Showing posts with label RACE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RACE. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
Why has there been an exodus of black residents from West Coast liberal hubs?
Why has there been an exodus of black residents from West Coast liberal hubs?
By Aaron Renn
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| The Mass Exodus of Black Residents is the shame of the San Francisco Bay Area and its "urban renewal" policies aka. "Negro Removal"-James Baldwin (writer poet activist 1924-1987) |
The Black Lives Matter movement has brought the challenges facing black America to the fore, and introduced racially conscious quality-of-life questions into the national debate. How are black residents in America’s cities faring? And how are those cities doing in meeting the aspirations of their black residents, judged especially by the ultimate barometer: whether blacks choose to move to these cities, or stay in them?
Though results vary to some extent, the broad trend is clear: West Coast progressive enclaves are either seeing an exodus of blacks or are failing to attract them. Midwestern and Northeastern urban areas are attracting blacks to the extent that they are affordable or providing middle class economic opportunities. And Southern cities are now experiencing the most significant gains.
Portland is part of the fifth-whitest major metropolitan area in America. Almost 75% of the region is white, and it has the third-lowest percentage of blacks, at only 3.1%. (America as a whole is 13.2% black.) Portland proper is often portrayed as a boomtown, but the city’s shrinking black population doesn’t seem to think so. The city has lost more than 11.5% of its black residents in just four years. It’s similar to Seattle, where the central city’s black population has fallen as the overall region’s has grown.
Lower down the coast, the San Francisco Bay area has lost black residents since 2000, though recent estimates suggest that it may have halted the exodus since 2010. San Francisco proper is only 5.4% black, and the rate is falling. The Los Angeles metro area, too, has fewer black residents today than in 2000.
If these figures merely reflected black consumer choice, they wouldn’t necessarily matter; but the evidence suggests that specific public policies in these cities are to blame. Primary among them are restrictive planning regulations, common along the West Coast, that make it hard to expand the supply of housing. In a market with rising demand and static supply, prices go up.
As a rule, a household should spend no more than three times its annual income on a home. But in West Coast markets, housing-price levels far exceed that benchmark — a hardship that more severely affects blacks than whites because blacks start from further behind economically. Black median household income is only $35,481 a year, compared with $57,355 for whites. The wealth gap is even wider, with median black household wealth at only $7,133, compared with $111,146 for whites.
According to the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, the “median multiple” — the median home price divided by the median household income — should average about 3.0. But the median multiple is 5.1 in Portland, 5.2 in Seattle, 9.4 in San Francisco and 8.1 in Los Angeles.
Even some on the left recognize how development restrictions hurt lower- and middle-income people. Liberal commentator Matt Yglesias has called housing affordability “Blue America’s greatest failing.” Yglesias and others criticize zoning policies that mandate single-family homes, or approval processes, like that in San Francisco, that prohibit as-of-right development and allow NIMBYism to keep out unwanted construction — and, by implication, unwanted people.
These commentators, however, ignore the role of environmental policy in creating these high housing prices. Portland, for example, has drawn a so-called urban-growth boundary that severely restricts land development and drives up prices inside the approved perimeter. The development-stifling effects of the California Environmental Quality Act are notorious. California also imposes some of the nation’s toughest energy regulations, putting a financial burden on lower-income (and disproportionately black) households. Nearly 1 million households in the state spend 10% or more of their income on energy bills, according to a Manhattan Institute report by Jonathan Lesser.
It’s not just liberal Western cities that are losing their black residents — many economically struggling Midwestern cities have the same problem. Detroit, Cleveland, Flint, and Youngstown all have declining black populations.
The greatest demographic transition is taking place in Chicago. A black population loss of 177,000 accounted for the lion’s share of the city’s total shrinkage during the 2000s. Another 53,000 blacks have fled the city since 2010. In fact, the entire metro Chicago area lost nearly 23,000 blacks in aggregate, the biggest decline in the United States.
But in northern cities with more robust middle-class economies, black populations are expanding. Since 2010, for example, metro Indianapolis added more than 19,000 blacks (6.9% growth), Columbus more than 25,000 (9%), and Boston nearly 40,000 (10.2%). New York’s and Philadelphia’s black population growth rates are low but positive, in line with slow overall regional growth.
The somewhat unlikely champion for northern black population growth is Minneapolis-St. Paul. Since 2010, the black population in the city has grown by 15,000 people, or 23%. The region added 30,400 black residents, growing by 12.1%.
Like Portland and Seattle, Minneapolis is considered a liberal stronghold. But, unlike those West Coast cities, it has cultivated a development environment that keeps housing affordable, with a home-price median multiple of only 3.2.
