This is Chicago mapped by racial diversity, and as you can see (click to embiggen), not a lot of mixing is going on there. Map your own town here. (via)
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.
They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.
Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, it’s door #2)
Accountability, motherfuckers.
Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.
There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.
When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.
The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.
Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.
They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.
Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?
Let there be snark.
Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.
One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.
You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.
If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.
Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.
A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.
These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.
🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵
Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!
Democracy cannot function without a free press.
Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.
Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.
Raven
Brought to you, in part, by the UGA Geography Department!
superdestroyer
Maybe progressives should go back and read what Elizabeth Warren wrote about housing in the U.S. White Americans will go broke trying to avoid living near blacks or Hispanics. Maybe someone should ask her during the election what so many white Americans spend so much of their income trying to avoid blacks and Hispanics.
Raven
@superdestroyer: Why don’t you tell us, schmuck?
Cronin
Unless I’m reading this wrong this map only details majorities, not diversity, so how is that helpful in talking about neighborhood diversity?
I live in Chicago. I live in a majority hispanic neighborhood that also has a minority african-american population and a sizable but still minority white population. On that map, my neighborhood is just bluish block.
If that point is that AA-majority neighborhoods are near other AA-majority neighborhoods, as with Hispanic majority neighborhoods, and that the douchier, businessman-type whites tend to live in suburbs most of the rest of the population can’t afford…how is that news?
Yes, population segregation is a problem (and the southside is largely monolithically black below the White Sox stop) but a large number of those neighborhoods are diverse, and that map makes no distinction between diverse or monolithic neighborhoods, just the majorities.
beltane
@Cronin: The map actually shows a few core majority white, black, or hispanic neighborhoods existing in a sea of less segregated neighborhoods. The map does not adjust for population density which makes it hard to see how many people live in each type of neighborhood.
Walker
Horrible choice of colors. White majority (medium diversity) and black majority (medium diversity) are essentially equivalent for a popular form of red green color blindness. If you are going to use colors in your charts, make sure they are differentiated appropriately.
Walker
@Cronin:
The map gives majority plus diversity measurement. That is what the shades mean.
rikyrah
no shock in the least. born and bred in this most segregated of cities.
4tehlulz
Congratulations to Chicago for being more segregated than Boston.
I know it was a long, hard struggle to get there.
Punchy
Pretty sure I can see Chinatown on this map….
beltane
You can also compare with 1990 census data. The number of “no majority” neighborhoods in NYC, for example, went up quite a bit in the decade between 1990-2000.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
Stanwood (about 25 miles north of Seattle), is divided* into West Stanwood (where the Norwegians live), and East Stanwood (where the Swedes live). Now that’s ethnic segregation!
*Not so much any more, but seriously, it used to be true.
ETA: There was even an empty strip between them as a buffer zone.
Ash Can
If you catch a white Chicagoan in a candid moment, he/she will say that he/she would not want to live in a black or Hispanic neighborhood because the property values are lower, the schools are less safe, the houses tend to be in a state of disrepair, and there’s more gun violence and other crime, everywhere and at all times of the day and night. And what it all boils down to is income disparity. Houses are more in disrepair because their occupants are working two and three jobs to maintain possession of them, and don’t have time to putter around the house or in the yard fixing things up. And/or they don’t have the money for the supplies needed to do the job, let alone pay someone else to do it. The Loop employers turn their noses up at neighborhood youths even in good hiring times, and even if suburban employers were hiring them, they’d have no way of getting out to where the employers were. With such severely limited opportunities, they turn to alternative means of “employment,” with street gangs often the only game in town. In the case of the girls, there’s not much access to contraception and not much motivation to stay childless, so they naturally follow in the footsteps of all their female family members and become mothers at an early age.
There’s plenty of blame to go around. The Chicago Public School system could be doing more to help students and teachers alike, but politics and budget constraints hamper them. The Chicago Park District could do more, along the lines of after-school and evening programs at the park field houses, but once again they’d need more money for it. Community organizers could infiltrate these neighborhoods even more than they do, but you guessed it — not enough financing. The appropriate federal and state authorities could do a LOT more about cracking down on discrimination in hiring practices, but for the various reasons we’ve discussed to death here, that doesn’t happen. The police could be doing WAY, WAY more to keep these neighborhoods safer, but between lack of sufficient funds (notice a pattern here?) and the fact that WAY, WAY too many cops are bigoted assholes, that’s not going to happen anytime soon. And finally, of course, when the economy goes in the crapper, the less-affluent are the ones that get flushed first.
OK, now that I’ve managed to depress myself and everyone else here first thing in the morning, I’m off to get more coffee (too bad I need to get shit done today, or I’d spike the stuff).
pk
@superdestroyer:
Why should they ask her? How about you read up on a bit of history and figure that one out all by yourself. And while you’re at it try find out why the Irish and Italians were given the same treatment not that long ago.
Mino
I don’t know about other metro areas, but the map of San Antonio is almost meaningless. The scale is too large–all those big intermediate blocks of color outside the core city contain almost no people by comparison.
Jim C
You can use the middle drop menu at the link to see changes over time – 1990, 2000, 2010 – in certain metro areas. While it doesn’t take population density into account, it will show that the Chicago metro area (including the city) has become more diverse.
Maybe not diverse enough for you, Mistermix, but the color shift from 1990-2010 is significant.
Just Some Fuckhead
Low divizzy in the hizzy!
Cronin
@Walker: Right, that makes sense. Clearly a pre-coffee moment, wasn’t reading the map properly. Sorry about that.
@Ash Can: Granted, I’m an east coast transplant here but the people you’re referring to as “Chicagoans” are generally suburbanites from Oak Park or Evanston or Lincoln Park upper-middle-class d-bags. I guess I’m probably a minority-within-a-majority but I don’t even have any (white) friends who live in the loop or out in the burbs. Everyone I know is in the neighborhoods. I guess…I just wish my anecdotal experience was the statistical one?
My experience living here is confined to the far north side, west side and northwest, so I can’t speak for the southside at all but it’s not like there aren’t jobs outside of the loop. Hell, a good portion of the neighborhoods are basically self-contained little towns. Yeah, the loop is where the financial firms and the big money is, but that’s not really different from any other city I’ve lived in (New York, Boston).
shortstop
@Cronin: Sorry, Cronin; I’ve lived here for 25 years, currently in a medium-diversity white majority neighborhood (which has black, Latino and Asian American minority pops) but also in many other neighborhoods, and I think Ash Can’s summary of the situation is depressingly spot-on.
shortstop
@shortstop: Having said that, I will say that the post title is a little misleading–it seems to imply that Chicago, which has always been hugely segregated, is becoming more so, and the reverse is true.
sb
Has there ever been racial mixing in Chicago?
redoubt
@sb: Some (I grew up in South Shore and our next door neighbors were black and white). Unfortunately the neighborhood has gone downhill the last twenty years (and I live in Atlanta now), and I would not be surprised if it was all black now.
Violet
According to the map, I live in an area with a moderate Latino majority, near an area with a moderate white majority. That fits who I see walking by my house. Whites and Latinos and the occasional African American family.
I live in a racially mixed area and just a week ago I had to go to the suburbs for something. I ended up visiting a Target while I was there and the people that worked at the Target were white. White workers at a Target? That never happens where I live. There may be one or two white workers, but the most are not at a place like Target. Pretty much everyone I saw walking around the shopping center parking lot was white, too. It was like visiting another culture.
Ash Can
@Cronin:
No, they’re working-class Chicago neighborhood whites, of which there are plenty. And keep in mind that Oak Park and Evanston are two of the most integrated suburbs in the area (you need to go farther out from the city limits to find the real upper-middle-class white douchebaggery). As for Lincoln Park, I agree you’ll find said douchebaggery there, but it’s of the transitory, “my co-workers said this was a good place to live” variety; established, long-term Lincoln Parkers are not the norm at this point (and the ones who are have lived there through the years when Lincoln Park was in fact a more integrated neighborhood).
I agree, but there aren’t enough jobs in the neighborhoods, especially with the closing of so many neighborhood factories over the past few decades — and the less affluent neighborhoods have suffered disproportionately. Chicago is hardly unique in this respect, but it’s certainly worth mentioning as an important factor.
I couldn’t agree more. I think Chicago is a great city, but it has its problems, and I only wish that more people, especially those in a position to do something directly, would do more to try to solve them (instead of throwing their hands in the air and saying “that’s the way it is”).
shortstop
Violet, we’re citymates? Cool.
Mr Stagger Lee
@Ash Can: Isn’t Rahmbo the mayor? Could he do something about it?? NAAAAAHH like Richard Dailey keep those n—–ers down there. I think Matin Luther King one remarked that Chicago bigots could teach Mississippi a thing or two.
