White Space, Black Hood

by Sheryll Cashin

  32. Robert Fairbanks, War on the Slums in the Southwest: Public Housing and Slum Clearance in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, 1935–1965 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014).

  33. “Video: Anger over Proposed Public Housing in High Opportunity Houston Neighborhood,” Texas Housers, March 14, 2016, https://texashousers.net/2016/03/14/video-anger-over-proposed-public-housing-in-high-opportunity-houston-neighborhood. Culberson, a nine-term Republican incumbent, was defeated by a moderate Democrat, Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, in 2018.

  34. “Video: Anger over Proposed Public Housing.”

  35. John Henneberger, “Houston, It’s Time to Stop Accommodating Segregation,” Shelterforce, February 7, 2017, https://shelterforce.org/2017/02/07/houston-its-time-to-stop-accommodating-segregation.

  36. Alvaro “Al” Ortiz, “Turner Announces Agreement Resolving HUD’s Investigation That Found Improprieties on Procedures for Low Income Housing Projects,” Houston Public Media, March 9, 2018, https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2018/03/09/272519/turner-announces-agreement-resolving-huds-investigation-that-found-improprieties-on-procedures-for-low-income-housing-projects.

  37. Andrew Giambrone, “Map: Nearly All of D.C.’s New Affordable Housing Is Being Developed East of Rock Creek Park,” DC Curbed, September 11, 2018, https://dc.curbed.com/2018/9/11/17846984/map-affordable-housing-rock-creek-park-dcfpi.

  38. Comments made by Robert Stumburg and Michael Diamond, two professors at Georgetown Law at the author’s June 4, 2019, faculty talk.

  39. Cashin, “Integration as a Means of Restoring Democracy and Opportunity;” Massey, Categorically Unequal.

  40. Brent Elementary School, District of Columbia Public Schools, https://profiles.dcps.dc.gov/Brent+Elementary+School, accessed October 12, 2020; Payne Elementary School, District of Columbia Public Schools, https://profiles.dcps.dc.gov/Payne+Elementary+School, accessed October 12, 2020.

  41. Greg Toppo and Paul Overberg, “Diversity in the Classroom: Sides Square Off in Minnesota,” USA Today, March 18, 2015, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/25/minnesota-school-race-diversity/18919391. See also “A Plan to Diversify New York’s Segregated Schools,” editorial, New York Times, September 2, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/opinion/nyc-schools.html (city officials saying they are strongly encouraging school districts across the city to adopt integration plans).

  42. William J. Mathis, “The Effectiveness of Class Size Reduction,” National Education Policy Center at University of Colorado Boulder, June 2016, https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Mathis%20RBOPM-9%20Class%20Size.pdf.

  43. “Segregated in the Heartland,” Governing, January 23, 2019, https://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov-segregation-series.html.

  44. Emily Badger and Darla Cameron, “How Railroads, Highways and Other Man-made Lines Racially Divide America’s Cities,” Washington Post, July 16, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/16/how-railroads-highways-and-other-man-made-lines-racially-divide-americas-cities/?utm_term=.8dabc8fb73b7.

  45. “Crossing a St. Louis Street That Divides Communities,” Vimeo, September 25, 2012, https://vimeo.com/50172283; see also Melody Goodman, “White Fear Creates White Spaces and Exacerbates Health Disparities,” Institute for Public Health at Washington University School of Medicine, February 16, 2016, https://publichealth.wustl.edu/white-fear-creates-white-spaces-and-exacerbates-health-disparities/ (including a visual of the Delmar Divide with demographic data of the two areas separated by the Delmar Boulevard).

  46. As of 2016, Census Tract 106 was 65 percent white with a median income of $109,000. It is immediately adjacent to Census Tract 88.03 which was 63 percent Black with a median income of $17,303. See American Community Survey (2016).

  47. Jon Banister, “Zoning Commission Approves Updated Plans for 1,100-Unit Sursum Corda Project,” Bisnow, October 23, 2019, https://www.bisnow.com/washington-dc/news/multifamily/zoning-commission-approves-updated-plans-for-1100-unit-sursum-corda-project-101441.

  48. Derek Hyra, “The Back-to-the-City Movement: Neighborhood Redevelopment and Processes of Political and Cultural Displacement,” Urban Studies 52, no. 10 (2015): 1753–73.

  49. Massey, Categorically Unequal, 19.

  50. Mallach, The Divided City, 142, noting “the complex relationship between gentrification and decline [elsewhere], and the fact that the overarching question of power transcends and subsumes both.”