Similarly, in Columbus (with a median multiple of 2.9) and Indianapolis (also 2.9), black families can afford the American dream. (Boston, with its high housings costs, is an outlier.)
Where else are black Americans moving? One destination dominates: the South. A century ago, blacks were leaving the South to go north and west; today, they are reversing that journey, in what the Manhattan Institute’s Daniel DiSalvo dubbed “The Great Remigration.” DiSalvo found that black Americans now choose the South in pursuit of jobs, lower costs and taxes, better public services (notably, schools) and sunny weather for retirement.
Historically, Southern blacks lived in rural areas. A large rural black population remains in the South today, often living in the same types of conditions as rural whites, which is to say, under significant economic strain. But the new black migrants to the South are increasingly flocking to the same metro areas that white people are — especially Atlanta, the new cultural and economic capital of black America, with a black population of nearly 2 million. The Atlanta metro area, one-third black, continues to add more black residents (150,000 since 2010) than any other region.
In Texas, Dallas has drawn 110,000 black residents (11.3% growth) and Houston just under 100,000 (9.2%) since 2010. Miami, with its powerful Latino presence that includes Afro-Latinos, also added about 100,000 blacks (8.3%). Today, Dallas, Houston, and Miami are all home to more than 1 million black residents.
Many smaller southern cities — including Charlotte, Orlando, Tampa, and Nashville — are seeing robust black population growth as well.
Not surprisingly, these southern cities are extremely affordable. A combination of pro-business policies combined with a development regime that permits housing supply to expand as needed has proved a winner. (Among these southern cities, only Miami, with its massive influx of Latin American wealth, is rated as unaffordable, with a median multiple of 5.6.)
When it comes to how state and local policies affect black residents’ choices about where to live, cities with the West Coast model of liberalism are the worst performing.
These results should be troubling to progressives touting West Coast planning, economic, and energy policies as models for the nation. If wealthy cities like San Francisco and Portland — where progressives have near-total political control — can’t produce positive outcomes for working-class and middle-class blacks, why should we expect their approach to succeed anywhere else?
Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. This piece has been adapted from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
Tuesday, January 17, 2017
A World without Racism
A World without Racism
Let’s drop our tribal divisions and unite as Americans.
By Zack Wright — August 8, 2016
Racism is not a problem in the United States Marine Corps. There is no distinction between black or white Marines — or any color in between. Drill instructors, NCOs, and commanding officers alike teach their men that there are no races in the Marines — to the Corps, whether you are light green or dark green is irrelevant. We are all green, and that is all that matters. For many decades, Marines of all different shades have fought, bled, and died beside each other. Promotion is based on performance scores, not on race. Discipline is based on individual action, not on race. Marines identify as Marines, not as a race.
If more Americans discarded the divisive labels that are thrust upon us every day by government policy, progressive ideology, and popular culture, we would have a much more united, less factionalized, less racist society.
One of the first things I remember being taught in life is that skin color does not matter. Discrimination, segregation, and hatred are wrong. Separate is not equal. I took this nugget of truth to heart and I have tried to live my life in a manner that confirms that ideal. Race is an artificial human social construction, a construction which has been a powerful force in conquest, enslavement, segregation, apartheid, murder, and genocide. Race is a negative force; it is a way for people to justify division and separation between groups of people.
Just over 100 years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt, in a famous speech, called for discarding the hyphen that many Americans carried as part of their identity. He argued that maintaining the hyphen in American society, would lead to the eventual destruction of America. “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all,” Roosevelt said, “would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”
RELATED: Identity Politics Are Ripping Us Apart
Last year, then–Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal echoed this sentiment when he said of his parents, “They weren’t coming [to America] to raise ‘Indian-Americans.’ They were coming to raise Americans.” Jindal proclaimed that he was tired of hyphenated Americans, a practice which only divides us.
In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. called for the end of racism in America. He dreamed that we would “one day live in a nation” where Americans “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Unfortunately, our nation has changed from the United States I knew in my youth to the country that we live in today. While I concede that my perspective has changed from that of a child to that of an adult, I believe that our country — while never having fully succeeded in discarding racism in the past — has regressed in the last decade. It’s true that the evil, government-sanctioned horror that was chattel slavery and Jim Crow are long gone. Public schools have been integrated for more than four decades. In theory all U.S. citizens are equal under the law. In 2008, we elected a black president.
