Jeffery

"Searching for Whitopia" Subtite: "An Impropable Journey to the Heart of White America" ...though its not that simple.

Found this at Carmichaels Bookstore in Lousiville (Publishers Weekly 2009 Bookstore of the Year) and have been reading it while in here for the holiday weekend. Interesting chapter on Carnegie Hill in NYC as an urban Whitopia. Sounds like Oakwood. Forsyth County sounded familiar...recall this from that "History of the New South" class I took at UofK. Sure enough it was the same place I remember..the lynching and driving blacks from the county. That was then this is now... The book lists "Extereme Whitopian Counties: At least 90% white, with total pop growth over 10% since 2000 and 75% of that growth coming from non-hispanic whites (assume he's using census estimates) For the Dayton/Ciny area: Boone County, KY Grant County, KY Warren County, OH "Witopian Counties" : at least 85% non-hispanic white, with total pop growth of at least 7% after 2000 and at least two/thirds coming from non-hispanic whites...for Cin-Day: Clermont County, OH Clinton County, OH Pendleton County , KY

Another example of how Daytonians take a big steaming cow turd, put a birthday candle on it, and call it cake.

Pathetic.

For a smaller place that had a similar "hip/growth" buzz, for Ohio, there is Columbus.

They are also linked to the Pacific Rim trading system since they are so close. Thats a reason the Japanese have that IT concentration in Portland.

You wouldnt have had the us & them thing you have in Dayton, which means the Portland remained an viable place to live for whites, since there was no minorities driving white flight. Then there is the counterexample of Chicago, hip, trendy, and with big ghettos. Regionally, there is Louisville, which has the problems associated with an urban underclass, yet city living remains desirable and the urban housing market remains strong in certain neighborhoods. I'm not sure what Renns point was, really. Maybe that places like Portland are not relevant models for the urban Midwest due to the peculiar demographics of those places. Austin has a quite a bit of sprawl, and that is an issue there . Go watch the documentary "The Unforseen" for an interpretation of this. Portland is limited by the growth boundary, which was driven by ag interests.

I don't think Louisville was ever as urban (or intensley developed) as Pittsburgh or Cincinnati, because it had a broad flat flood plain to expand over. No topographical constraints. The downtown also developed different, without the dense district of high-rises. I might do a few more Louisville posts, but not sure about that since this is supposed to be Urban Ohio...sort of off topic.

