Urban apartheid
I caught the tail end of Midmorning (our local NPR morning program) today in what sounded like a quite interesting conversation. The guest was a guy named George Galster from Wayne State University. He's been studying how middle class neighborhoods have been disappearing from urban areas--in essence, neighborhoods are becoming more economically segregated. One caller talked about how Brooklyn Park has made this explicit: in the northern part of the city, one recent zoning decision meant that only houses worth over $400,000 could be built. And lower income residents are also pushed out of the middle of the city, back toward our neighhborhood in north Minneapolis. He commented that because more affluent residents contribute more taxes and use less services, it's a good decision.
Sometimes I think about white flight and the suburban boom that accompanied it in the past tense, but from the little I heard, I'm reminded that economic segregation is a present day problem. I have hope for developments like Heritage Park close to downtown, ones that are mixed income by design. So many problems in poor urban areas are tracible to economic (and by extension, racial) segregation--the lack of hope and opportunity breeds a multitude of issues. It's one of the main things I'm interested in as I consider a graduate degree in Geography this fall.