  51. Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff, “Income Inequality and Income Segregation,” American Journal of Sociology 116, no. 4 (2011): 1092–1155.

  52. Natalie Sabadish and Lawrence Mishel, “CEO Pay in 2012 Was Extraordinarily High Relative to Typical Workers and Other High Earners,” Issue Brief #367, Economic Policy Institute, June 26, 2013, https://files.epi.org/2013/ceo-pay-2012-extraordinarily-high.pdf; Diana Hembree, “CEO Pay Skyrockets to 361 Times That of the Average Worker,” Forbes, May 22, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianahembree/2018/05/22/ceo-pay-skyrockets-to-361-times-that-of-the-average-worker/#25b77268776d.

  53. Others have made similar arguments. See, e.g., Reeves, Dream Hoarders, 104–8, quoting economists.

  54. Reardon and Bischoff, “Income Inequality and Income Segregation.”

  55. Vinnie Rotondaro, “Once-Aspirational Philadelphia Suburbs Struggle with Poverty,” National Catholic Reporter, March 25, 2015, https://www.ncronline.org/news/parish/once-aspirational-philadelphia-suburbs-struggle-poverty.

  56. Mallach, The Divided City, 170, 205, 288.

  57. Cashin, Place, Not Race, 24.

  58. Jargowsky, “Architecture of Segregation.”

  59. Cashin, The Failures of Integration, 110–17, 355n66.

  60. Cashin, The Failures of Integration; Cashin, “Localism, Self-Interest and the Tyranny of the Favored,” Georgetown University Law Center, Business, Economics, and Regulatory Law Working Paper No. 194751 (December 1999), http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.194751; Myron Orfield, Metropolitics: A Regional Agenda for Community and Stability (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997).

  61. Jessica Trounstine, Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 253, 446, 491, 616, Kindle.

  62. Troustine, Segregation by Design, 650, 675.

  63. Trounstine, Segregation by Design, 678.

  64. Andrea Gibbons, City of Segregation: 100 Years of Struggle for Housing in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 2018); Mallach, The Divided City.

  65. Mallach, The Divided City, 111, 211–12.

  66. Mallach, The Divided City, 234.

  67. David Jackson, “Chicago Development Programs Bypass Austin,” Chicago Tribune, September 28, 2013, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2013-09-28-ct-met-austin-development-history-20130929-story.html.

  68. Brett Theodos et al., “Neighborhood Disparities in Investment Flows in Chicago,” Urban Institute, May 2019, https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/100261/neighborhood_disparities_in_investment_flows_in_chicago_1.pdf.

  69. Cashin, The Failures of Integration, 117–23.

  70. Kelly M. Bower et al., “The Intersection of Neighborhood Racial Segregation, Poverty, and Urbanicity and Its Impact on Food Store Availability in the United States,” Preventive Medicine 58 (2014): 33–39, doi:10.1016/j.ypmed.2013.10.010.

  71. Rachel Weber et al., Why These Schools? Explaining School Closures in Chicago, 2000–2013 (Chicago: Great Cities Institute, University of Illinois at Chicago, November 2016), 21, https://greatcities.uic.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/School-Closure.pdf.

  72. Randall K. Johnson, “Where Schools Close in Chicago,” Albany Government Law Review 7 (2014): 508, 518.

  73. Pavlyn Jankov and Carol Caref, “Segregation and Inequality in Chicago Public Schools, Transformed and Intensified Under Corporate Education Reform,” Education Policy Analysis Archives 25 (2017): 2, 19.

  74. Jessica Shiller, “The Disposability of Baltimore’s Black C
ommunities: A Participatory Action Research Project on the Impact of School Closings,” Urban Review 50, no. 1 (2017): 23–44.

  75. Mallach, The Divided City, 124, 205, 223, 234, 240–44.

  76. Mary Hui, “What City Bus Systems Can Tell Us About Race, Poverty and Us,” Washington Post, September 7, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/what-city-bus-systems-can-tell-us-about-race-poverty-and-who-we-are/2017/09/07/6531d26a-9260-11e7-8754-d478688d23b4_story.html.

  77. Gillian B. White, “Our Struggling Public Transportation System Is Failing America’s Poor,” Atlantic, May 16, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/stranded-how-americas-failing-public-transportation-increases-inequality/393419.

  78. Rebecca Benincasa and Robert Benincasa, “How Federal Disaster Money Favors the Rich,” NPR, March 5, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/03/05/688786177/how-federal-disaster-money-favors-the-rich; Junia Howell and James R. Elliott, “As Disaster Costs Rise, So Does Inequality,” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 4 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023118816795.

  79. Jeff Ernsthausen and Justin Elliott, “One Trump Tax Cut Was Meant to Help the Poor. A Billionaire Ended Up Winning Big,” ProPublica, June 19, 2019, https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-one-trump-tax-cut-meant-to-help-the-poor-a-billionaire-ended-up-winning-big. See also Adam Looney, “Will Opportunity Zones Help Distressed Residents or Be a Tax Cut for Gentrification?,” Brookings, February 26, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2018/02/26/will-opportunity-zones-help-distressed-residents-or-be-a-tax-cut-for-gentrification, noting that this tax “subsidy [is] based on capital appreciation, not on employment or local services, and includes no provisions intended to retain local residents or promote inclusive housing” and because the subsidy’s value depends on “rising property values, rising rents, and higher business profitability” it could end up being a subsidy for displacement and gentrification.

  80. Timothy Weaver, “Tax Law’s ‘Opportunity Zones’ Won’t Create Opportunities for the People Who Need It Most,” The Conversation, May 15, 2018, http://theconversation.com/tax-laws-opportunity-zones-wont-create-opportunities-for-the-people-who-need-it-most-94955.

  81. Aaron Glantz and Emmanuel Martinez, “For People of Color, Bans Are Shutting the Door to Homeownership,” Reveal, February 15, 2018, https://www.revealnews.org/article/for-people-of-color-banks-are-shutting-the-door-to-homeownership.

  82. Glantz and Martinez, “For People of Color, Bans Are Shutting the Door to Homeownership.”

  83. Aaronson et al., “The Effects of HOLC’s ‘Redlining’ Maps”; Jacob Faber, “Contemporary Echoes of Segregationist Policy: Spatial Marking and the Persistence of Inequality,” Urban Studies (2020), https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098020947341.

  84. Faber, “Contemporary Echoes of Segregationist Policy.”

  85. Jeremiah Battle Jr., Sarah Mancini, Margot Saunders, and Odette Williamson, Toxic Transactions: How Land Installment Contracts Once Again Threaten Communities of Color (National Consumer Law Center, July 2016), https://www.nclc.org/images/pdf/pr-reports/report-land-contracts.pdf.

  86. See Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

  87. “Property Taxes and Equity,” Harris Public Policy, University of Chicago, https://harris.uchicago.edu/research-impact/centers-institutes/center-municipal-finance/research-projects/property-tax, accessed February 1, 2021.

  88. Bernadette Atuahene, “Predatory Cities,” California Law Review 108, no. 1 (February 2020): 107, https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38NS0KZ30.

  89. Legal scholar Daria Roitmayr makes a similar though broader claim that racial inequality reproduces itself automatically from generation to generation, a “lock-in” effect of racial monopoly power, though I offer a geographic analysis that complicates this picture and illuminates the dominance of wealthy white enclaves. See Daria Roithmayr, Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

  CHAPTER 6: MORE OPPORTUNITY HOARDING

  1. “Nonwhite School Districts Get $23 Billion Less Than White Districts Despite Serving the Same Number of Students,” EdBuild, https://edbuild.org/content/23-billion, accessed February 1, 2021.

  2. George Orwell, Animal Farm (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1990), 118.

  3. Andreas Schleicher, ed., Preparing Teachers and Developing School Leaders for the 21st Century: Lessons from Around the World (Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 2012), www.oecd.org/site/eduistp2012/49850576.pdf.

  4. Bruce D. Baker, Danielle Farrie, and David Sciarra, “Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card,” iv–v, http://www.edlawcenter.org/assets/files/pdfs/publications/Is_School_Funding_Fair_7th_Editi.pdf.

  5. Baker et al., “Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card,” iv.

  6. Mary McKillip, “Tracking State School Aid Cuts in the Pandemic,” Education Law Center, August 25, 2020, https://edlawcenter.org/news/archives/school-funding-national/tracking-state-school-aid-cuts-in-the-pandemic.html.

  7. Baker et al., “Is School Funding Fair?,” 1. “States that invest in the resources that matter—low pupil-to-teacher ratios, especially for high poverty districts, and competitive wages—tend to have higher academic outcomes among children from low-income families and smaller income-based achievement gaps.”