Cincinnati was the last place I and my partner visited before he died. We were down on Main Street and then at Findlay Market during the day, and then he took ill that night, dying three days later. Findlay Market was the last place he saw alive, outside our house. He loved that place. He loved to cook and this place had it all for him. He went to the butchers, he had knowledgeable discussions with the people who ran Colonel Del Ray spice place (and was a good customer of theirs), he liked to get stuff at the delis, like Silverglades and the Italian place next door, and he used to really like shopping for produce and fruit, the old pro at this. I’d end up having to walk bags of stuff back to the car so we wouldn’t have so much to carry. And sometimes a guy working at the produce stalls on the Race side would put the stuff in a big cardboard box for us and walk it to the car for a tip. But it wasn’t just Findlay market. We’ve been together since 1988, actually slightly longer in California, but we discovered and explored Cincinnati together after he moved here to join me in Ohio in the fall of 1988. Cincinnati was a “we” thing for us. So we discovered special places there, as lovers are wont to do, places we went to that aren’t there anymore but still live on in memory; Piatt Park/Garfield Place used to be a quiet, romantic spot for us, with Mulane’s Parkside Café for lunch or dinner, and a visit to the little Mexican folk art shop in the Doctor’s Building (and that little café next door, that’s still there) . Then there was the celtic/folk record store in Roselawn, Crazy Ladies with it’s gay lit-crit, politically correct ephemera, and woman’s music section, the Albee restaurant in the Westin, and obscure things like a Latino corner grocery somewhere where Cincinnati meets Norwood, a little gay bar in downtown Covington, the vaguely fetish/leather/occult clothing place on Court Street, etc…. And places that are still there, like Joseph-Beth, Queen City Chili, Dutenhoffers, the rude tie store on Main, and we were always adding new spots to our itinerary, like Shake-It Records and Northside. We also used to go down for shows in the early years. We’d live large, staying at a room in the Westin after seeing a show at Bogarts, or cocktails at some downtown gay bar (two are still there). We were going to see Rent before he died, at the Aranoff. That would have been our first time there. We had the tickets bought. Instead I went. I wore his leather jacket and put it on the aisle seat next to mine (he preferred aisle seats), sort of a symbolic gesture. He was Angel and I was Collins. And Cincinnati was our East Village. Our visits became almost like rituals or pilgrimages. If it was a visit to Duttenhofers we’d have to try those little eateries on busy, gritty McMillan (I recall an Ethiopian place from years ago), and dream of renting an apartment over those stores. We’d finish up with drive to the overlook park off Ohio Street…he liked those overlooks…especially that one with the city luminous in that southern light, that southern exposure, spread out before us in all its colorful variety. Or we’d take a drive past the mansions in Clifton or Keys Crescent. He was a big queen (I say that in a good way) who appreciated the fabulous, and things didn’t get much more fabulous than Cincinnati architecture, both the humble and the haute bourgeois. The buildings in Cincinnati would always make us smile, or take our breath away. We shopped at Tower Place, when it was new, back when they had the Williams-Sonoma, Nature Company, Structure (with it’s Le Corbusier Grand Comfort chairs) and Banana Republic, where I bought him a green field jacket that he still had, tattered in the closet, when he died (the inveterate pack rat). We’d always go there between Christmas and New Years, or just after New Years as another little tradition. Always a sale at Saks. Great memories of downtown Cincinnati, including the old CAC gift shop in the Formica Building arcade (won a design award, I think). But it was just driving around the city that appealed to us, or walking around a place, a neighborhood, a park, discovering something new, like driving up through Tusculum with its Sausalito-like hills to discover Alms Park and it’s overlook. Or discovering quaint Mariemont at the end of Columbia Parkway. Or cruising the backstreets of Camp Washington and seeing the hulk of the Crosley factory over us, catching the late afternoon sun. Over the years, as we grew older, the city revealed itself to us and became familiar to us, became a part of our life together. We appreciated the infinite variety of the place and couldn’t get enough of it…”Let’s go down to Cincy! Sure!” …. For us, Cincinnati was for lovers; in all its myriad aspects it was a place we fell in love with as we fell deeper in love with each other. Whenever I drive the streets, walk the streets of the city he will be with me, if only in spirit… …in Cincinnati I’ll never walk alone.

I've never been but I am falling in love with New Orleans, just from pix and books, & esp posts like the thread header...wow, just wow. I am in awe....

Places like Portland and Seattle aren’t the whitopias Benjamin is talking about. They attract people because they are hip, funky, have a great natural setting, fairly healthy economies, and reportedly a high quality of life. In short they have a buzz. People move there for those reasons, not because these cities are white. The whiteness is incidental. They are Ecotopia, not Whitopia. The people in Benjamins book wouldn’t move to places like Portland or Seattle. Their whitopias are rural and small town. Since Portland and Seattle didn’t attract a lot of blacks this means there wasn’t a big pool of minority population subject to socio-economic exclusion. If these places had a big black in-migration you’d see an urban underclass form and black ghettos dominate entire ends of town just like you see here in Ohio. (though I've read Portland did have a little black ghetto at one time, the Albina district)

^ fascinating! I love the rich neighborhood history and geography of Cincinnati! :-) ....and a big thx to Rando for that link to Brighton. Another place for my walks! Now, about Mohawk....(maybe these placs get their own thread? Anway, this sounds fascinating: There's Fulton, which stretched from Bains Street to St. Andrews, the old riverboat manufacturing neighborhood. Presumably there is some of this neighborhood still standing?

The similarities with Louisville is why I get so pissed off at the way things are in Dayton because the rest of the city is considerably more alive than Dayton is. During this era the preservation/back-to-city movement kicked off, which became a big force in local culture during the 1970s, after all this demolition happened. There was a concerted effort to try to save the remaining neighborhoods...the locals began to re-value the city and move back into town, which gathered steam in the 1980s and 1990s till the city now as very active and busy neighborhoods, just not next to downtown...because, well, there aint anything left next to downtown....