Peter A
“The Loop employers turn their noses up at neighborhood youths even in good hiring times, and even if suburban employers were hiring them, they’d have no way of getting out to where the employers were.”
Of course the Democrats solution to this is to make illegal immigration easier, continue to support economic policies that favor outsourcing, and tell everyone to “go to college.”
The Republican solution is basically the same except for cleverly turning immigration into an excuse for race baiting (while not stopping it) so that no progressives will ever address how unfair immigration is to lower class Americans.
shortstop
@Ash Can: Oak Park and Evanston are more diverse overall than most other suburbs, but they have their own pockets of segregation, like little Chicagos. Otherwise, agree with all you said in this comment, too.
Those not familiar with Chicago may not realize that the city proper ends soon after the supermajority black and Latino areas to the west. The supermajority white areas on the left of the map are suburbs.
And looking closely, I now think my neighborhood is no racial majority, which is slightly surprising but welcome news.
Violet
@shortstop: No, I don’t live in Chicago. Sorry. I just put in my own area and took a look.
shortstop
@Violet: Bummer. I was going to send you to the new Uptown Target, which has the only truly racially diverse staff I’ve seen in one of their stores.
Ash Can
I’m not hitting the “reply” button for this because I do not mean to be picking on the commenter who wrote this. But I want to highlight it because it illustrates a pernicious perception that’s beyond pandemic in the white community — the conflating of “downhill” and “black.” And by “beyond pandemic,” I mean that virtually everyone, including people who have been liberal activists and progressives and integration cheerleaders all their lives, makes this connection between ethnic change and deterioration in safety and appearance. I’ve done it myself, and it’s something I’m still trying to overcome. I’ve come to realize, at least, that we need to characterize neighborhood deterioration in economic terms, and not in racial terms.
Shinobi
@shortstop:
I live in an almost entirely black neighborhood in Evanston. It’s a nice community but we do have issues with crime, and I Think that has to do with the history of redlining that means we have more rental houses and foreclosures. People move in cheap and sell drugs and then after they get caught or the neighbors force them out with their large scary dogs (Yes this was a tactic we employed) they move in to another cheap foreclosure rental and start over.
I think it is also important to note that living in Chicago isn’t just about where you sleep. It’s also about where you go, and what you do. We all ride the el and the buses together. (Though the Metra is pretty white.)
I can’t remember the last time I was in a public place where there were only white people. I mention this because now when I go home to St. Louis, or visit other towns that happens all the time and it kindof creeps me out.
We might not sort our apartment buildings White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, White, Black…. but at least we all have the ability to get around this city and experience the other cultures that are here.
shortstop
@Ash Can: I read that comment, raised my eyebrows and thought, “Well, maybe the commenter is noting that this neighborhood is now economically disadvantaged and observing that people of color bear the brunt of that.” Trying too hard? At the risk of becoming your groupie today: dead on again.
Cronin
@shortstop & @Ash Can: You guys are both entirely right, I think I end up being biased by the fact that I like it here, am glad I moved here, and WANT it to be less awful than it is in many respects.
Good thing to keep in mind, I guess, the human tendency to minimize or paper over problem that you don’t personally witness and simply wish weren’t the case. Ugh, 9:30am and I feel like I need a drink.
shortstop
@Shinobi: Good points about moving among neighborhoods for work, shopping, social life, etc. I don’t think much about it because it’s something I take for granted. I read somewhere that a couple of generations ago, Chicagoans tended to stay in their self-contained neighborhoods except for some work commuting. Now, many more people move daily around the city…although the ability to do so is somewhat dependent on finances.
Ash Can
@Mr Stagger Lee:
Sadly, that’s still the case to a distressingly great extent. You have your white cops, firefighters/EMTs, parole officers, and other city workers who tend to see the worst of the other ethnicities they come in contact with, and fall right into the “if some then all” trap. You have working-class whites who go all their lives barely leaving their neighborhoods — who are afraid to go downtown, even — who never come in contact with minorities and get all their knowledge of minorities from TV news broadcasts (which, of course, cover one crime after another). And there’s the pernicious effect of racism that’s gone underground in this day and age, with white Chicagoans (like whites everywhere else) considering themselves to have overcome racism if they have minority friends or liked and trusted minority co-workers (even as they see these people as exceptions to the rule).
