New Findings in Racism and Black-White Housing Segregation

With the exception recently of police, few groups are more in the spotlight than landlords when it comes to battling racism and other discrimination. The reason for this is simple: as landlords, we provide that most fundamental of all human needs: shelter, a place to come in from the rain. It's therefore important that we stay up-to-date with the latest research on discrimination so we can better root it out of our businesses.

Day six of race related riots in Ferguson, MO, August 17, 2014. By Loavesofbread, wikipedia.

According to NPR, we're all a little racist?

NPR summarized some research that they claimed proved the following: When asked to associate the words "good" or "bad" with images of black or white people, "most people" subtly tended to have trouble associating "good" with "black" and "bad" with "white". But shame on NPR, because the link to their "findings" didn't seem to support this assertion. What we've read in the same studies is different. It seems that if someone does have a bias, even the most serious "reeducation" brainwashing techniques can only make a small dent in changing their minds. So there's no easy fix to racism. (Is anyone surprised?) Read the full NPR article here.

Housing in Ferguson, MO Deeply Segregated

One year ago in August, 2014, an 18 year old black man was shot by a 28 year old white police officer outside St. Louis. This sparked the movement Black Lives Matter and the deep unrest about police force and racist enforcement. It matters to us. Greater St Louis (of which Ferguson is a part) is the ninth most segregated metro area in the United States. There were 50 metro areas studied.  But Boston has practically the same segregation index and is number 11 of 50.

Over the last 30 years, black-white segregation in both Boston and St Louis has declined by about 10 points out of 100 on the "segregation index" from low 80's to low 70's. Las Vegas, NV is the lowest scoring metro area on the black-white segregation index at only 36, a decline of 26 points in 30 years.

We searched briefly for why Las Vegas might be headed so much more quickly to interracial utopia, and what we found was a.) nobody really knows, and b.) it's getting worse for white-hispanic segregation. So clearly racism and segregation are multifaceted and hard to pin down.

Will we ever move past race? We hope so. But if not, we can always call NPR to schedule a weekly "reeducation" session. It won't work too well, but we can hope. We can hope.