Thanks. Maybe this should be on “Urban Kentucky”. But that would be a short board. Since this is Urban Ohio, one can see some comparisons here with Ohio cities. Some of this looks like the older Oregon housing in Dayton, or a bit like German Village, or short versions of the tenements of Cincinnati and Covington. And all those Italianate buildings look like a less grand Dayton Street, maybe, in Cincy. There’s a definite common theme here. 2 or 2.5 stories, detached housing, rectangular or square attic windows. Sort of a lower, low density version of Cincinnati. But then one can see how things bulk up as you get closer to the river, like that apartment/retail example from Market Street or the rowhouses (in a previous post) on Jefferson. It seems like Market and Jefferson might have been a bit like Vine Street in Over The Rhine, lined with taller buildings mixing retail and housing. The expansion of downtown combined with urban renewal nearly obliterated an entire housing typology from the city. Yeah, I think that four lane 9th Street that’s there now was intended as an interim solution. And how about that crosstown route cutting across the midsection of Old Louisville. That was a really astute siting as south of that there is more housing and north the parking lot lands ensue, so that freeway would set in concrete (literally) a sort of fuzzy boundary on the south edge of downtown. What happened on the east side of downtown was pretty bad too, as they lost the Haymarket district, blocks of antebellum buildings, the Preston Street shtetl, the former Italian area on Pearl Street, and the old Fehr brewery.

Also you have to account for depopulation of certain neighborhoods which over time lose their identities and become swallowed by more vibrant 'hoods. ..is this what happened to Mohawk and Brighton, or are they still considered identifiable neighborhoods still. BTW, I think I drove through that East End area . It has that church with the clocktower that riverboats used to set their time to. I think there isn't much to that neighborhood in terms of width, but its a pretty long shoestring. Linwood, I thought, was it's own place, as was Columbia.

