Vision Circle

One of the reasons I like David Brooks is because he is a student of demographics. Call it political / social geography, but there is an art and science of thinking about facts about where people live and why. One of the reasons I dislike David Brooks is because he is so focused on the chatting classes. In his latest piece, 'People Like Us', he suggests that our problems with racial and cultural segregation are largely ones of personal choice and human nature manifested into neighborhoods. No way.

Edge Cities, Upscale Demography & Social Mobility
My first interest in the subject of demography was piqued by the book, 'The Nine Nations of North America' by Joel Garreau. He later wrote an update to his treatise entitled 'Edge City'. I found that volume to be truly remarkable. But within it are some deep clues that will help us understand some structural reasons why what Brooks is talking about doesn't ring true for me.

Garreau uncovers a great deal in his book about edge cities, those new and densely populated areas that seem to have sprung from nowhere in the 70s to become the key areas in America's largest cities. They are places like Tyson's Corners VA and The Perimeter just north of Atlanta. These became the hubs when downtowns were emptying out. Why? The primary reason is economic. The collected push and pull of interests between real estate developers, midsized business lessees, shopping mall tenants, urban planners, zoning laws, large relocating corporations and their relocating employees came together to create those office parks and their surrounding subdivisions at the freeway interchanges all over America.

Along with Garreau, I also paid special interest to the marketing angle of all this which is zipcode demography. Michael J. Weiss wrote 'The Clustering of America'. You want a demographic profile of your community? It's all right here at Claritas' website.

(Disclosure: Except for the accumulated wealth, my family demographic profile is almost exactly like this. In that, I presume that I am typical of such upper middle class whitefolk except for the astounding lack of wealth I have inherited, typical of most blackfolk of all classes.)

One of the salient facts that remain in my head from reading Garreau and Weiss is that a good 60% of Americans are live, work and die within a 50 mile radius of their birthplace. In Southern California, notably Orange County and the San Fernando Valley, there are no houses that are older than 60 years. Here we have entire cities built after the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. But most of America was not, and most of America doesn't move. One of the secrets of American success is mobility. The contrast between the Mobile People to those who live and die in locked down communities is the divide that makes all the diffence in evaluating Brooks' conclusions. When you go beyond talking about consumer preferences and begin to talk about race, the subject begins to outweigh Brooks' light touch.

Brooks' liberal use of the word 'we' suggests that most American's share Bobo values and are, or ought to rightly be Mobile People. He begins about as far away from the ghetto as possible.

Human beings are capable of drawing amazingly subtle social distinctions and then shaping their lives around them. In the Washington, D.C., area Democratic lawyers tend to live in suburban Maryland, and Republican lawyers tend to live in suburban Virginia. If you asked a Democratic lawyer to move from her $750,000 house in Bethesda, Maryland, to a $750,000 house in Great Falls, Virginia, she'd look at you as if you had just asked her to buy a pickup truck with a gun rack and to shove chewing tobacco in her kid's mouth. In Manhattan the owner of a $3 million SoHo loft would feel out of place moving into a $3 million Fifth Avenue apartment. A West Hollywood interior decorator would feel dislocated if you asked him to move to Orange County. In Georgia a barista from Athens would probably not fit in serving coffee in Americus.

There aren't so many Americans, as Brooks would have us believe, that can get up and move anytime we like. Everyone doesn't have equity enough to trade up houses in the old tradition. Even in these days when mortgage rates are at their lowest in a generation, most Americans don't move around much and certainly African American mobility is much more limited. African Americans own fewer homes, have less fungible equity and are incrementally more hobbled my mortgages that whites in the mainstream. I think it goes without saying that home ownership is a fundamental building bloock of healthy communities.

Remarkably, not until 1970 did the black home ownership rate reach the level of the white rate at the turn of the century (46 percent). The slight declines in both the black and white rates between 1920 and 1940 were followed by sharp rises from 1940 to 1960 (24.2 points for whites and 18.6 for blacks) and continuing increases until 1980 when the rates leveled off. Although the white level of ownership was always higher than the black level, the size of the gap varied over time. The gap jumped by 5.5 points between 1940 and 1960 and then collapsed from 1960 to 1980, falling 7.8 points.