@shortstop: My neighborhood is virtually entirely white and rife with racism. It’s also peaceful, stable, historic, and safe, with good schools, pretty houses, and nice lawns. I’m constantly on the lookout for ways, however small, subtle, and seemingly unimportant, that I can demonstrate to Bottle Rocket that living among people of all sizes, shapes, and colors is normal and healthy. (So far, he seems unfazed when we go to places where we’re in contact with numerous minorities of whatever kind, including where we’re minorities ourselves, so I’m optimistic but still vigilant.)
shortstop
@Cronin: Take courage, Cronin…it’s at least moving fractionally in the right direction in terms of integration, even as most Chicagoans’ economic situations have gotten worse. The problems of this city can be really overwhelming viewed in total; I’ve had to learn to focus my volunteer work/activism on small bites, which helps.
Left Coast Tom
It’d be cool if they had the 2010 data, at least for SF Bay they just have the 1990 and 2000, and some parts of the area have seen big changes between 2000 and 2010. In any case, it seems to say that in 2000 my neighborhood was moderate diversity White majority, with some nearby areas being high diversity, moderate diversity Asian, and moderate diversity Hispanic.
I agree about the horrible choice of colors, one has to look pretty closely to see what its conveying, the basic ‘diversity’ characteristic doesn’t pop out at you.
Ash Can
@Cronin:
Chicago needs lots more people like you! :)
Don’t get me wrong; I do love Chicago. The fact that we’re focusing on all the bad for purposes of our discussion here does not negate the fact that there’s a huge amount of good here. People like you who want it to be better are the key to it actually becoming better. For my part, I challenge my friends when I hear them saying anything bigoted. I scold, cajole, sympathize, mock, whatever the instance calls for. But I don’t let it slide. And I emphasize the way we all benefit when societies are more integrated and equitable (everyone’s standard of living goes up — duh). For your part, you’ll likely be talking to people you come in contact with about all the good things you’ve experienced here, and why they’re good — within the context of how natural and efficient an integrated community is. Don’t let a bunch of us anonymous crabs on teh intrawebz put you off of that. Ever.
Mnemosyne
@Ash Can:
My family all lives in the North Shore/Lake County and, man, it is a sea of white. There was not a single black family in our neighborhood until I was 16 (we had some Asian and Indian families, but no African-Americans).
When I went back for my grandmother’s funeral about 10 years ago, I was driving around with my cousin, who grew up in Central California (Carmel, south of San Francisco). We were driving in silence for a while until she turned to me and said, very seriously, “I have never seen so many white people in one place in my life.”
Roger Moore
@Left Coast Tom:
They do, it’s just that the site is badly laid out. If you go to the metropolitan areas map instead of the cities map, you can see the 2010 data; it looks as if it’s on about as fine a scale as the city data, too.
I was pleased to see that Pasadena has fairly high diversity. There is only one “no majority” neighborhood, but there are white, black, and Hispanic majority neighborhoods right next to each other, and there are no “low diversity” neighborhoods of any stripe. I shouldn’t be surprised, since non-Hispanic whites are no longer a majority.
Left Coast Tom
@Roger Moore: Ah, thanks. It is weirdly laid out. Anyway, it shows what I thought…a lot of moderate diversity White areas are now moderate diversity Asian.
Gopher2b
Breaking news.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
I think part of my issue with the map is that it shows racial diversity, but not really ethnic diversity. Glendale shows as white/moderate diversity, but I rarely hear English being spoken by my neighbors. So it’s not quite as simple as the map makes it look at first glance.
Also, it seems weird to mark the huge swaths of national forest and the mountains as “mostly white.” I’m sure that’s true, but it doesn’t even come close to reflecting how few people live there.
BGinCHI
We live in that high diversity area on the north side, so we win.
And in Albany Park, where we teach, it’s one of the most diverse ‘hoods on the planet.
Suck it, monocultures!
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
Yes, the racial vs. ethnic diversity issue is a real one. A big part of it is that to a real extent the ethnic diversity issue is a fuzzier one. It’s not just about your ethnic background but also how long you and your family have been in the country. Recent immigrants add to diversity in the way that third and fourth generation ones don’t, unless those later generation immigrants are part of a group that works especially hard to preserve its ethnic identity, like the Armenians in Glendale and Pasadena who I assume are one group you’re thinking about.
redoubt
@Ash Can: Agree. I apologize. It was not my intention to characterize “downhill” in racial terms. It was in economic. (I have to guard against conflating them too, as you can see.)
