Minorities Dream, Work Hard With Different Outcomes

If you’ve ever wondered, what is this world coming to? Check out my neighborhood.

It’s a model of new residential integration. My neighbors to the right are ethnic-Palestinian, from Jordan. To the left is a biracial family; she’s Latina, he is black and they’ve got school-aged kids that scurry around on their bikes. Two doors down lives and Asian woman with her parents and toddler. Across the street is another Latino family and another black family. It’s a good, friendly, peaceful neighborhood.

It’s also the best spin on what the The US 2010 Project calls the latest trend. The study “examined (housing) trends across more than 300 American communities over the last two decades …” It found that, according to a Huffington Post report,

Most of the progress made in residential integration has come as a result of blacks, Latinos and Asians living closer to one another.

But, like I said, that’s the best face we can put on the findings.

Among minority households, even those with relatively high incomes tend to be clustered in neighborhoods where most of their neighbors are the same race and many are poor, the study found.

There’s an American aspirational promise that almost all American’s buy into: work hard, play by the rules, realize your dreams. The implication is that the dream is available to all and that our aspirations would produce a truly integrated society. The US 2012 Project, done by  Brown University and the Russell Sage Foundation, found a big gap in that sequence. It turns out that minorities tend to live among other minorities: blacks among blacks, Latinos among Latinos, regardless of income. My street is the positive outlier.

Our belief is that where we live is a matter of choice. That Latinos live among other Latinos because that’s where they want to live. And that may well be the case, especially among immigrant communities. But the study finds that even after reaching higher income levels most minority families stay within their group. The researchers found that “Latino families earning $75,000 or more per year live in communities with much higher concentrations of poverty than white households earning $40,000 or less.”

Experts construe the findings as evidence of continued discrimination in American housing, with minority households effectively impeded from taking advantage of the full spectrum of choices available to white Americans. The result, say economists, is a self-reinforcing limitation on minority wealth accumulation. Deprived of access to more affluent neighborhoods, minority families are also denied the benefits that accrue from living in such communities: better schools, nicer parks and rising home prices, with equity gains that can be tapped to launch businesses and finance private education.

The easiest thing would be to say that Latinos want to live near their familiar places, the stores, the molinos and bodegas and restaurants. But it’s not as if all those things are going away.

“Race trumps income more than we would have expected,” said John Logan, a Brown University sociologist and the lead researcher behind the study. “And if you look at the characteristics of neighborhoods where affluent African Americans and Latinos live, they just do not have the same characteristics of neighborhoods where whites with similar incomes live. Their neighborhoods just aren’t the same.”

How does it happen? Researchers call it “steering.” That’s when real estate agents show different homes to buyers of different races and cultures, regardless of other qualifications – like income, education, employment and credit – being identical. White couples are shown houses in “nicer” neighborhoods.

The real estate industry pushes-back on the theory. According to the Huffinton Post report they say it’s a business decision. They’re afraid of placing families in neighborhoods where they won’t feel comfortable because that won’t lead to word-of-mouth-recommendations and more business. Also, they say, banks decline minority mortgage applications more often than equally qualified white applications.

John Logan put it this way:

“I’m afraid that making a good income, having a college degree and buying a home does not have the same pay-off for (minorities)… that it does for whites.”

Follow Victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda