I had the pleasure of contributing to a field trip of visiting landscape architecture students and their professor recently. Getting out in the neighborhoods and habitats in Baltimore is always fun and rewarding. Plus the reaction to visitors often helps refine how we talk about and present our work and engagement with communities.
While showing off some of the theoretically interesting and
practically important work on vacant lots led by Chris Swan in collaboration
with his students, I was asked why Baltimore looked like it does. I took a deep breath. Most people expect a simple answer. But the answer actually involves a complex
system and its history. My answer was
helped by having just read a piece in the Atlantic City Lab, entitled "The
Problem of Resegregation," which highlighted the work of Prof. Gary
Orfield at University of California Los Angeles (http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/02/the-problem-of-resegregation-in-suburbia/462396/).
 |
| The first step of demolished stoops. |
Here is how Orfield would answer that question (and in the
field, I borrowed his framing). Integration in American cities and suburbs is
fragile. Although slightly more than 40
% of people in suburbs in the United States live in integrated neighborhoods,
it is easy to tip from integrated to segregated. This phenomenon is happening in America's
"inner ring" suburbs currently.
The drivers of these changes reflect many of the same dynamics that have
been playing out in Baltimore for decades.
Here is a summary of Orfield's list, derived from scholarship based on
many US urban areas:
1. Racial steering, in which whites and blacks are steered
by the real estate industry to separate neighborhoods. Block busting, a familiar process in
Baltimore (as in many other urban areas) is an example of this.
2. Mortgage discrimination, in which it is more difficult
for black households with a given level of income to receive financing than a
white household of the same income.
3. Discrimination by individual buyers and sellers. (This or a version of it couched as
"white flight" is sometimes the only answer given to the question of
why.)
4. Preferential location of public housing in minority or
integrated neighborhoods.
5. Gerrymandering of students from poor families into less
wealthy school districts, and subsequent rezoning.
That is a comprehensive list, and it goes a long way, when
combined with the increasingly well documented history of such discriminatory
actions in Baltimore, to explaining why a particular neighborhood in the city
looked to a visitor the way it did.
Later I realized something about that question: Why does
Baltimore look like it does? The
question that made me take a deep breath that bright sunny day in West
Baltimore, could have been asked anywhere in the metropolitan area.
And the answer would be the same: a complex system of
social, economic, and policy actions is what explains what each neighborhood in
the Baltimore region looks like. Not
only do those half dozen causes apply when in a vacancy-plagued neighborhood in
West Baltimore, but they also apply to the tree-lined avenues of sturdy stone
homes, to post-war suburban cul de sacs, and to exurban areas dotted with mansions
behind white rail fences.
Why Baltimore looks like it does is due, in very large
degree, to a regionally distributed system of social sorting. BES is discovering the ecological processes
that reflect those differences in neighborhood physical and social
structure. We can't ignore the complex
systems answer that explains the sorting as we work do understand the
ecological implications of spatial heterogeneity across the broader
city-suburban-exurban-rural system.
