Gentrification and Diversity in American Cities

Gentrification has been underway in richer cities of the world for decades, but the 2010 Census in the US has revealed that it is an important part of increasing the residential diversity of cities. The latest story comes from New York, where the NY Times reports on the transformation of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in NYC's Borough of Brooklyn "that traces its African-American roots to the early 19th century and has been the borough’s black cultural capital for decades."

Overshadowed by Harlem’s racial metamorphosis since 2000, an even more striking evolution has occurred in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Over all, the neighborhood is now barely 60 percent black — down from 75 percent a decade ago. But in the older Bedford section west of Throop Avenue, according to the 2010 census, blacks have recently become a minority of the population for the first time in 50 years.

“Both the fall of the crime rate and the improvement of the subway were conditions that made this neighborhood more attractive to people who might not have considered living there in the past,” said John H. Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

“In the 2010 census, the first thing we noticed was how the concentrations in many traditional black and white areas dropped off across so many blocks,” said Steven Romalewski, director of the mapping service of the Center for Urban Research at CUNY’s Graduate Center, which analyzed the census results block by block.

Hispanics Continue to be Victimized by US Immigration Policies

Professor Douglas Massey of Princeton has an excellent Op-Ed piece in today's New York Times that connects the dots between the current US immigration policy, the sub-prime mortgage practices that led to the housing bubble, and the rather astounding drop in household wealth among Hispanics as a result of the Great Recession. The latter finding is drawn from a new Pew Hispanic Center report that analyzes a just-released set of data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Among the highlights of Massey's comments are the following points:

Hispanic families saw the largest decline in wealth of any racial or ethnic group in the country during the latter half of the last decade: from 2005 to 2009, their median wealth fell by an astounding 66 percent. The reason? The implosion of the housing market, where Hispanic families had invested much of their wealth.But that’s only the latest chapter in a much longer story. Over the past two decades Hispanics have moved from the middle of the socioeconomic hierarchy, between blacks and whites, to a position below both. On virtually every indicator of socioeconomic welfare, Hispanics fell relative to blacks.This has nothing to do with nativist tropes like work ethic or resistance to assimilation and everything to do with misguided government policy: our immigration and border-control system has created a class of people cut off from traditional legal and economic structures and thus vulnerable to the worst depredations of the market system.Because of the irresistible draw of the American economy, militarization of the border didn’t really affect undocumented in-migration, but it did reduce out-migration — migrants knew that once they left it would be hard to get back in. Whereas there were an estimated 3 million undocumented migrants in 1990, the number rose thereafter to peak around 12 million in 2007 and 2008, at which point half of all Salvadoran immigrants, 60 percent of all Mexican immigrants and two-thirds of Guatemalan and Honduran immigrants were here illegally.

East Africa Famine Worsens into "A Vision of Hell"

The famine in the Horn of Africa, especially Somalia, is getting worse, not better, according to all reports. The problem started with the worst drought in 60 years but is compounded by the fact that it is centered in a region of Somalia that is controlled by a militant group--Shebab--that is determined not to allow food aid to reach the victims. The victims are disproportionately children.

Across the sprawling mass of the Dadaab refugee camp - some 50 km sq (19 sq miles) - there are several graveyards now, full of small mounds of earth, where chronically malnourished Somali refugees have been buried.

Usually the graves are horribly small: infant mortality in this camp has risen threefold in the last few months, according to the United Nations.