Do you consider race when looking for a neighborhood to live in?
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Anonymous
Not PP, but I don't think valuing diversity means sending your kids to failing schools. I'm AA and no way would I send my child to many schools in DC. You have to balance valuing diversity with other things, like the importance of a solid education. Each family has to decide where to draw the line re: that balance. For my family, it's buying in a neighborhood that is diverse, but also zoned for Deal/Wilson. For PP, it's a diverse neighborhood and charter school, and patronizing services staffed/owned by PoC when possible. This sounds like a good and totally reasonable balance to me. |
Anonymous
Only 8%? I can believe it being like 15-20%, but I have a hard time thinking folks in Vienna, Great Falls, Bethesda, Potomac, etc., are putting the "for sale" signs out when a few Blacks move in but I can believe it happens when you start Section 8ing the place up and the newcomers start acting up. But that'd happen in random stretches of Chantilly, Herndon, Gaithersburg, etc. I mean it's 2015, shouldn't we at least wait for the fried chicken, watermelon, sagging pants, rap music, purple drank, and other such things to start happening before we start freaking out? |
Anonymous
Diversity to me means being among people from different backgrounds, but sharing a similar focus/drive/goal in life. The different backgrounds enrich us, but the similarities bind us - both are equally important. I don't give a flip what their skin color or sexual orientation is - I don't make it a point to count this as any meaningful source of diversity. I find it laughable that anyone would attach diversity to these superficial characteristics. If all you do is put yourself amongst a bunch of people who look/act differently from you, all you have is chaos, not meaningful diversity. My kids have a range of friends from white, asian, european, and middle eastern families. They are all, however, from families with successful purpose driven parents who value education and hard work. They serve as role models to each other, help each other succeed in life and school. |
Anonymous
Chain link fences on the local basketball courts. That's when we decided to move out of a Bowie neighborhood that started out well mixed, but is now 80%+ AA. |
Anonymous
Beautiful application of obtuse and obnoxious sweeping generalizations. |
Anonymous
Thank you. Have the reasons people freak out about Blacks changed in the past few years? I thought I had most of them covered. |
Anonymous
A good reminder that a lot of families don't have many options. In this metro area, household income is the predominant factor - families will live in the best possible place they can; that may be where the schools are bad, crime is high and amenities are low, but we shouldn't be quick to assume it's because they don't care about their kids (or, the favorite DCUM mantra - don't value education). And then, in many other places redlining is still happening under the radar. Real estate agents won't show houses and banks won't approve loans in certain areas for qualified minorities, so even solid middle class people settle and concentrate in lower income areas. Not because they dislike living among whites, or don't care about their kids, but because those are the best options available. For our AA family with a young son, we see diversity as his best chance at thriving for reasons too many to enumerate here. Germane to this discussion, I admit that we feel as nervous about Chevy Chase (where we've tentatively looked at houses) as we do about some areas of the city where residents and schools are still mostly black. Reading DCUM for the last few years have only solidified reservations about certain people in certain areas, and I'm glad we have options. |
Anonymous
Yes. You're now guilty and racists no matter what has really happened, or beenn said. |
Anonymous
From what I understood the reason has always been the same...hatred. All the ancillary acts and attributes you described as reasons for white people's repugnance are just ridiculous rationalizations for their inherent ill will towards blacks. |
Anonymous
I'm the PP you're responding to. Thanks for pointing out that redlining still occurs--I'd commented upthread that it occurred in the past. We also looked in CC during our housing search recently. My husband does a lot of training outdoors for triathlons, and I wasn't keen on the idea of him running through CC on a regular basis alone as a black male (he was fine with it, though). However, I think it's a great area, so I think at the end of the day we would've been fine there (although we ended up moving to a different NW DC neighborhood). We also have a young child and have thought about all the things you allude to in your post re: importance of diversity. Good luck in your search. |
Anonymous
I otherwise agree with your post, but what evidence do you have that this is actually happening? |
Anonymous
because those things count as diversity as well |
Anonymous
Different poster here. I posted about this upthread so sorry for repeating myself but I grew up in a wealthy white town and I was afraid of people who weren't just like me. For awhile I lived in Georgetown and I used to be afraid driving my car east of the park. Later I got more comfortable east of the park when I saw how ridiculous it was to be afraid of some of those neighborhoods but I was still afraid to drive east of the river. Well, I moved into an AA neighborhood that was a mix of people from very poor up to lower-middle-class and saw how crazy it was to be afraid of that neighborhood. Then I tutored a kid who lived east of the river and I had to drive her home after tutoring. Driving east of the river on a regular basis made me realize how crazy it was to be afraid to go over there. So yeah, maybe I wasn't an asshole from growing up in my exclusive (but lovely) town but I was afraid of things and people that I didn't need to fear and it limited my freedom. I still see that fear in friends of mine who haven't spent much time in urban mixed neighborhoods and I see how it limits their freedom. I did not want that for my kid. |
Anonymous
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I'mthe pp who mentioned 8%. Here is more data on that statistic. As PPs suspected it does vary with the neighborhood's tolerance. maybe I was remembering the specific finding for one area.
Within the general framework of the invasion-succession model many studies have attempted to identify the “tipping point,” or the percentage point of new minority residents which causes the remaining white residents to leave. As Morton Grodzins (1958) predicted “once the proportion of non-whites exceeds the limits of the neighborhood’s tolerance for interracial living, whites move out.” The literature refers to this “limit of tolerance” as the racial tipping point. Findings on the existence of a tipping point are varied, leading to the conclusion that neighborhoods and communities are too heterogeneous to obey an iron-clad tipping point. For example, one of the first observations of a tipping point came from Chicago Housing Authority’s research from the 1950s. This study shows that once the population of a housing project becomes more than one-third black, most white residents begin to leave (Meyerson and Banfield 1955). However, more recent studies looking at multiple cities found little evidence for a universal specific tipping-point (Pryor 1978, Goering 1978). Card et al (2008) finds evidence for a tipping point with a minority population of 5% to 20%, noting that tipping points are higher in cities where whites have more tolerant racial attitudes. http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1112&context=econ_honproj |
Anonymous
Sure. Quick Google search: https://www.propublica.org/article/housing-enforcement-group-sues-mt-bank-for-discrimination http://www.urban.org/research/publication/housing-discrimination-against-racial-and-ethnic-minorities-2012-executive |