HABITATINTLL, Vol. 5, Nos. l/2, PP. 175-180 Pergamor Prm Ltd. 1980. Printed m Great Bnla~n

Race and the Suburbs

NATHAN GLAZER Harvard University, USA

Charles Abrams was one of the earliest analysts of urban affairs to devote himself to the serious problem of the racial segregation that was common in Northern and Western American cities. Indeed, I first met him when, in the late 194Os, he began to write on this issue for Commentary magazine, of which I was then a member of the editorial staff.’ His involvement in these matters went beyond analysis: during the administration of Governor Averill Harriman as governor of New York State in the late 1950s Charles Abrams served as Chairman of the New York State Committee Against Discrimination, and introduced what

were then new and original approaches to fighting discrimination.

But the problem of residential segregation, it has turned out, has been more resistant to attack than was thought possible thirty years ago. It is characteristic of the issues of

discrimination and segregation that we struggle with in the USA that, when we run into difficult problems in one area, we hope for an answer in another area. If we could only improve the economic position of blacks, we say, we could reduce the degree of residential segregation, since blacks would then have the economic ability to move into new areas. Or, if we could reduce the residential segregation of blacks, we could contribute to the most painful problem of all, the separation of the races in the public schools, which is now attacked by court decisions requiring the busing of children long distances into different neighbourhoods.

In view of Charles Abrams’ concern with the problem of reducing segregation between the races in American cities, a concern he manifested at least thirty-five years ago, it is I think valuable to investigate where we stand today, and to explore why this problem has been so resistant to policy intervention, despite the many state laws, and the national legislation, which make discrimination in rental and sales of housing illegal.

There is no question that one of the most striking embarrassments and failures of American society is the distribution of blacks and whites within metropolitan areas. The overall picture is familiar. The suburbs are overwhelmingly white. The central cities have far more than their national proportion of black. And if our common aim is an integrated society - integrated in its schools, its work, its residence, its armed forces, its international representation, its culture -clearly the failure of integration in residence is the one great exception to what I

‘See, for example: “Homes for Aryans Only,” Commentary, May, 1947, Vol. 3, No. 5, pp. 421-427; “The Segregation Threat in Housing,” Commentary, February, 1949, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 123-131. Charles Abrams’ major work in this area is Forbidden Neighbors: A Study of Prejudice in Housing (New York: Harper), 1955; (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press), 1971.

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think is overall success. While the Kerner Commission Report in 1968 spoke of the danger of two societies-one white, one black -in most fields we have put that danger behind us. Workplaces are more and more integrated, up to the highest levels. Government is more and more integrated, up to the highest levels. But residence remains separated, most strikingly between suburb and central city but equally strikingly within suburbs and central cities.

Sociologists have been charting the degree of segregation for some time, generally by use of a measure, the segregation index, which tells us what proportion of one race or the other

would have to move to give us an even distribution of the races within cities and metropolitan areas. There are good reasons to have expected a reduction in segregation in recent years. In 1968, we barred discrimination by race, religion, and national origin in both ownership and rental of housing. Government-subsidised housing -which has had a chequered career in the last decade or so -not only bans discrimination but requires some “affirmative” effort, in location and in rental and sales efforts, to get a social mix. Attitudes have improved greatly. In 1956, 46% of whites said they would object if a Negro with the same income and education moved into their block; by the late 1960s this was down to 2 1%.

There have also been improvements in the economic position of blacks. There are increasing numbers of blacks of higher education and stable family patterns. Indeed, young black families in which there is present both a husband and a wife now have incomes quite close to that of the national average. Certainly there are enough blacks of respectable income to permit a much higher level of integration than we actually find. About 5% of blacks live in

suburbs, a figure which has not changed in decades. It is true the number of blacks living in suburbs has increased, because suburban population has increased so rapidly.

But if we look into the matter in greater detail, we will find that much of the black

population in suburbs is actually concentrated in predominantly black residential enclaves. Even that 5% of blacks in suburbs, which is one half the proportion of blacks in this country, suggests a much higher degree of integration than actually exists.

A recent study at the Urban Institute, by Ann B. Schnore, provides us with some rather sad materials on this question. She has analysed distribution of blacks and whites in metropolitan

areas by census tracts -a tract holds on the average 4,000 people. In 1970,71% of blacks lived in tracts that were more than 50% black, 38% lived in tracts that were more than 90% black. Interestingly enough, the concentration of blacks was most extreme in the North Central states, where almost half of blacks lived in tracts that were more than 90% black. The concentration became slightly more extreme between 1960 and 1970, and it is hard to believe matters have improved much since 1970. The West is the most integrated region, the Northeast next. North Central and South are rather similar on this measure, but segregation is even greater in the North Central region than in the South. No measure is perfect, of course. Perhaps the reason why the South shows less segregation than the North Central region is because the South still has large pockets of rural blacks in newly suburban areas that were once rural. But the overall fact is clear: despite changes in law, in attitudes, and in income and education of blacks, segregation remains remarkably high, and by some measures - I will not go into the complex details of how we measure integration -has increased.