RELATED: America’s Balkan Values
Yet despite these signs of progress, today we are mired in a backward-trending divisive ideology of self-segregation, fruitless categorization, and tribalism. I watched in profound sadness and disappointment in the winter of 2014 when, in the midst of the terrible self-destructive riots in Ferguson, Mo., President Obama, the man with the perhaps greatest opportunity to lead our country into reconciliation and unity since Reconstruction, instead further divided our country. I was listening, waiting to be led to a new America, and he left me disappointed and Ferguson burning.
The end state of the progressive ideology that celebrates and reinforces race as an important distinction in employment, crime, education, and politics is a society that is further split into warring factions. It is rolling back the spirit of E Pluribus Unum. Instead of uniting the country as one, it seeks to divide us based on the color of our skin. Our young people are assaulted by a racial ideology that tears us apart. Divisive jokes, slurs, nicknames, and categorization confront our youth every day. Rap songs, social media, and popular culture all reinforce that divide instead of minimizing it. But instead of finding ways to move past these troubles, progressive ideology seeks to normalize racial slurs rather than eliminate them.
I have experienced racism in my life. Things have been assumed about me because of my appearance. I have been called slurs. I have gotten in fights. I, too, have been categorized against my will. I am one of the millions of Americans who does not fit into the convoluted categories and divisions that government policy and racial ideology try to force us into. I refuse to be categorized based on my skin color or ancestry by anyone — but especially by the government.
In order to exercise your constitutional right to buy a firearm in the United States you must fill out the ATF 4473 form from which a background check is conducted. Buyers are required by our government to categorize themselves by answering two questions: Question 10A on ethnicity requires you to check “Hispanic or Latino” or “Not Hispanic or Latino”; Question 10B requires a buyer to define himself by choosing at least one of: American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, or White.
RELATED: The Race-Obsessed Left Has Released a Monster It Can’t Control
Archaic classification systems are non-scientific, flawed, divisive, and pointless. How should a person answer whose parents and ancestors were Arabs born in Egypt? What about white people born in New Zealand? Are they not Pacific Islanders? Is it not insane that Lebanese, Pashtun, Bengali, Tamil, Turkish, Cambodian, Indonesian, and, of course, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans are all classified by our government as “Asian”?
One of the most insulting incarnations of racism today is the idea of race-based voting. Whenever politicians and media predict the outcome of the “Black vote” or the “Latino vote,” I cringe. How is it not racist for someone to assume — or even expect — an individual to vote based on the color of his or her skin? What is more racist than to ascribe a person’s political views to her physical appearance? Should not a person vote his conscience? Should not experience, philosophy, religion, economic status, residency, education, occupation, and morality have far more to do with an individual’s political perspective than his or her pigmentation? Expecting someone to think, behave, or vote a certain way based on skin color is as racist as segregation. And yet many who dare dissent from the politics they are expected to hold based on skin color are often called traitors or Uncle Toms.
I am a conservative American who hates racism. I am in fact actively anti-racist: I want to live my life in a way so that my tiny corner of the universe is positively improved by practicing anti-racism. What is the end state of divisive racial ideology? It is unending division. For progressives, is there ever a point where Asian Americans, African Americans, European Americans, Hispanic Americans (another socially constructed category — arbitrarily divided from Native Americans) can just be Americans? Not that I’m aware of. Progressive ideology seems to want to divide us — permanently.
Alternatively, the admittedly far-off and idealistic goal for American society from a conservative perspective is color blindness. If race shouldn’t matter in how we judge individuals, let’s treat it like it doesn’t matter. Let’s remove race as a criterion for consideration. Conservatives should work toward a society where nothing is influenced or decided based on the color of a person’s skin. A truly uniting policy would be to move beyond these feudal bonds of socially constructed imprisonment. Let us cast off any stereotypes, assumptions, benefits, grievances, or impairments based on the amount of melanin in a person’s hide.
Encouragingly, there is a precedent for this idea in American history — when disparate groups of English, Dutch, German, Swedish, Welsh, and Scottish colonists became, simply, American. Later, the Poles and Italians became Americans. The Irish — once thought to be too different to ever truly assimilate into our culture — became Americans. During the First World War many Americans of Germans descent made tangible changes in their customs and culture to become, simply, Americans.
I am not advocating that you forget your heritage or ancestry. As free men and women, by all means celebrate your ancestry and heritage as you please, but remember that we are an American Nation, and that “American” is our nationality — something far more important and unifying than the artificial and destructive concept of race.
So let me join with President Roosevelt and Governor Jindal in calling for an end to hyphenated Americans. Let us drop our tribal divisions and embrace our shared heritage and nationality. Let us unite as Americans. Let us remember that separate is not equal. I hope that, as Americans, we will move toward a color-blind, post-race, and post-racist society. That is the only way to end racism.
