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Dissecting segregation in Greater Boston
BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN
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There is an old saying about whites’ attitudes toward blacks: in the South, African-Americans can get close but not high, and in the North, they can get high but not close. According to a series of presentations at Harvard this weekend, Greater Boston has merged the worst of both worlds: providing barriers that keep minorities from relocating, and failing to help people in minority neighborhoods succeed. The panels on local urban color lines were part of the Metro Boston Equity Initiative of Harvard’s Civil Rights Project. Taken together, they suggest a dour scenario for minorities in Eastern Massachusetts. Housing prices have skyrocketed in Boston’s heavily minority neighborhoods — at an even faster pace than elsewhere in the city. Earlier pioneering efforts at integrating suburbs failed, leaving whites with racial stereotypes that hinder their willingness to see their neighborhoods become integrated, and leaving nonwhites with perceptions of discrimination that hinder their willingness to integrate white neighborhoods. Reinforcing those color lines, overt and subtle lending discrimination keeps nonwhites from buying in white neighborhoods. On top of that, students from Boston’s minority neighborhoods go to college at a much lower rate than other area students, perpetuating minorities’ lack of assets and resources; lack of assets and resources prevents nonwhite families from moving out of the Boston area. These findings are culled from eight different papers, but they add up to a picture of minority families staying in neighborhoods they can’t afford and that don’t serve them well, says Leslie Leath, partner at Boston’s ParkLane Group and co-author of "No Room at the Inn," a paper on Boston minority families’ responses to these problems. "Our assumption at first was that people are just leaving in droves, running out of the city," she says. "But the primary response of minority families has been a doubling- and tripling-up of families to pay rent, and when that doesn’t work they are becoming homeless." On the other end of the economic scale, minority homeownership has increased substantially. "But where they’re buying has been perpetuating where they have already been," says Nancy McArdle, project director of the Metro Boston Equity Initiative. Blacks buy in Brockton, Latinos buy in Lawrence, and many other suburbs like Wakefield and Dover remain virtually 100 percent white, she says. According to "More than Money," a paper she co-authored for the conference, those decisions are not based on income and affordability. Yet such minority enclaves seem inevitably to face lower price appreciation on their homes, slower job growth, and worse schools than in white suburbs. "So we run the risk of recreating the segregation of the city out in the suburbs." Some would argue — and did at the panel discussion, according to McArdle — that that horse has left the barn. Integration may be disappearing as an ideal for the area. "The conversation seemed to be moving toward redefining integration as integration of resources," Leath says. Panels sponsored by the initiative later this year will look more specifically at racial issues concerning schools, housing, employment, and transportation in the Boston area, McArdle says. The initiative is sponsored by the Foley Hoag, Fannie Mae, Hyams, and Boston Foundations.
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