There are three major explanations for the pattern of residential segregation.

One is economic: blacks, who are on the average poorer than whites, with a household

Race and the Suburbs 177

income about three-fifths that of whites, simply cannot afford to live in many

neighbourhoods, and therefore must be concentrated in poorer neighbourhoods.

The second is discrimination: owners of rental housing, real estate agents, developers of individual home tracts, and individual owners all discriminate, maintaining areas as all-white, or, if blacks do begin to move in, by their actions rapidly turn it to all-black.

The third is preference: most groups - races and ethnic groups - prefer to live among their own kind. While this may look like and have the same effects as prejudice, I would argue it is really different. For one thing, it may affect blacks in the same way as whites. For another, the housing decision is not one based on prejudice against a specific groups -it may not be, for example, to avoid blacks as such, but to select a neighbourhood that is more than 50% Jewish, or has Catholic institutions.

Do we know much about how these three factors operate? It appears that the economic factor explains only a small part of the distribution of blacks. While they are on the average poorer, there are enough blacks -at every income level -in almost every metropolitan area to make possible much greater integration than exists. And, indeed, more prosperous blacks, who have greater choices, are on the average more integrated -but still far short of what we would find if income alone determined where they live.

What about discrimination? The actual degree of existing, persisting discrimination is not easy to determine. It is never easy to determine the dimensions of practice which are illegal, for people doing illegal things will not generally acknowledge it openly. Recently, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has made public a study in which matched pairs of blacks and whites tried to rent or buy housing. It shows that many blacks will find discrimination. Thus, asking about rental housing, whites were favoured 28% of the time, blacks 12% of the time, and were treated equally 60% of the time. In trying to purchase a house, whites were favoured 52% of the time in the number of houses the agent suggested they look at, blacks 25% of the time. The North Central states were the most discriminatory-there was twice as much discrimination as in the South or West; three times as much as in the Northeast.*

Does this explain the segregated patterns between suburb and city? I believe it explains a good deal. But when we see how often the black interested in renting or buying was not discriminated against, I would think there is still a lot to be explained.

And so we come to the third and most elusive factor, preference. When people look for housing, they are limited by their economic situation, they are concerned over whether they will meet prejudice, but they also act out of preference-preference for neighbours of the same race or ethnic group, for a neighbourhood with institutions that serve a group, for a location convenient to one’s work, for an old suburb or a new, for apartment houses, two- family houses, or single-family homes. Preference is a reality, affecting the choice of blacks as well as whites.

But of course it does not explain why so often blacks live in entirely black neighbourhoods, whites in entirely white neighbourhoods. The preferences of white ethnic groups have not generally led to the creation of neighbourhoods almost exclusively of that group. Jews,

2”Housing Survey Finds Wide Anti-Black Bias,” m The Wash&ton Post, 17 April, 1978, pp. Al, A2.

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Italians, Poles have preferences which lead to concentrations, but which do not create -as often as in the case of blacks -close to 100% neighbourhoods.

But in recent years we have begun to learn how relatively mild preferences for one’s own group-or against another group -create a dynamic process which leads to segregation. In other words, only a little preference or prejudice leads to people moving into or out of a neighbourhood at such rates as to create high concentrations which hardly anyone individually wants.

This was first demonstrated in an elegant theoretical article by Thomas Schelling.’ He suggests the following exercise:

“Take,” he says, “. . . a roll of pennies, a roll of dimes, a ruled sheet of paper divided into one-inch squares, . . . and find some device for selecting squares at random. We place dimes and pennies on some of the squares, and suppose them to represent the members of two homogeneous groups -men and women, blacks and whites, French- speaking and English-speaking. . . . We can spread them at random or put them in con- trived patterns. We can use equal numbers of dimes and pennies or let one be a minority. And we stipulate various rules for individual decision.

“For example, we could postulate that every dime wants at least half its neighbours to be dimes, every penny wants a third of its neighbours to be pennies, and any dime or penny whose immediate neighbourhood does not meet these conditions gets up and moves. Then by inspection we locate the ones that are due to move, move them, keep moving them if necessary, and when everybody on the board has settled down, look to see what pattern has emerged.”