I am getting more and more interested in my former home of Louisville. I’ve been digging a bit in the Louisville library history collection and at the UofL library archives during my frequent returns home. So, here is a backstory on the pix upthread, a bit on the urban renewal effort and what came before. I was really curious about this, so took some vacation time to go down and do some research. First, this WPA map showing age of housing, from the 1940s. The WPA has these for Chicago and Dayton and probably other cities, and are a snapshot of what was standing in the 1940s. This is a great map to have as it takes the info down to the block level. Then a close up. The empty space is the Beecher Terrace housing project. Notably there are blocks in this urban renewal area with the average age before 1860, so some of the older housing in the city was in this district. Next, population. This was from a slightly later map prepared by the planning commission. I think each dot is 70 or 40 people. By this time Beecher Terrace had been built. Next, race. This was, and had been for many years, a predominantly black neighborhood. ..and % black. This is another WPA map. …the saying was that urban renewal was “Negro Removal”, and we’ll see how the plans created a buffer zone between downtown and Louisville’s black ghetto. Next, to give a flavor of the urban fabric, this amazing map prepared by the WPA in the early 1940s. It classifies every parcel in the entire city by type of use, so is sort of land use map. It also attempts to show parcels that have residential and commercial (black outline). You need a magnifying glass to really study the original, so this scan of a Xerox isn’t to legible. But the map does show the core of downtown to the right as colored black (for commercial use), but also how the surrounding neighborhoods interweave into the downtown. A close-up of the urban renewal area, with some landmarks mentioned. I will be noting these as reference points as the area is transformed via urban renewal. The map also shows how rich and varied this urban fabric might have been, how fine grained. The Beecher Terrace property is shaded in red, but the original streets and alleys still appear on this map. Next, a parcel map from the urban renewal project application. This was the situation probably in 1959 or 1960. By this time Beecher Terrace had been built. There are some other things here, like the parcel for Central High School (the old Jim Crow black school) two blocks south. …and the proposed street rearrangement plan, showing new streets and streets and alleys to be vacated. The modern parcelization, from the Louisville GIS site ….one can see how the granularity goes a away at the new parcels are larger. Today…the urban renewal area from the air….. And the basic concept. Beecher Terrace came first, perhaps setting a precedent for this area. So the planners decided to use the western part of the urban renewal area for more public housing, “Village West”, and a rebuilt Central High. Beyond that, along the railroad line heading to the 14th Street bridge the land was turned into an industrial district (mostly). Broadway was to become a commercial strip, and Market Street (the northern edge of the district was also more commercial/industrial. 9th Street separates all this from the West Downtown urban renewal district, shaded in red, which is the area in the pix at the thread header. And which we will look at in detail next. A blow-up of the big WPA land use map, giving one the flavor on how fine-grained the urban fabric was as it shaded into downtown. This was, in part, the oldest part of the city. Market, Jefferson, and Liberty were part of the original town plat, which extended westward to 14th Street. South of Liberty to Broadway was out-lots, which were subdivided during the antebellum area. Somewhat akin to how Over The Rhine was originally the out-lots of Cincinnati. During the antebellum era the city expanded west and east along the river, and south toward Broadway. Even as late as the 1940s this area was still intensely developed, with few vacant parcels. What’s notable is that this map shows mixed use; the outlined parcels along Market denote residences above commercial or retail. One also sees this a bit on Walnut, the old black shopping/entertainment strip We already saw how Beecher Terrace was an early attempt at urban renewal as slum clearance for better housing. Beecher Terrace is shaded in red here, but the yellow shading was the proposed site for the first large scale urban renewal scheme, perhaps from the 1930s. (certain public buildings shown for reference so one can compare how the area changes through time) This was to be a City Beautiful influenced civic center, akin to the Group Plan of Cleveland or the Civic Center in San Francisco. The plan actually extended one block east towards downtown from the future West Downtown plan, and made use of the long blocks south of Liberty as landscaped mall, flanked by public buildings of various types, with two squares on either end, north and south vistas terminated by two monumental public buildings. The north end was developed as “Jefferson Square” , for city, county, and state government, dominated by a new city-county building. The old court house would become a museum. If you look closely the flanking lawns along the central mall are really parking lots. The south end was developed as “Lincoln Square”, dominated by a grand US Court and Customs House, just north of the new central post office, flanked by additional Federal office buildings. The plan shows a Telephone Building and the Courier-Journal. These were already built, the Telephone Building was Louisvilles only art deco skyscraper. I don’t know if this was intentional, but this plan, while providing a grand civic ensemble, also provided a barrier or cordon between the core of downtown and the black neighborhood just to the west. Though not executed there must’ve been some zoning intention of locating public buildings in this area as one was built pre-urban renewal, the hatched space about two blocks south of City Hall, between 6th & 7th, on this urban renwal parcel map. …a snapshot of parcelization just before urban renewal. In conjunction with the urban renewal effort the downtown business association, Louisville Central Area, released Design for Downtown, the first big postwar effort to enhance downtown. Though this plan was oriented towards retail, hospitality, & entertainment it did make some other suggestions, like wrapping downtown and vicinity with freeways (the model was Detroit and Columbus, according to the text). The western freeway would divide the urban renewal zone in half (in red outline), separating the more residential western half from what was intended to be a more office/civic zone to the east The plan wasn’t as “designed” as the old group plan. Pretty much office buildings set in parking, with some residential things. The Jefferson Square concept disappears, with the northern part of West Downtown proposed for offices and maybe light industry surrounded by (and enclosing) landscaped parking lots. This plan shows some older buildings on Market Street (north edge of the map) being saved, but they were not. Lincoln Square is still there somewhat, as a landscaped forecourt to a new lozenge-shaped Federal building north of the Post Office (at the site of the group plan court and customs house). What’s notable is this plan proposes a little residential complex south of Walnut, with rows of townhouses snaking across the property. There might have been high rises proposed, too, but one can’t tell from this graphic The plan shows some older buildings saved north of the Federal building. These were proposed to be converted into offices for non-profits. This didn’t happen and they were demolished. As we know, a Federal building was built, as was the plaza in front of it. “between the idea and the reality/falls the shadow” Housing was also built, as two high rise housing projects near the Greyhound station, and a small low rise suburban-style development roughly at the same site as the proposed residential complex. The planners provided this map to help envision what was to come vs what was there, shading the new buildings and zoning over the existing structures. This is a great bit of info as one can get a flavor of the urban fabric just before it was destroyed. Using the above graphic as a base map, a black plan showing the spatial character of “West Downtown” (which was really “East Russell”). One can see how this area was already substantially eroded by demolitions and parking. But there was enough left to provide a fairly consistent street space along the east-west streets, with a fairly solid street wall on Market, north edge of the zone. Walnut really stands out as a consistent street space continuing into downtown. Chestnut less so once it gets closer to the post office. The black plan doesn’t give too much idea of granularity once buildings are next to each other, so the old townhouses on Jefferson, Market and cross streets don’t show up too well. Next, the city transformed: “keeper” buildings in red… ….the old fabric is removed and the new inserted around the keepers… ….resulting in solids lost is space vs defining space. Classic figure ground reversal: What you see in the thread header, mostly, suburban space: (there have been some adds and subtracts since the 1980s). And the ghost city; retired property lines and parcels denoted by dashed line. So what did this all look like, before it was torn down? The U of L photograph archive has quite a few images, but they are expensive to get digitally (long story on how U of L differs from WSU in using their collection), so a few scans of Xeroxes of Xeroxes of photos, to see maybe a grainy glimpse of a lost city. I focus here on residential as I’m more interested in that from a vernacular architecture POV, seeing how it compares with Dayton and Cincinnati, but there are pix of churches, hotels, commercial buildings, etc, in the collection. Nearly all of this is before 1876, probably before the Panic of 1873. Some it is probably antebellum, from around the 1830s-1850s. First, perhaps Louisville’s working class housing before the shotgun arrived… Commercial building with apartments above, on either Market or Jefferson, closer to the river Newer retail add-on to older residential, on Walnut Street. It seems that there were a few of these on Walnut. Fancy Oertels ’92 sign over the door. Oertels was one of Louisvilles’ three postwar beers, others being Fehrs (with it’s Fehr Bear mascot) and Falls City (have a ‘City, taste the ‘City, etc). This is a series. The buildings on either side of that old red brick church in the thread header. The church today Starting from the west, left…. (these are newer, 1880s ore later, one has that distinctive Louisville feature of chamfered corners) …the church, roughly mid block… …next door, and to the corner.. So one can see the possibilities of this urban renewal collection, virtually reconstructing the city. The church was Kentucky architect Gideon Shryrocks last work. Across the street was one of his first. And it survived, heavily modified, until urban renewal. This unsual feature appears on the urban renewal map, as what looks like a rambling complex of things set in a mostly empty block. Buried in that mass are two buildings, survivors from 1838 and 1858 respectively. In this image, the farther one with the tower was designed & built by Shryock in 1838, but it burned and was rebuilt in 1856. The closer one was built in 1849. This was University Square. The 1838 building was the medical college, and the 1856 was the forerunner to U of L but was also Louisvilles’ first high school, the Male High School. There was a female one elsewhere. University Square (and its neighbors) appear on the 1876 real estate map …and on the 1884 one. The 1838 medical college after the 1856 rebuild… …and, next door, the 1848 college, later Male High School. They survived until taken by urban renewal in the 1960s. The replacement: To close, a birds-eye of a portion of the West Downtown urban renewal zone, demolition nearly complete, and some features from previous maps labeled for reference. Clear-cutting a city. The wide-open spaces of the East Downtown urban renewal district are visible in the upper part of the image, in the background beyond the cluster of downtown buildings. But that’s another story.