Monala
I just looked up Boston, and while many of the suburbs lack diversity, the city itself does not. I lived in Boston proper for about 20 years until 2008, and it drove me crazy that people still judge the city by the ’70s busing crisis, saying things like, “It’s one of the most racially segregated cities in the U.S.”
If you don’t know the boundaries between the city and suburbs, you might not realize this by looking at the map. However, if you know the boundaries, you will see that the 2010 map has only 2.5 areas of low diversity: Mattapan, which is low diversity black, and South Boston, which is low diversity white; a few swatches of Back Bay and the West End are low diversity white (that’s the .5). Every other neighborhood–repeat, EVERY OTHER NEIGHBORHOOD–is either moderate or high diversity.
Ridnik Chrome
Native Chicagoan here. I grew up in Logan Square and Lakeview (don’t call it Wrigleyville!) in the Seventies and Eighties, and then lived in Rogers Park for about a decade before moving to New York in the late Nineties. I go back to visit once or twice a year, and while I’m always glad to see my friends and family, seeing what’s become of the city depresses the hell out of me. Particularly when I go walking around Lakeview, especially east of Sheffield Avenue. In the last decade or so developers bought up most of the old one and two family houses, tore them down and replaced them with condominiums. And while it may be slightly more diverse ethnically (a few more black people, but way fewer Latinos than when we lived there), pretty much all the old working class folks I grew up with are long gone, and in their place are a bunch of spoiled upper middle class condo brats who never should have been allowed out of the suburbs. They might be a bit more tolerant of people who are of a different color or ethnicity, but they hate poor people.
Ash Can
@redoubt: I never thought it was your intention. It’s such an easy trap to fall into.
Ridnik Chrome
@Ridnik Chrome: Also (and this is just based on what I’ve observed from walking around the neighborhood and comparing it with less gentrified places like Uptown or Rogers Park), the age demographic seems to have been compressed into a range of roughly 25 to 45. It’s like somebody came around in the middle of the night and carted off all the old people, and most of the school-age kids. People move in after they graduate college, and move out right around the time they get married and become parents, either because they don’t want to send their kids to the local schools, or because they can’t afford to raise kids (certainly not if they want to have more than one kid) in the neighborhood.
shortstop
@BGinCHI: Dude, you do not! Look closer. You’re the moderately diverse/majority white neighborhood between my high-diversity hood and the high-diversity hood just north of you. Now, when I lived where you do now, it wasn’t majority white. It is now, thanks to you super-white white people who are whitely white. ;)
MCA1
Non-native Chicagoan/Chicagolandian here. Couple of unconnected thoughts and anecdotal impressions:
– just about everyone I know who’s a longtime Chicagoan has mentioned that the City’s generally gotten more diverse over time. Before moving to the lilly-whitest place on Earth three years ago we lived in Lakeview, and our neighborhood was definitely diverse – I’d say 45% white, 30% Latino, 15% AA, 10% Asian and other.
– Over our 5 years at that home, we saw the kids on the playground at the local elementary school go from almost exclusively minority to reflecting the generally overall racial makeup of the area, as well. Which (I think) probably speaks to at least some improvement in one of the biggest factors leading to suburban flight by professional dbags such as myself in the Chicago area: the City’s public schools. Not enough improvement yet for us, and we weren’t in position to be dropping $15k/kid/yr. for private schools, but I nonetheless left with the impression that a significantly higher percentage of our generation compared to our predecessors are settling in for raising their kids in the City, even if they aren’t part of the 1% and living in the Gold Coast and sending their kids to Latin or Parker.
– as someone mentioned upthread, I think we’ve got more of a case of economic “undiversification” going on than racial. There’s little to no income diversity in Lincoln Park, for instance, as gentrification has made it generally impossible to find somewhere to live there if your household income’s less than 100k. The tail of that dog is that as certain areas continue to gentrify, they tend to start looking more white, but that’s a matter of the socioeconomic lack of diversity.
