A world that is free from conscious intent and in which actions do not have consequences must come as a constant surprise. In a recent article the Economist laments that the United States isn’t more like Europe with compact cities and comprehensive mass transit:
In a paper* published in 1965, John Kain, an economist at Harvard University, proposed what came to be known as the “spatial-mismatch hypothesisâ€. Kain had noticed that while the unemployment rate in America as a whole was below 5%, it was 40% in many black, inner-city communities. He suggested that high and persistent urban joblessness was due to a movement of jobs away from the inner city, coupled with the inability of those living there to move closer to the places where jobs had gone, due to racial discrimination in housing. Employers might also discriminate against those that came from “bad†neighbourhoods. As a result, finding work was tough for many inner-city types, especially if public transport was poor and they did not own a car.
[…]
Some suggest that governments should encourage companies to set up shop in areas with high unemployment. That is a tall order: firms that hire unskilled workers often need to be near customers or suppliers. A better approach would be to help workers either to move to areas with lots of jobs, or at least to commute to them. That would involve scrapping zoning laws that discourage cheaper housing, and improving public transport. The typical American city dweller can reach just 30% of jobs in their city within 90 minutes on public transport. That is a recipe for unemployment.
Let me provide an alternative explanation.
Stage 1: There are many inner city jobs.
Stage 2: Blacks move into inner cities.
Stage 3: Jobs move out of inner cities.
Stage 4: The increase in new entry level workers represented by the Baby Boomers begins to come to an end.
Stage 5: The United States imports entry level workers, mostly from Mexico, to fill the gap.
I think I see a pattern emerging here. American businesses don’t want to hire blacks.
The obvious explanation is racism and I think that racism is a substantial component but it’s not the only component. Other components include mutual lack of cultural understanding and social pressure opposing cultural assimilation, just to name two. None of those problems are going to be solved by scattered site low cost housing or improved mass transit. Or by more immigration for that matter.
Just as a point of reference the last gasp of low-cost housing on the North Shore, a strip of SROs, was razed a decade ago. Anyone who thinks scatter site low cost housing is going to catch on is whistling past a graveyard.
“The typical American city dweller can reach just 30% of jobs in their city within 90 minutes on public transport.”
That wouldn’t be true of Chicago, would it? Google maps claims that I can get from Blue Island(*) to the Loop in under an hour. And I don’t recall the exact novels about Chicago, perhaps Dreiser and Bellow, but the need to take public transportation to get to jobs or say Evanston isn’t new. I think Chicago has a fairly good public transportation system, perhaps uniquely so, but it has all the same problems nonetheless.
(*) Blue Island is a city just to the South of Chicago; the Loop is the center of the downtown business district.
As it turns out one of Chicagoland’s best restaurants is in Blue Island, of all places: the Maple Tree Inn.
What has happened in the Chicago area is that increasingly the jobs have moved out of the city, ever farther west, beyond the reasonable reach of public transit.
This has resulted in commutes proceeding in the opposite direction from what was envisioned when the traffic grid was laid out. Many people commute out of the city in the morning and back to the city in the evening rather than the other way around.
I grew up on Chicago’s South Side and participated in the Great White Flight around 1958 when the local high school I would have to attend turned majority Black. Moving to an all-White (no Blacks, but also no Jews and no Latinos) suburb was the best thing my parents ever did for us, since the school was well-funded and had attracted the best teachers, one of which was my mom, who’d fled Chicago’s [Crime] Schools as well.
We went from what would become a miserable school to one that produced 14 National Merit Scholars in my class alone. Of course my parents had to tend to the welfare of their kids first, “de-segregation” be damned. I lay the problem directly at the feet of public education. Had my parents been able to spend a Friedman voucher on a private school instead, we might well have stayed on the South Side, as my Roman Catholic cousins actually did.
Now living among Hispanics on Austin’s South Side, I regularly employ Cubans, Mexicans and Central Americans–every one who comes knocking on my door looking for work. They all “work like a Mexican,” as we like to say. I never in my life heard anybody praise a worker by saying he “works like an African-American.”
I decry Amerikan racism, especially as expressed by absence of minorities in our vaunted National Parks and Forests and by their under-representation in our public universities. My solution is to privatize these racist institutions, abolish public education altogether and give a free education to any child born of “miscegenation.”
It’s a poorly-kept secret that the lily-white suburbs of cities like Atlanta and Chicago totally lobby against any extension of public transportation from the inner-city to their citadels. They took great pains to flee Atlanta and Chicago’s South Side, after all, and they don’t want to subsidize the easy influx of minority Chicago or Atlanta workers. That’s why the last stop of MARTA is in Doraville instead of Duluth and the METRA and CTA stop in Oak Park, still inside Cook County, and don’t cross into DuPage County.
@Jimbino
… and give a free education to any child born of “miscegenation.â€
A breeder is a breeder is a breeder. If you encourage one, you will encourage them all. It would be better to charge extra for anybody who is the product of a breeder. This will curb the breeder’s tendency to breed.
All the world’s problems come from breeders. Every person spreading Ebola is the product of a breeder. Every terrorist is the product of a breeder. Every robber is the product of a breeder.
Since breeding is a gateway to crime, it should be a crime.
At one time, there was a good public transit system from the poor areas to the rich areas, but they may have bypasses everything inbetween. The hired help needed to get to work, and they did not have cars.
In many cities, the public transportation system was an outgrowth of the city’s growth. The city did not grow outward from a central point. In many cities, town and villages were developed from subdivided farms or plantations.
There were no or few automobiles, and streetcars, trolleys, trams, etc. were used to ferry people back and forth. Without public transportation, these areas would never have become populated, and as the grew towards each other, the public transportation system grew together also.
