Michael B. Katz

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      Figure 8 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which married couple with children house holds compose more than 50 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Boston, 2000.

      Racial segregation also transformed urban space. Racial segregation was much higher in late than in early twentieth-century American cities. In 1930, the average African American lived in a neighborhood that was 31.7 percent black; by 1970, the percentage had jumped to 73.5. These were numbers never before experienced by any group, including the immigrants who poured into the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton described the situation, without exaggeration, as “American apartheid.” Affluent as well as poor African Americans experienced extreme racial segregation. In northern metropolitan areas in 1980, Massey and Denton revealed, measures of segregation for African Americans with incomes of $50,000 remained as high as for those with incomes of $2,500. In sixteen metropolitan areas, one of three African Americans lived in conditions of such high segregation that Massey and Denton labeled them “hypersegregation.”³⁷

      In the 1990s, although segregation in cities declined by an average of 5.5 percentage points, the average African American still lived in a census tract that was 51 percent black, while affluent African Americans were more likely to live near African Americans with modest incomes than near comparably well-off whites, and as Shorty’s neighborhood underlined, many thousands of African Americans still lived in districts marked by the toxic combination of poverty and segregation.³⁸ Nonetheless, in the last third of the twentieth century, Massey and his colleagues show, a “new regime of residential segregation” began to emerge. Despite mass immigration from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, overall levels of ethnic segregation did not rise. Measures of immigrant segregation remained “low to moderate” while, after 1970, “black segregation declined.” As racial segregation lessened, “socioeconomic segregation rose, as indicated by rising levels of dissimilarity between the poor and the affluent and between the college educated and high school graduates, yielding spatial isolation among people at the top and bottom of the socioeconomic scale.”³⁹

      Geography reflected income. After the mid-1970s, income and wealth inequality, as Chapter 2 explains in more detail, increased to levels not experienced for perhaps a century, and real wages declined despite rising productivity. “The fundamental reality,” write urban scholars Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom, “is one of growing economic segregation in the context of overall rising inequality. People of different income classes are moving away from each other not just in how much income they have but also in where they live. America is breaking down into economically homogeneous enclaves.” Growing economic as well as racial inequality registered on urban space as economic segregation among whites grew notably after the 1970s. Growing economic inequality marked suburbs as well as cities as inner-ring and older suburbs experienced the poverty, population decline, job loss, and infrastructure decay usually associated with inner cities. In the early twenty- first century, СКАЧАТЬ