– disagree with whomever said the Metra’s not diverse. Mine goes through the North side and Rogers Park, Evanston and then up to Waukegan, passing through heavily Jewish Highland Park and Glencoe, and heavily Hispanic Highwood on the way. So when I get on the train there are plenty of non-WASPy’s and non-whites on it. It’s only when you pay attention to where everyone gets off that you see the lack of diversification :^)
Anthony
@Monala: If you just look at city proper and not the whole metropolitan area, you’re cooking the books. The whole process of white flight is based around leaving for the suburbs.
beyond left
Chicago reclaims “most segregated city in the North”! Hooray!
Grew up on the south side for the first 24 years of my life. The racial lines for different neighborhoods might as well have been painted on the streets.
When I moved to Beverly in the 60’s, we were the only non white family for a 2 mile radius on the east (the line at Ashland Ave marked the end of whiteytown) and probably 5 miles in any other direction.
When I bought my first house there in the 80’s we were the only non white (mixed race at this point) family on our block. When I sold that house to a very nice AA older couple in the late 80s, my next door neighbor who had been very friendly with me, refused to talk to me and kept that up until I actually moved out.
Maybe things are better now, but my memories are all about racial exclusion…
Herbal Infusion Bagger
You can still have racial (and class) segregation in what looks to be a superficially integrated city. San Francisco looks like a racially diverse city, until you get to the schools. 30% of the school-age population is white, but only 10% of the public school population is white. An awful lot of SF white granola liberals send their kids to private school.
grumpy realist
@beyond left: That’s what has freaked me out about Chicago: that the lines between neighborhoods are so obvious and also so rigid. I’m in Oak Park, and I can go from crappy run-down stuff (on the other side of Austin) to million-dollar Victorians on landscaped property within walking distance. Very, very bizarre.
Oh, and Oak Park is extremely integrated. We have had quite a few mixed-race families moving to Oak Park from other parts of Chicago because no one blinks twice about it. It just means if we run across a lost toddler we have to remember that hysterical parent may not be same color…
Monala
@Anthony: Partly true. However, Boston still has a strong city-proper middle class presence, so it’s not that all the middle class white folks fled, leaving only those too poor to flee. I need to check the demographic stats on the schools, however–that may be a better indication.
Ridnik Chrome
@MCA1: What part of Lakeview did you live in? In the Seventies and Eighties the area south of Belmont Avenue and east of Racine was mostly Latino and lower middle class. Same with the neighborhood east of Wrigley Field (hard to believe it now, but if you went walking on Addison east of the L tracks circa 1984 a lot of buildings had Latin Eagles graffiti on them). By the late Nineties (when I left town) both areas were pretty solidly upper middle class and white. Again, I’m basing my comments on what I’ve observed on my occasional return visits, but it only seems to have gotten even more gentrified since I moved away.
Dexter's new approach
I’ve seen this map before, and as I Chicago resident, I thought it gave the wrong impression. I’ve lived in LA and Boston, and they both felt more segregated. Sure, here there are affluent white-bread neighborhoods like Lincoln Park, Lakeview (south of Wrigley that is.) Full metal douche-beggary. But the city needs areas like these for small town kids to comfortable transition to after graduating from Big 10 schools. But even in these areas there’s still enough regular contact with other races to make relatives visiting from Sheboygan nervous.
And anyway, I think many (most) of the city’s most interesting, vibrant and desirable areas are quite diverse. I’m talking about hoods like Wicker Park (starting to turn d-bag), Noble Square (my hood), Logan Square, Avondale, Ukrainian Village, Pilsen, Edgewater, Rogers Park, and of course President Obama’s Hyde Park.
I think the big problem is the large part of the South Side that is 100% black. It’s a completely different experience (seemingly impenetrable to outsiders.) and that’s not going to change anytime soon.
Ridnik Chrome
@Dexter’s new approach: Dawn comes soon enough for the working class…
Dexter's new approach
@Ridnik Chrome:
NIce catch! Great Song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDAs5JgoLZE
Peter A
@pk: The Italians and Irish were not given that treatment. Don’t buy into recent right wing victimology.
Peter A
@Monala: I lived in Boston during the same time period as you – it is a very segregated city. Talking to black people at the bus stop or behind the Dunkin’ Donuts counter does not make a city “integrated”. I worked in the financial sector and worked with, literally, one African American in 20 years. And never met a single black person who worked for our competitors, at law firms or at banks, not one. There are some vibrant social scenes in Boston where you will meet African-Americans, but the average white or Asian person would have to make a real effort to seek those out. To me that’s not “integrated.”