The result in every case is “segregation” -all the pennies (or dimes, whichever is used to represent the minority) in one area of the board. One can use a computer to figure out what happens, but it can be demonstrated by simply going through the manual operations. And when one thinks about it, it makes sense. Most whites may consider an 11% black neighbourhood (the average of the blacks in the country) too black; many blacks may

consider 11% not black enough. In the literature on school desegregation, 11% black -two or three in a classroom of 2.5 -is often considered barely integrated, or not integrated enough.

Many argue for larger proportions of blacks if they are to feel comfortable and not like an exposed and isolated token.

The point was first demonstrated theoretically or anecdotally. (Many years ago, I pointed out the anomaly of a situation in which a group of Jews surveyed in a small city felt 50% Jewish in a neighbourhood was just right-would the Gentiles in the 50% Jewish neighbourhood think the same?) Now survey evidence demonstrates the same point. The University of Michigan Population Studies Center showed people in Detroit a schematic drawing of a neighbourhood - fifteen boxes, in which some are white and some are black -and asked: “If you lived in their neighbourhood, how would you feel about the mix of black families and white families in your neighbourhood?”

Let us take a white respondent, who has been shown a drawing of a neighbourhood: fifteen houses, in one of which a black lives. That would not bother many whites, even in segregated

3 “On the Ecology of Micromotives,” The Public Interest, Fall 1971, No. 25, pp. 82 ff. The analysis of this article is now in Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotivesand Microbehaviour, New York: W. W. Norton, 1978.

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Detroit. Only 7% could try to move out. Only 27% would not be willing to move in. But suppose two more black families move in. It is now 3 out of 15. The number trying to move out now rises fourfold to 24%. The number who would not move in now doubles to 50%.

One can see that even though only some whites oppose blacks moving in, if they move out -and other blacks move in -the percentage of uncomfortable whites rises, and the area is threatened by becoming all-black.

Take the other side, black preferences. Hardly any black would choose a neighbourhood which is all white, and not many more would choose one which is all-black. They would prefer, overwhelmingly, neighbourhoods that are about 50% black. But that is not what whites prefer. And if we put these two sets of preferences next to each other, we see an inexorable process by which areas -not all, but most -beginning with, let us say, only 7% black, go rapidly to higher proportions and become almost all black - something which blacks do not prefer and, of course, which whites do not prefer, but which they are both left with, owing to the process by which mild preferences aggregate to almost total segregation.4

What does one do about it? If the process is the way I have described it - and leading social scientists agree it is -then we cannot be optimistic about some of the favoured approaches to getting integrated communities. Thus, we can enforce the law most vigorously, but enough whites will always prefer neighbourhoods with very few blacks, and enough blacks will always prefer neighbourhoods with considerably more blacks, for this process leading to segregation to begin. Certainly we should enforce the law. Certainly no black should ever be denied housing because of racial discrimination. And certainly we can have integrated stable neighbourhoods. But we will not have very many, and most blacks will still live in concentrated black neighbourhoods.

We should try to create as much integration as possible, and we know a good deal about what creates stable integration in neighbourhoods. The proportion of blacks should be low. The social, economic and educational status of blacks and whites should be the same. Their children should have similar educational orientations. There should not be considerably more blacks in local schools than their proportion in the population. And so on. But these conditions are hard to arrange through public policy, and hard to maintain in a society such as ours, where there is a great deal of private residential building, and a great deal of freedom of movement. They do require a good deal of community management: to keep the proportion of blacks low, to see that a rough social and economic parity between incoming white and black residents prevails, to recruit new white residents, because the kind of stable integrated neighbourhood I have described will always be more attractive to blacks than to whites, and without management its black proportion will rise to create the kind of neighbourhood both groups would prefer not to have. One thing that seems vain and foolish to hope for is to carry through simultaneously class integration and racial integration. Bringing together groups very far apart in income -and what comes with income in this country-is in any case very difficult. It is foolish to try to create an abstract utopia of mixed poor and well-off, white and black -it will only create endless problems, unhappy communities, and new ghettos.

4Reynolds, F., &human, H., Bianchi, S., Colasanto, D., and Hatchett, S. (1978). “Chocolate City, Vanilla Suburbs: Will the Trend Towards Racially Separate Communities Continue?” m Social Science Research, 7, pp. 319-344.

180 Nathan Glazer

Does this mean one gives up the hope for an integrated society? Not at all. Our society is increasingly integrated in its economic activity, its political life, its culture, its higher education. In two important areas we do find resistance to integration: in residence, and in elementary and secondary education. It is hard enough to create stable integrated schools by moving children around. It will be much harder to do it by moving families around. And just as banning segregatory acts in school assignment does not produce integration across the board, neither will policing vigorously against segregation in housing produce integrated housing across the board. All this will change in time as the integrative experiences in other sphere of life become more common, and the two races are drawn closer together by common experiences, interests, and values. That, at any rate, is my conviction.