An exodus of discouraged workers from the job market kept the U.S. unemployment rate from climbing above 10 percent in December, economists said. Had the labor force not decreased by 661,000 last month, the jobless rate would have been 10.4 percent, according to economists including David Rosenberg at Gluskin Sheff & Associates in Toronto and Harm Bandholz at UniCredit Research in New York. Source: Bloomberg Details a the link.

I was meaning on walking through the Brewrey District on one of my Cincinnati walks. Looks like I better hurry up and do that before they tear this down.

Im trying to figure out where the East End is? Airport Road suggests someplace by Lunken?

^ yeah, sure was! Interesting to hear about Sidebar. That was an interesting place. Have you ever been there?

Here’s a closer look at the Akron economy plus a few things on commuting and maps showing where things are locating between Akron and Cleveland (northern Summit & Portage counties). Gross Metropolitan Product The MSA number, showing the increase during the early part of the decade and the plateau later. Numbers are millions. The BEA allows one to do breakouts by economic sector, as long as the data is not suppressed. In this case there is a fairly complete set of data, allowing the sectors to be graphed out. There isn’t much interesting here, other than the relative sizes of the sectors. Another way of looking at this is how much did a sector add or subtract between 2001-2008, and then arranging them for comparison All told most sectors contributed to the growth in GMP across the decade. Akron had a net growth. Interestingly it retail and wholesale trade, professional and technical services, and management of companies and enterprises, followed by manufacturing, tat led the way. Or, showing it another way, the percentage each sector contributed to Akron GMP growth. . The performance of the sectors over the course of the 00’s expressed as a percentage. Wholesale & Retail Trade drops off in this case, but one can see the more white collar sectors having the greatest % growth over the decade. And a snapshop for 2008, showing how the sectors contribute to the overall GMP. I note the best performing sectors with a star. Employment GMP is not employment. In fact it might not even be that closely related after comparing the following charts with the GMP charts (where possible…they are not directly comparable) The employment number mirrors the GMP number, in aggregate. Note that employment in these charts is not how many people living in the Akron area are working, but how many positions are being generated in Summit and Portage Counties. It is supply side. Employment by sector; the sectors here are not exactly the same as the GMP ones, but I think one can do direct comparisons with the Manufacturing and Trade sectors in the GMP charts. I guess I was surprised to see Government so high here. This is mostly local government. Also manufacturing didn’t do well in employment vis a vis GMP. The Leisure and Hospitality sector looks pretty high, too, in terms of jobs (this would include bars and restaurants). Though the Akron MSA did end the 2001-2008 period with a net increase of positions, most sectors lost jobs, the most by far being manufacturing. Here are the numbers (in thousands): By far the best performer was professional and business services, followed by the familiar health care & social services & private education Wrapping up with a snapshot of the employment situation in 2008. Growing sectors are noted with a star: The Akron/Cleveland Connection Some commuting number history (from the census) for people commuting to Cuyahoga County and Summit County showing how there is a strong exchange between the two, even as early as 1970. I cut off the numbers at 1,000 commuters, just to show the significant commuting. Portage County is starting to get a lot of Cleveland commuters, too. And, since Summit County is becoming an increasingly important commuting destination, the types of sectors the commuters are in: ..not sure there is anything suprising here. Manufacturing, though declining, still provides a lot of work for Cuyahoga County commuters. Mapping Economic Clusters in Northern Summit A transportation planning agency in Akron generated a set of maps showing clusters of manufacturing and retail trade employment, zoning, and land use. It’s very clear from these maps that northern Summit and northwestern Portage counties are clusters of employment based on these maps, probably sharing a labor pool from Akron and Cleveland . Manufacturing: Retail Trade Unfortunatly no maps for professional, technical, and management concentrations, since these are becoming growing areas for employment as well as GMP. Perhaps they can be inferred from the zoning map (which shows intent for growth as well as what’s there) Finally, current land use for northern Summit County. One can see industrial parks and office/retail concentrations, too, to some extent. I’m not that familiar with this area…I recall driving in to Cleveland from Akron via Penninsula, Hudson, and Twinsburg back in 2004, and thinking this area was starting to get built-up…in fact I think I remember that industrial area between Hudson and Twinsburg. I wonder if those northern tiers of townships (smaller and all perfectly square in the Western Reserve, I guess) might be the “Warren County” of Cleveland? It’s pretty tough to get economic info like this below the county level. It looks like the transportation planners got some employment numbers mapped hot spots, and there is “zip business patterns” from the census, So, difficult to say how much of the Akron MSA and employment growth is coming from “Akron proper” and how much is from this northern tier. The Brookings Study I want to close up here by linking y’all to this neat study by Brookings on Akron: A Restoring Prosperity Case Study: Akron, Ohio The link takes you to an executive summary. At the summary there is another link to a much more in-depth .pdf that has a fascinating little economic history, and also makes some points about the rubber industry that reminds me of the Pittsburgh story, in terms of timing of industrial collapse: ”…it then discusses how the “bottoming out” of this dominant industry gave rise to the industrial restructuring of the area. The paper explores the nature of this restructuring, and the steps and activities the city’s business, civic, and government leaders have undertaken to help spur its recovery and redevelopment. In doing so, it provides a series of lessons to other older industrial regions working to find their own economic niche in a changing global economy.” The article does make the point that Akron city is itself is doing rather well compared to, say, Cleveland, so perhaps some of this economic growth is helping the core city, too.

The concept of driving in to park, going throgh Tower Place, and then fanning out to other downtown destinations....that is how I used the place. It was more like an arcade in that way. I was there back after Xmas and noticed they still have stores there. Including a TJ Maxx and relocated Cincinnati Shop. So not dead yet.