  8. Cashin, The Failures of Integration, 268.

  9. Interview with Laurence Spring, March 11, 2019, notes on file with the author; see also John Kucsera and Gary Orfield, New York State’s Extreme School Segregation: Inequality, Inaction and a Damaged Future (Civil Rights Project, March 2014), https://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/ny-norflet-report-placeholder/Kucsera-New-York-Extreme-Segregation-2014.pdf.

  10. Laurence T. Spring, “Schenectady City District Complaint Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974,” http://www.schenectady.k12.ny.us/UserFiles/Servers/Server_412252/Image/Advocacy/USDeptofED_OCR_Complaint.pdf, 13–16.

  11. Mary Lou Lang, “Feds to Investigate Alleged Discrimination in Aid to NY Schools,” Washington Free Beacon, December 5, 2014, https://freebeacon.com/issues/feds-to-investigate-alleged-discrimination-in-aid-to-ny-schools.

  12. Spring, “Schenectady City District Complaint.”

  13. Spring, “Schenectady City District Complaint,” 2.

  14. Interview with Laurence Spring, March 11, 2019, notes on file with the author.

  15. Interview with Laurence Spring, March 11, 2019.

  16. Interview with Laurence Spring, March 11, 2019.

  17. New York Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights, Education Equity in New York: A Forgotten Dream (US Commission on Civil Rights, February 10, 2020), usccr.gov, 106–23, https://www.usccr.gov/pubs/2020/02–10-Education-Equity-in-New%20York.pdf.

  18. Letter from Timothy C. J. Blanchard, director, New York Office of US Dept. of Education Office of Civil Rights to MaryElle Elia, commissioner, New York State Education Department, April 17, 2020, obtained by Freedom of Information Act Request and on file with the author, emphasis added.

  19. Ivy Morgan and Ary Amerikaner, Funding Gaps: An Analysis of School Funding Equity Across the US and Within Each State (Education Trust, February 2018), https://edtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/FundingGapReport_2018_FINAL.pdf; “Spending Per Pupil Increased for Sixth Consecutive Year,” US Census Bureau, May 11, 2020, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/school-system-finances.html.

  20. Joseph Spector, “Why School Funding in New York Is Still a Major Fight,” Democrat & Chronicle, March 22, 2019, https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/politics/albany/2019/03/20/why-school-funding-new-york-still-major-fight/3139023002.

  21. Interview with Laurence Spring, March 11, 2019; New York Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights, Education E
quity in New York, 140.

  22. Peter Goodman, March 5, 2019, “The (Maryland) Kirwan Commission: Is It Time for New York State to Investigate Changing School Funding Formulas as Well as Educational Governance and Priorities?,” Ed in the Apple, https://mets2006.wordpress.com/2019/03/05/the-maryland-kirwan-commission-is-it-time-for-new-york-state-to-investigate-changing-school-funding-formulas-as-well-as-educational-governance-and-priorities.

  23. Cashin, The Failures of Integration, 268.

  24. Jim Malatras, Uneven Distribution of Education Aid within Big 5 School Districts in New York State (Rockefeller Institute of Government, November 14, 2018), https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/11–13–18-School-Spending-in-NYS_FINAL.pdf.

  25. Eliza Shapiro and K. K. Rebecca Lai, “How New York’s Elite Public Schools Lost Their Black and Hispanic Students,” New York Times, June 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/03/nyregion/nyc-public-schools-black-hispanic-students.html.

  26. Jose Vilson, “The New York City School Controversy Shows Why Standardized Testing Is Broken,” Vox, March 22, 2019, https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/3/22/18276408/new-york-city-stuyvesant-high-school-brooklyn-tech-science.

  27. Plaintiffs’ Corrected Third Amended Complaint, Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding, Inc. v. Rell, 295 Conn. 240 A.2d (Conn. 2010), http://ccjef.org/wp-content/uploads/CCJEF-v-Rell-Plaintiffs-Corrected-Third-Amended-Complaint-Jan-7–2013.pdf; Alana Semuels, “Good School, Rich School; Bad School, Poor School,” Atlantic, August 25, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/property-taxes-and-unequal-schools/497333.

  28. Semuels, “Good School, Rich School; Bad School, Poor School.”

  29. Plaintiffs’ Corrected Third Amended Complaint, Rell.

  30. Matthew Kauffman and Edmund H. Mahony, “State Supreme Court Overturns Sweeping Ruling in CCJEF Education Funding Lawsuit,” Hartford Courant, January 18, 2018, https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-news-ccjef-education-ruling-20180117-story.html.

  31. Kauffman and Mahony, “State Supreme Court Overturns Sweeping Ruling in CCJEF Education Funding Lawsuit.”