...read this.
We'll discuss tomorrow but feel free to comment tonight.
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Your (and my) homework for tonight...
« The Fumo indictment is out | TheNextMayor.com Main Page | Petition time »
...read this.
We'll discuss tomorrow but feel free to comment tonight.
Comments (1)
For starters, I do think that segregation is a problem in Philadelphia.
Having said that, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee has done some studies on racial segregation. It's been a few years since I read the study, and can't find it at the moment, but they basically pointed out that, under the system normally used to measure segregation, cities with very low percentages of minority population generally are found to have the lowest segregation. This is because those cities don't have a large enough minority population to cause a "clumping" effect. Furthermore, the methodology discussed tended to take points away for having more than the city's overall minority percentage in a given neighborhood (so if a city was 25% African American overall, it would rank as more segregated for having a neighborhood that was 50% African American -- at least that's how I remember it).
Given these criticisms of commonly used methods for measuring segregation, they decided to use their own methodology and instead measured the percentage of census blocks (which are smaller than census tracts) in each city that were at least 20% black and at least 20% white, finding that several cities with high percentages of minority population (like St. Louis and Milwaukee) ranked fairly high. Philadelphia and other NE cities were generally around the middle, and cities in the Pacific Northwest ranked fairly poorly.
Under the methodology used by UWM, I believe the census block I currently live in might at this point be considered "diverse," even though most people would probably be very quick to say that I live in a "black" neighborhood. Of course, that observation doesn't take into account the fact that my neighborhood is at the edge of a rapidly gentrifying area, which brings up the question of why neighborhoods "gentrify" instead of becoming diverse (is it all about property taxes, or is there more to it?)
As for NTI, rather than criticising it myself, I'll simply provide the following link:
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/special_packages/15426614.htm
Posted by Anonymous | February 6, 2007 10:43 PM