An interview with the author in the social-democratic magazine In These Times: Road Tripping Through Whitopia What lessons do you want people to take away from your book? Many whites may say, “I don’t hate minorities.” Or, “I voted for Obama.” But that’s beside the point. Throughout the 20th century, racial discrimination was deliberate and intentional. Today, racial segregation and division result from policies and institutions that are no longer explicitly designed to discriminate. Yet the effects are practically the same. Structural racism endures in the absence of prejudice or ill will. On my journey, examples of structural racism surfaced over and over. That’s a key lesson I hope white people take from the book—how terrible outcomes result without evil intentions. As for racial minorities, we need to get our acts together. Where we’re succeeding, “Bravo.” Where we’re falling short, “The jig is up.” Some of our shortcomings are becoming increasingly indefensible. As Obama says, “In private—around kitchen tables, in barbershops and after church—black folks can often be heard bemoaning the eroding work ethic, inadequate parenting and declining sexual mores” in inner-cities. So, white folks are not exactly crazy. There are some evident urban problems any reasonable person may want to flee. More at the link. Racial minorities have a higher crime rate. This is a statistical fact. One can see this in the FBI uniform crime reports. The FBI has online a uniform crime report time series for the 1990s for the various crime categories with breakouts by race, and the minority rate is in nearly all cases higher than the white rate. The census has a time series for homicide going back to 1980 (1980 to 2005) and again the rate is higher for racial minorities than whites. Again, statistical fact. The average white person doesn’t know this. What he sees on the news or in the paper are the mug shots of black and brown faces, or the faces of the black and brown victims. This is because the media focuses on the dramatic, human-interest crimes, the murders, the home invasions, the rapes, the more lurid the better, because lurid sells. And since the pool of perps is higher with minorities it’s more likely you’ll see minority crime in the media. For example over 60% of the homicides in 2008 and 2009 in Dayton were committed by blacks, so you are going to see violent crime having a black face just because of the rates. Add to that certain pop culture things, like the gangsta rap thing that was big a few years ago, and certain negative stereotypes are formed about minorities. But these stereotypes have basis in fact, even though they are unfair because they are, after all, stereotypes. This really has serious implications. An example again from Dayton: In 2007 the city did a survey of residents (not suburbanites) and asked a question if people felt safe or unsafe downtown. For daytime, 16.9% of blacks felt unsafe, while 26.7% of whites felt unsafe, a 9.8% difference. For downtown and night, 37% of blacks felt unsafe and a big 55.4% of whites did, a difference of 18.4%. I contend these differences are due to whites seeing large concentrations of blacks downtown or more blacks on the street than whites, hence they think “”black= crime risk= unsafe”. Even if the police stats say downtown is actually the safest part of Dayton. Think about the implications of this perception given that there is an effort to revive downtown in various ways. These numbers are only for city residents, who one would assume would know better. One can speculate the percentages are even worse for suburbanites who might have very limited contact with racial minorities. And Benjamin acknowledges that segregation is a problem, in this interview in Time: What is the danger Whitopias pose to America as a whole? You can call me old-fashioned, but I'm an integrationist. A democracy can't function at its optimum unless all members are integrated as full members. A community full of like-minded people tends to enforce their own view of the world and close off opposing viewpoints. You can go to parties in New York City where the liberal smugness is intolerable because they're only hearing liberal viewpoints. On the Whitopian conservative side, it's spinning out of control. Look at the tea-bagger movement, where people are concerned their taxes are going to be wasted on minorities and illegal immigrants. Same with the movement that says [President] Obama is not a citizen. source Or, this is another way of describing a phenomena noted in another book: The Big Sort Benjamin liking integration is not an uncommon POV with some blacks. If one looks at actual surveys of whites and blacks, blacks prefer to live in integrated communities at higher rates than whites, giving the lie to the rationalization that we all want to be with people mostly like ourselves. And integration allows you to check your negative stereotypes with reality, with real live minorities as co-workers or neighbors. Anyway, any good Buckeye Whitopias out there? I think Benjamin’s; criteria was 95% & up white and a certain population growth rate.

There is still a net amount of commuters from Akron to Cleveland, but the rate in the opposite direction has increased considerably between 1970 and 2000. The Akron issue really is interesting.

Georgetown is included in the Lexington metro area, not part of the Cincy MSA, though Cincy is including more counties down into KY now. I did run numbers for Lexington and Louisville but didn't want to cloud this GMP stuff by dipping down into another region. Lexingtons' GMP had a 16.7% growth in 2001-2008, putting it in the Sea-Tac/ DFW Metroplex range. Pretty impressive.