"The Miracle of Mpls", Local Responses & Racial Disparities

[Avian]

The Miracle Of Minneapolis. Positively glowing:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... is/384975/

[Silophant]

My favorite part was that it mentioned "Minneapolis" 17 times, but "Minneapolis-St. Paul" and "Twin Cities" only 11.

[Anondson]

I was almost blushing...

[acs]

The first comment nailed it: Socialism, don'cha know?

[Rich]

He gives much of the credit for our success to our fiscal disparities law, and to a lesser degree, our approach to affordable housing. Maybe we've been taking those efforts for granted around here. Other places don't do that sort of thing as well.

[Viktor Vaughn]

If anything, I would think Fiscal Disparities slowed white flight and ghettoization leaving us less sprawly than we'd otherwise be.

I did blush a little reading that article, but mostly this type of praise makes me think about how bad it must be other places. It's hard enough to keep the rent paid here; it's difficult to believe we have some of the highest wages, employment rates, and affordability. We have such a divide here between those with opportunity and those with no chance, If this is as good as it gets, this country is screwed.

[mattaudio]

I did blush a little reading that article, but mostly this type of praise makes me think about how bad it must be other places. It's hard enough to keep the rent paid here; it's difficult to believe we have some of the highest wages, employment rates, and affordability. We have such a divide here between those with opportunity and those with no chance, If this is as good as it gets, this country is screwed.

This. It's not evidence we have it all figured out. It's evidence that most of the country has it so much worse. Humbling indeed.

[acs]

Lets not kid ourselves. The reason we have affordable housing in a high income metro isn't because of fiscal disparities, its because of sprawl. Take a look at this new data on Citylab, we're heavily in the black (bad) in both sprawl index and change in sprawl over the past 10 years.

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/02/ ... es/385559/

[grant1simons2]

The writer is explaining his writing on the Daily Circuit today on MPR

[Nathan]

Minnesotans have a long history of being not good enough to themselves or appreciating what they do well or believing that what we have could possibly be better than what anyone else has. That could be negative, but also pushes us to strive to do things better. The fact that we think our metro has so many disastrous issues and yet the rest of the country looks to us as a case study is proof that we're doing something right... we can always strive for better, as we should but every once in a while it's OK to pat ourselves on the back without trying to destroy some praise we've gotten. We have a lot of momentum building up I feel like we have to strive to make and equitable and successful metro and city grow. It appears we already know how.

[David Greene]

Lets not kid ourselves. The reason we have affordable housing in a high income metro isn't because of fiscal disparities, its because of sprawl. Take a look at this new data on Citylab, we're heavily in the black (bad) in both sprawl index and change in sprawl over the past 10 years.

The article is pretty clear that the focus was on the operation of Fiscal Disparities and the Met Council pre-Pawlenty. There's a quote from Orfield about how we had a good regional housing plan before then. The currnt Met Council is drafting a new one, the first in many many years. So I don't think it's valid to conclude the sprawl gave us affordable housing.

[EOst]

It's not as though the less-sprawling cities were planning better than us, either. Most of them (NYC, LA, Honolulu, Miami, SF, etc.) aren't growing outward because they've more or less exhausted the viable land to build sprawl on.

[twincitizen]

So here's one predictable response to the Atlantic "Miracle of Minneapolis" article: http://www.questionthepremise.org/new-b ... at-miracle

While there is obviously merit and truth to saying "Minneapolis is a great city for white people, but much less so for people of color", due to some pretty glaring racial disparities, at some point the constant race angle is really going to start turning off some allies. Even as a youngish urban person who considers himself to be pretty far left politically, the whole white guilt angle barely plays for me. Do the folks who bang that drum and write these types of pieces ever stop to think how this message is received in the blueish-purplish (barely left-of-center) suburbs which keep Minnesota in DFL-control? I dunno.


If that paragraph made your blood boil, maybe take a breath before continuing, because I've had a dangerous lingering thought about the whole "extreme racial disparities!" thing, and the above article provoked me enough to finally commit it to keyboard:

Is it possible that our greater-than-normal racial disparities (presumably based on statistics) are perhaps partially due to MSP's white people doing exceptionally well, relative to other metros, and not entirely due to MSP's people of color doing poorly?

Phrased differently, let's say hypothetically MSP's white people are doing really great, relative to St. Louis (or Denver or anywhere). And let's say MSP's people of color are doing about the same as those other places. Would that not statistically create the result of greater disparity than other cities?

I'm not even sure what I'm getting at there, but I've had that thought bonking around in my brain too long to hold it back any longer.

[David Greene]

Even as a youngish urban person who considers himself to be pretty far left politically, the whole white guilt angle barely plays for me. Do the folks who bang that drum and write these types of pieces ever stop to think how this message is received in the blueish-purplish (barely left-of-center) suburbs which keep Minnesota in DFL-control? I dunno.

Here is where I think most white people go off track. It is *not* about guilt, not in the least. The feelings of guilt we white people have are actually a sort of defense mechanism that allows us to become paralyzed and not do anything. It's actually another form of privilege.

The key to successfully navigating this as a white person is to just constantly tell yourself not to feel guilty. I know it sounds corny, but fake it 'til you make it. At least that's been my experience. I felt guilty as hell for years. Then after many conversations I started to catch myself when I felt guilty and told myself to think otherwise. One day I didn't feel guilty anymore.

