Open House Picks

MM:

And it gets worse.

As Richard Plunz writes in “History of Housing in New York,” suburban development was tied to national defense during the Cold War. The idea was to combine highways and new development to move people from cities, likely targets of atomic attack.

If African Americans were excluded from the suburbs, what does that say about about U.S. racial attitudes at the time?

I have a friend who taught for a year at a mostly “minority” community college in New Jersey, where she found her students flagellating themselves about their communities’ “failures.” The depth of their self-loathing was astonishing to her. Not until she began to cite research unearthing the reasons behind their communities’ conditions — location, racial make-up, property values, poverty, etc. — and their relationship to official policy, did they begin to see what they might do about it, with positive impact on their self-regard.

I wish she could lead a course for some of Brownstoner’s posters. They might be less likely to “flame” certain Brooklyn neighborhoods and mischaracterize the people who live in them.

NOP

Bob Marvin:

People need to understand the full implications of your story. It describes why so much of the city and metropolitan area are what they are today, from the social make-up communities and the “wealth gap” between races to the uneven distribution of services and failure of so many of our public schools.

NOP

if we have any hope to save the planet from global warming, it will be to live in high density environments.

we will not be able to sustain life on this planet if people continually gobble up the land and exploit it for their own greed.

when the world runs out of oil, you will see every person on this planet gravitate towards the nearest big city.

we already see it more and more in places like europe, which has been around much longer and lives with less resources. their societies have become much more evolved than ours, partly because of maturity and also partly because they have already reached a turning point in how to treat the world, that we have only seen glimpses of here in the u.s. up until now, we have been FAR too selfish!

Montrose Morris:

You’ve got that right.

And the reason so many African Americans are behind the wealth curve is that they were denied access to low-cost, government-insured mortgages for the post-war suburbs that were exclusively — and at the time, legally — whites only.

To this day, most Americans’ wealth is in their real estate, and most of their wealth can be traced to federal policy that turned the country from 35% home ownership to 65% home ownership in a single generation. But due to discriminatory policies during the suburban boom, that same generation of African Americans was denied wealth-building opportunities open to others, for no reason other than race. (And wealth, more than income, powers educational achievement, career development, and the accumulation of more wealth, as research shows.)

There was an economic imperative to “white flight” in the 1950s, when I was growing up in Crown Heights. The suburbs were where whites could get mortgages with little or no money down. If they’d been offered the same chance in the city, close to their families, houses of worship, and friends, at least some would have decided to stay. And if blacks were given the same mortgate opportunities in the suburbs as whites, at least some would have left, creating a very different New York and region than we have today.

I remember the impacts of official policy on Brooklyn back in the day. At the time, of course, I knew nothing about the FHA, red-lining, exclusionary zoning, racial covenants, etc. But within a decade, my old neighborhood went from “white” to “black,” and as I’d learn years later, only partially because of social preferences.

As always, follow the money.

Nostalgic on Park Avenue
BCHM/Back to Crown Heights Movement

gays and asians are minorities too. the former don’t even have the right to marry, yet they as groups tend to do better than their other, non-minority counterparts, if you want to speak about education and earning power.

so how can you use minority as an excuse, montrose?