— Zack “Cookie” Wright was a sergeant in Lima Company, Third Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment and is a veteran of the Iraq War.
Sunday, September 25, 2016
Saturday, September 10, 2016
Rand Paul: We Must Demilitarize the Police
Rand Paul: We Must Demilitarize the Police
Anyone who thinks race does not skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention, Sen. Rand Paul writes for TIME, amid violence in Ferguson, Mo. over the police shooting death of Michael Brown
The shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown is an awful tragedy that continues to send shockwaves through the community of Ferguson, Missouri and across the nation.
If I had been told to get out of the street as a teenager, there would have been a distinct possibility that I might have smarted off. But, I wouldn’t have expected to be shot.
The outrage in Ferguson is understandable—though there is never an excuse for rioting or looting. There is a legitimate role for the police to keep the peace, but there should be a difference between a police response and a military response.
The images and scenes we continue to see in Ferguson resemble war more than traditional police action.
Glenn Reynolds, in Popular Mechanics, recognized the increasing militarization of the police five years ago. In 2009 he wrote:
Soldiers and police are supposed to be different. … Police look inward. They’re supposed to protect their fellow citizens from criminals, and to maintain order with a minimum of force.It’s the difference between Audie Murphy and Andy Griffith. But nowadays, police are looking, and acting, more like soldiers than cops, with bad consequences. And those who suffer the consequences are usually innocent civilians.
The Cato Institute’s Walter Olson observed this week how the rising militarization of law enforcement is currently playing out in Ferguson:
Why armored vehicles in a Midwestern inner suburb? Why would cops wear camouflage gear against a terrain patterned by convenience stores and beauty parlors? Why are the authorities in Ferguson, Mo. so given to quasi-martial crowd control methods (such as bans on walking on the street) and, per the reporting of Riverfront Times, the firing of tear gas at people in their own yards? (“‘This my property!’ he shouted, prompting police to fire a tear gas canister directly at his face.”) Why would someone identifying himself as an 82nd Airborne Army veteran, observing the Ferguson police scene, comment that “We rolled lighter than that in an actual warzone”?
Olson added, “the dominant visual aspect of the story, however, has been the sight of overpowering police forces confronting unarmed protesters who are seen waving signs or just their hands.”
How did this happen?
Most police officers are good cops and good people. It is an unquestionably difficult job, especially in the current circumstances.
There is a systemic problem with today’s law enforcement.
Not surprisingly, big government has been at the heart of the problem. Washington has incentivized the militarization of local police precincts by using federal dollars to help municipal governments build what are essentially small armies—where police departments compete to acquire military gear that goes far beyond what most of Americans think of as law enforcement.
This is usually done in the name of fighting the war on drugs or terrorism.The Heritage Foundation’s Evan Bernick wrote in 2013 that, “the Department of Homeland Security has handed out anti-terrorism grants to cities and towns across the country, enabling them to buy armored vehicles, guns, armor, aircraft, and other equipment.”
Bernick continued, “federal agencies of all stripes, as well as local police departments in towns with populations less than 14,000, come equipped with SWAT teams and heavy artillery.”
Bernick noted the cartoonish imbalance between the equipment some police departments possess and the constituents they serve, “today, Bossier Parish, Louisiana, has a .50 caliber gun mounted on an armored vehicle. The Pentagon gives away millions of pieces of military equipment to police departments across the country—tanks included.”
When you couple this militarization of law enforcement with an erosion of civil liberties and due process that allows the police to become judge and jury—national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, pre-conviction forfeiture—we begin to have a very serious problem on our hands.
Given these developments, it is almost impossible for many Americans not to feel like their government is targeting them. Given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them.
This is part of the anguish we are seeing in the tragic events outside of St. Louis, Missouri. It is what the citizens of Ferguson feel when there is an unfortunate and heartbreaking shooting like the incident with Michael Brown.
Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention. Our prisons are full of black and brown men and women who are serving inappropriately long and harsh sentences for non-violent mistakes in their youth.
The militarization of our law enforcement is due to an unprecedented expansion of government power in this realm. It is one thing for federal officials to work in conjunction with local authorities to reduce or solve crime. It is quite another for them to subsidize it.
Americans must never sacrifice their liberty for an illusive and dangerous, or false, security. This has been a cause I have championed for years, and one that is at a near-crisis point in our country.
Let us continue to pray for Michael Brown’s family, the people of Ferguson, police, and citizens alike.
Paul is the junior U.S. Senator for Kentucky.
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