Black Money, Black Housing
So when Brooks begins to talk about the top third of African American society he completely ignores their economic handicap of accumulated wealth. All he sees are income distributions. It might be pleasant to talk about one third of black America and suggest racism is not determining where they live:

When we use the word "diversity" today we usually mean racial integration. But even here our good intentions seem to have run into the brick wall of human nature. Over the past generation reformers have tried heroically, and in many cases successfully, to end housing discrimination. But recent patterns aren't encouraging: according to an analysis of the 2000 census data, the 1990s saw only a slight increase in the racial integration of neighborhoods in the United States. The number of middle-class and upper-middle-class African-American families is rising, but for whatever reasons—racism, psychological comfort—these families tend to congregate in predominantly black neighborhoods.

These predominantly black neighborhoods are precisely those which are not the new Edge Cities. The black middle class and the upper middle class are not on par in equity, so despite the fact that they may earn as much as their mainstream counterparts, that's only half the equation when it comes to homebuying.

Brooks ignores the most stunning fact of America itself, that it was built on the dreams of migrants and strangers seeking liberty and economic advantage. The Great Migration of 20s was not about blackfolks looking to self-segregate themselves into the Southside of Chicago and in Harlem. They went where the jobs and money was hoping against the odds that they would have the liberty to pursue them. The impulse remains the same, people go where they can find enough economic advantage to be stable. Nobody wants to live in a ghetto. It defies all logic to suggest that people who must suffer those deprivations do so willingly. Major supermarket chains have only come to the conclusion in the wake of grandiose political promises (and tax abatements) post-LA Riots that relatively poor black and latino would support them. It had to be proven!

The question of integration remains before us, but in order to deal with that issue, you have to face several things which are difficult. The first is that race is at the heart of the reasons blacks remain separate. Whether it is the racism inherent in the top third of black America's lack of assets, or that which contributes to the social pariah status of the bottom two thirds. There isn't much to inherit from the ghetto except the drive to want to get out and obtain what Americans have. You simply must accept that blackfolks are economically motivated just like anyone else, their failure is not a failure of desire.

I'm convinced that it will be many a season before anything approaching residential integration will survive mainstream political debate. Affirmative Action remains propped up by the twisted logic of Diversity and California is set to pass a law that would blind that state to such black & white distinctions as we have described here. Proponents would presumeably have us all identify ourselves by the zodiacs marketers like Claritas dream up for the benefit of the industries of consumption and disposable income. Yet the fact of our society's racial segregation is real for the majority of Americas who lack mobility and choice in housing. Whether they are white and live in Southy or black and live in Roxbury, the immobile are trapped where they live - separate and unequal.

This brings us back to all those urban planners, zoning laws, real estate developers and corporate relocations. Brooks would have us believe that there should be no political considerations brought to bear on the free market economies of housing. It should be all about how people vote with their feet, not with their minds, and hey if it's human nature to cluster into our own little cliques what's the problem? The problem is that the ghetto is not quite America, and those people trapped there are not quite Americans. The Mobile People are clustering according to their interests, everybody else is moving the only places they can afford most of which are just about as racially segregated as they ever were.

The fate of integration as a question of social policy, zoning laws and quality of life issues does lie in the hands of Bobos and Mobiles. We're the ones, after all, that write the public opinion pieces. Our conversations drive the political agenda. But Brooks lets us off the hook with typical libertarian irresponsibility. Racial integration whose benefits are so clear requires us to be more than simply personally unselfish. It is not a question of personal choice, but of political responsibility which means we need to employ political pressure to change neighborhoods.

If you live in a coastal, socially liberal neighborhood, maybe you should take out a subscription to The Door, the evangelical humor magazine; or maybe you should visit Branson, Missouri. Maybe you should stop in at a megachurch. Sure, it would be superficial familiarity, but it beats the iron curtains that now separate the nation's various cultural zones.

I have written that one of the fundamental reasons that African Americans are so passionate about their culture and politics is because we have been forced to forge brotherhood with each other. We didn't ask to be herded into neighborhoods because of the color of our skin, but we made them work, and we grew to understand each other in ways too numerous and complex to mention. We began as negroes stuck in same ghettoes with other negroes, but we came to understand our duty to each other as human beings and emerged with black pride, and in so doing changed America for the better. Isn't that what America is all about, or is it all about the Benjamins, and maximized personal choice?

Most of us didn't volunteer to be Americans, but we are stuck in this national community. We need to recognize and implement our duty to each other by developing particular solutions to particular problems. The American mainstream works, let's get everybody in to it. Racial integration is what our nation needs because we still have ghettos.