This was around the 1900’s. In the 1950’s, there were automobiles, and there was less need for public transportation. As the communities grew, there did become a need, and many suburbs were reluctant to tie into the inner city system.
The stated reason was crime, but most suburban white people get nervous around inner city black people. I could go into a long dissertation about why most of these people are not racist, but why bother.
A lot of white people who will never go to places like Ferguson (or any inner city), who will never be the only white person among a room of black folks, who will never live where there are too many black people will claim it is because of racism.
Another group of people with the same background will claim it is only being prudent.
Today, the nervous white people are scared of being called a racist if they do the wrong thing, and they will avoid black people even more. If you do not interact with a black person, you cannot do anything racist. They will give in to whatever demands are made, and then, they will move further away.
At least, the white liberals will be able to use their Obamacare when they sprain their shoulders patting themselves on the back over the wonderful deeds they have done.
On the other hand, the white conservatives will suck their thumbs clutching their guns in case the scary black youth knocks on the door. (Newsflash: He is probably selling raffle tickets, school candy, coupon books, etc. in your neighborhood because you have money to buy that shit.)
Damn big word. Went through most of my life believing I was a misogynist . Just last year I found out I was actually a miscegenist. Must be the public schooling. Oh, yeah, and I just found out you don’t like my kids. Up yours!
@gray shambler
If you are addressing me, I am a misanthrope, and I probably would not like you or your kids. I am a also sexist, and females generally get a pass for anything short of murder.
If you are addressing @Jimbino, he does not like breeders (his word). @Jimbino really, really does not like breeders. I am not sure about your kids, but he definitely does not like breeders. Did I mention the breeder part?
“This was around the 1900′s. In the 1950′s, there were automobiles, and there was less need for public transportation.”
Ah, I get to ride one of my favorite hobby horses, now. It’s not generally known, but at one time Los Angeles had the greatest public transportation system in the world. Goggle ‘Pacific Electric Railway’. Look at the map of the Red Cars. It’s astonishing how extensive that system was. And if you think it looks like a map of the freeways in Southern California, you’d not be wrong, since many of the freeways were built over the rights of way of the Red Cars. The whole system involved the Red Cars (electric trains), Yellow Cars (electric trollies), and an extensive bus system. It was still functional, or parts of it was, in the late 50s. I recall. in 1959, taking a Red Car from the naval base in Long Beach, where I was stationed for a bit, to downtown LA., then taking a trolly to within 2 blocks of my house in West Los Angeles. Alas, it’s all gone now, but the great irony is that Los Angeles is spending billions to recreate what it already had in the PER. The movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, btw, is loosely based on the destruction of that public transportation system in favor of the freeway system. (General Motors was implicated in the destruction. GM at one time had an entire unit dedicated to the dismantling of urban trolley systems.)
I was born in ’68, and one of the things I’ve run across over the years from friend’s parents is a widespread view that there was nothing in their lives like that year — it seemed like the world would explode from the assassinations, the riots, the height of the Vietnam War, and events around the world. I’ve read that there are still empty lots on the West Side of Chicago from when Chicago was set afire after MLKJr. was assassinated, and stores still boarded up as well. In college, I had a lot of friends that went to school in the Cook County Suburbs (Arlington Heights and Mount Prospect) whose parents left the West Side shortly after that. My sense is that these suburbs were well-connected to the downtown by public transportation, which was part of the attraction, but zoning ordinances prevented construction of multi-unit dwellings (an ordinance on the books since 1959 and upheld in an important case by the SCOTUS in 1977).
From Peoria it looked a little different. African-Americans migrated to the city from the South at the tail end of the manufacturing boom. Working class whites were moving up on to the bluffs, which had long been the more desirable neighborhoods, and the blacks arrived in the older neighborhoods to take their place. The collapse of manufacturing jobs drove a wedge through the community. First-in, first-out. It really feels to me like if the manufacturing jobs had continued, the racial disparities would not have been as great as they turned out. It feels like the African-Americans that came to the city were a day-late and a dollar-short. Whites that got hit hard by the collapse moved elsewhere, the blacks entered into various poverty relief programs and stayed.
Oops,
FIFO = LIFO
I don’t think it can simply be a case of bad timing, PD. If it were the wave of Latin and Central American immigrants that began arriving in numbers between 30 and 40 years ago would be in even worse shape which is not the case.
TB was channeling ZARDOZ earlier…..
@Icepick
Congratulations, I am not sure I will ever be able to get that image of Sean Connery out of my head.
(think Nicki Minaj, Nicki Minaj, Nicki Minaj, Nicki Minaj, … )
Senator Minaj sounds nice. She is a candidate I could definitely get behind.
@Dave, the crucial distinction is that Latin American immigrants will pick-up and migrate relatively quickly if a job is lost and there are jobs elsewhere. Aren’t African-Americans the least mobile Americans? (Latinos might be the most)
Used to be a time, say after 1900, when just about city large or small, had some manufacturing jobs. Blacks from the South migrated to the North and took some of those jobs, whites from across the Midwest moved from farms and small towns into the cities and took those jobs also.
Late 60’s, 70’s, those factories started to close. Environmental restrictions, fear of urban riots, the expansion of the “pink collar” workforce, sweetheart relocation offers from states with non-union workforces, incentives to move manufacturing jobs into Mexican border regions, foreign trade completion, then the great outsourcing shift to South Asia and then China …
The assembly line jobs went away, in other words. Pretty much in a single generation, leaving behind the workers who thought they had employment and prosperity guaranteed for life. Blacks in Detroit, Hispanics in the LA area, whites in Lima and Springfield and Dayton, Ohio. Pretty much a universal experience. Race doesn’t even begin to be a factor.