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>> You often hear the phrase,
the bad neighborhood is on the other
side of the railroad tracks.
But have you ever wondered what came
first, the bad neighborhood, or
the railroad tracks?
And the answer is, it's complicated.
It's complicated because in the US,
cities have been strategically designed
to enable some people to
succeed while keeping others,
namely inner-city black families,
from finding that same success.
So what's the impact of this today?
It means that the unemployment rate for
black individuals is nearly twice that for
white individuals.
And it means it would take a staggering
228 years for the average back family
to accumulate the same amount of wealth
that the average white family has today.
Every time I hear these
statistics I cringe.
This is about so
much more than low socioeconomic status.
This is about race.
And so
I began to wonder how did we get here.
To understand the problem
we need to go way back.
It's the 1920s and
the start of the Great Migration,
the migration in which more than
six million black individuals
moved from rural areas of the South
to cities in the North and the West.
By coming north,
they hoped to escape the overt and
often violent racism of
the Jim Crow South, but
what they found was an even more
insidious form of racism in the north.
Racism hidden in the structural
makeup of where they lived.
When black families came to the north,
they were subject to threat of
the double H, housing and highways.
In the 1930s, the government sponsored
Homeowner's Loan Corporation
graded US neighborhoods to determine if
they would be approved for home loans.
The foremast, is this neighborhood negro?
Yes or no?
And this was the number one determinant
of whether a neighborhood was approved for
a home loan.
So when black families tried to buy
homes they were told again, and
again, home loans are not
available to you.
And so these predominantly black
neighborhoods were systematically denied
access to home loans.
In the US, not being approved for
a home loan is essentially a sentence for
poverty.
Home ownership accounts for
more than 60% of wealth accumulation and
this only gets worse over time as wealth,
or
lack thereof, is passed down
generation after generation.
But the problems didn't
stop at a lack of housing.
In 1956, President Eisenhower
unveiled his grand plan for
the US interstate highway system.
For urban planners, the creation
of a highway was an easy way to
take care of the places and spaces of
people of color, which they termed blight.
Robert Mose,
as the master builder of New York City,
purposely built the highway to cut through
the heart of the black community and
to isolate black neighborhoods
from the rest of the city.
With the creation of the highway,
whites fled to the suburbs.
These new suburban families no longer
contributed their tax dollars or
purchasing power to the city center,
and so
service available to those in
the inner city quickly declined.
Unfortunately, black families were unable
to access the amenities of the suburbs.
Moses purposely built
the bridges of Long Island so
low that buses could never pass beneath.
In doing so he was able to keep
Long Island pristine, a haven for whites,
with jobs and beautiful beaches, while
trapping black families in the inner city.
Sadly, many of these
divisions remain today.
Let's take Detroit.
Inner-city Detroit is almost 80% black,
but if you cross
Eight Mile Road to the north or
the Expressway to the south,
you find suburbs that are just 1% black.
And there's even a wall,
it's termed Detroit's Berlin Wall, and
it was built in the 1940s to separate
the black neighborhood from the white one.
And this matters.
It matters to me and
it should matter to all of you.
It matters because racial inequality is so
deeply embedded in the US,
that where you live is a proxy for
your life opportunity.
Social scientists study the disconnect
between where low income households reside
and where the suitable jobs are located.
In cities like Detroit, where the
black-white segregation is the highest,
you also see the highest levels of
disconnect with that job distribution and
the largest black-white income gaps.
Where you live determines where
your children can go to school,
what food you can buy,
what healthcare you can receive, and
what public transportation
is available to you.
So if your race determines where you live,
then your race determines your
access to these basic amenities.
And this matters for all of us.
It's about what is moral and
it is about what is just, but
it has also serious economic consequences.
One 2013 study found that a unit increase
in a city's racial segregation led to
a 1.5% decrease in
a city's economic growth.
And another study found that greater
segregation is linked to large and
significant increases in the rates of
violent crimes, such as robbery or
aggravated assault.
This is not acceptable and
it needs to change, and
there are things that we all can do.
First, we need to add amenities to
these still under-served neighborhoods.
Open a grocery store, build a pharmacy,
invest in neighborhood gardens,
entertainment spaces or schools.
We can start by taking advantage
of underutilized assets.
In Cleveland, city residents found
an abandoned Kmart building and
they turned it into a recreation center
that's now used by inner-city youth.
Do you know that there are millions
of square feet of this type of empty
floor space waiting for
our investment all across the US?
Next, we can take a hard look at
our public transportation systems.
In 1994, the L.A. Bus Riders Union sued
the Transit Authority for racially
discriminating against minority groups
in their delivery of public transit.
The bus riders won, and when L.A.
Transit added hundreds of new buses
black ridership significantly increased.
And finally, we can implement
inclusive housing policies.
We need to zone more neighborhoods for
multi-family housing.
When you invest in a neighborhood
it often leads to gentrification,
pushing out the original
tenants as housing prices rise.
When we zone for multi-family housing we
can keep prices affordable and protect
those most vulnerable to displacement,
even as the value of a neighborhood rises.
Racial inequality is a huge issue for
this country.
Yes, we need more
diversity in the workforce.
And yes we need more equitable treatment
of citizens by law enforcement.
But I would argue that
metropolitan equality
is the civil rights issue
of the 21st century.
We need to understand how our cities were
built, how communities were intentionally
marginalized, and
how those segregations remain today.
So demand investment in neighborhoods, and
demand equitable public transportation,
and demand inclusive, affordable housing.
At Stanford, we strive to change lives and
change organizations and
change the world, but let's start by
changing the cities in which we live.
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