In my experience, having deep relationships with both white and black people working on racialized issues helped tremendously. Others may not need such intensive therapy.

As for the suburbs, I'll grant that the people I come in contact with are generally of the more open-minded variety but suburban people I know are some of the most eagerly engaged in racial justice work.

I do agree that the message can be conveyed much better. Making the great white leap often requires that we explain how these disparities hurt white people too. That's something that is not really authentically done in most pieces about these disparities. To fix things everyone needs to understand their stake in it.

As to your point of white people doing better here than in other places, that may be true but there's something that's holding people of color back. If white people are doing better here, people of color should be too. If they aren't, that means there are some obstacles here that don't exist in other places. And pleny of obstacles shared all over the country.

[acs]

I wonder if this is straying towards the difference between what's known as "hot" or open racism versus "cold" or withheld racism. I started thinking about this when I came across this article describing how blacks (and presumably other minorities) are moving back to the south despite the history of hot racism towards those groups in these areas.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati ... /21818127/

It's often been said that Atlanta was the first city of the "new south" because supposedly people there were "too busy for racism", and that has in part allowed Atlanta to grow rapidly. Now, our own metro has to deal with the problem of cold racism that is so prevalent in the Midwest if we want to continue growing. It's a far more daunting challenge than what Atlanta faced IMO.

[up north]

So here's one predictable response to the Atlantic "Miracle of Minneapolis" article: http://www.questionthepremise.org/new-b ... at-miracle

While there is obviously merit and truth to saying "Minneapolis is a great city for white people, but much less so for people of color", due to some pretty glaring racial disparities, at some point the constant race angle is really going to start turning off some allies. Even as a youngish urban person who considers himself to be pretty far left politically, the whole white guilt angle barely plays for me. Do the folks who bang that drum and write these types of pieces ever stop to think how this message is received in the blueish-purplish (barely left-of-center) suburbs which keep Minnesota in DFL-control? I dunno.


If that paragraph made your blood boil, maybe take a breath before continuing, because I've had a dangerous lingering thought about the whole "extreme racial disparities!" thing, and the above article provoked me enough to finally commit it to keyboard:

Is it possible that our greater-than-normal racial disparities (presumably based on statistics) are perhaps partially due to MSP's white people doing exceptionally well, relative to other metros, and not entirely due to MSP's people of color doing poorly?

Phrased differently, let's say hypothetically MSP's white people are doing really great, relative to St. Louis (or Denver or anywhere). And let's say MSP's people of color are doing about the same as those other places. Would that not statistically create the result of greater disparity than other cities?

I'm not even sure what I'm getting at there, but I've had that thought bonking around in my brain too long to hold it back any longer.

I just want to say that I mostly agree with you, and I'll leave it at that. I don't want to get in trouble here.

[David Greene]

I just want to say that I mostly agree with you, and I'll leave it at that. I don't want to get in trouble here.

Trouble? This place is a lot of things, but crucifiers is not one of them. I for one welcome open and frank discussion on these topics.

[Snelbian]

As to your point of white people doing better here than in other places, that may be true but there's something that's holding people of color back. If white people are doing better here, people of color should be too. If they aren't, that means there are some obstacles here that don't exist in other places. And pleny of obstacles shared all over the country.

Yep. Even if the problem isn't that black people are doing poorly independent of context, it becomes an equally bad problem deeply ingrained, systemic racism preventing them from enjoying the same comparative success white Minnesotans do. I'm not sure either problem is lesser.

[RailBaronYarr]

Lets not kid ourselves. The reason we have affordable housing in a high income metro isn't because of fiscal disparities, its because of sprawl. Take a look at this new data on Citylab, we're heavily in the black (bad) in both sprawl index and change in sprawl over the past 10 years.

The article is pretty clear that the focus was on the operation of Fiscal Disparities and the Met Council pre-Pawlenty. There's a quote from Orfield about how we had a good regional housing plan before then. The currnt Met Council is drafting a new one, the first in many many years. So I don't think it's valid to conclude the sprawl gave us affordable housing.

But, in general the article used median affordability indexes, the type of high-level stuff that shows how good your average joe has it. Our regional affordability for the median household has definitely come from allowing mostly unfettered growth on the fringes (despite what most conservatives say about the Met Council, the results are what they are). Couple that with the weighted average citizen in MSP having access tot he 5th most jobs by car (in a 30 minute drive) in the country, and you have low housing costs + high job mobility (again, for your median person).

I think the topic of 'affordable housing' that Orfield was talking about plays a small part in that big picture, and certainly the change in how it's distributed over the last 15-20 years warrants huge debate. But for a family looking to move to MN, seeing wages/housing costs, it barely registers. Which is why the article could gloss over racial issues, income disparities, etc. From the outside, things really do look rosy.

[mplsjaromir]

So here's one predictable response to the Atlantic "Miracle of Minneapolis" article: http://www.questionthepremise.org/new-b ... at-miracle

Two things to remember: The percentage of Minnesota's black population has more than doubled in the last 25 years 2.2% in 1990 and 5.2% in 2010. Logic would indicate that people do not move places that have less opportunity. The large increase in the black population is from Somali immigrants. Comparing the economic and scholastic indicators of a population largely made up of war refugees, to native born Americans is not useful.

Secondly the author of that blog and his cohorts are known charter school grifters. They use the low test scores as an excuse to bust teacher unions and bust the chops of MPS. They really have no shame.