Understanding Urban Inequality: Housing, Segregation, and Justice
Eviction: A Driver of Poverty and Instability
Evictions have become more frequent and normalized in low-income urban neighborhoods. They are not just a consequence of poverty but also a driver of it. Matthew Desmond shows how eviction creates housing instability, disrupts employment and schooling, and contributes to health problems. It disproportionately affects women of color and reveals how the housing market profits from their vulnerability.
Inner-City Housing Conditions and Causes
Inner-city housing is often characterized by deterioration, overcrowding, and neglect. These conditions stem from decades of disinvestment, redlining, and segregation. Public housing has often concentrated poverty, while private landlords in poor areas may exploit tenants with high rents for low-quality units.
Housing Affordability Crisis: Income vs. Rent
The gap between income and housing costs has widened, making it increasingly difficult for low-income families to find safe and affordable housing. Wages have remained stagnant while rents have increased, particularly in urban areas. Affordability issues force people to choose between rent and other basic needs, contributing to instability.
Poor Housing Quality in Marginalized Neighborhoods
Poor housing quality is more common in marginalized neighborhoods. Tenants often live with mold, leaks, infestations, or heating issues. These conditions affect mental and physical health, particularly for children and the elderly, and often go unaddressed due to lack of regulation and fear of retaliation from landlords.
Housing Choice Vouchers: Benefits and Limitations
Housing Choice Vouchers (Section 8) are meant to help low-income families afford housing in the private market. While they can offer access to better neighborhoods, they are limited in number and not always accepted by landlords. Discrimination and long waitlists limit their effectiveness.
Profiting from Urban Poverty: Exploitative Practices
Landlords, payday lenders, bail bondsmen, and private prison companies profit from the instability of poor communities. Matthew Desmond highlights how some property owners exploit tenants by charging high rents for substandard housing, knowing they have limited options.
Racial Segregation in Milwaukee: Causes and Effects
Milwaukee is among the most racially segregated cities in the U.S. Segregation is maintained through discriminatory practices in housing, education, and employment. It results in concentrated poverty, poor schooling, and limited access to jobs and services for Black residents.
Urban Crime, Violence, and Systemic Inequality
Crime and violence in urban areas are often tied to systemic inequality, poverty, and lack of opportunity. Over-policing and mass incarceration disproportionately affect Black and Latino communities, reinforcing cycles of disadvantage. Neighborhoods with few resources tend to experience higher crime rates, which further stigmatizes them.
Understanding Privilege in Urban Policy
These readings encourage critical reflection on how race, class, and gender privilege shape everyday experiences and access to power. Understanding privilege is essential to engaging in anti-racist and equity-focused urban policy.
Key Concepts: Understanding Urban Violence and Crime
Urban violence is not random; it is shaped by neighborhood conditions, inequality, and historical disinvestment. Concepts like “social disorganization” and “neighborhood effects” explain how the lack of social infrastructure leads to crime. The criminal justice system often reinforces these inequalities.
Racism and the Criminal Justice System
These readings explore how laws and policing practices have disproportionately targeted communities of color, from stop-and-frisk to mandatory sentencing. The system contributes to mass incarceration, family separation, and economic instability.
The Rise of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement
#BlackLivesMatter emerged as a response to systemic police violence and broader racial injustices in the U.S. It highlights how Black lives are devalued by systems of policing, housing, education, and employment, especially in urban settings.
Gender and Urban Spaces: Challenges and Roles
Urban spaces are gendered, often built for and by men. Women face unique challenges in accessing public space, safety, and employment. Women’s roles in caregiving and low-wage labor are central to urban life but are often undervalued.
Key Concepts: Gendered Urban Spaces
Public and private urban spaces reflect and reinforce gender norms. For example, suburban planning often isolated women in domestic spaces, while public transit systems may not consider women’s safety. LGBTQ+ individuals also face exclusion or harassment in certain urban areas.
The Cycle of Segregation: Perpetuating Inequality
Segregation is reproduced through social networks, racial preferences, discrimination, and economic inequality. The “cycle” refers to how segregated neighborhoods limit access to quality education, jobs, and housing, perpetuating inequality across generations.
Creating the ‘Ghetto’: Policies of Segregation
Policies like redlining, urban renewal, and public housing placement intentionally segregated Black communities. These policies concentrated poverty and limited access to resources, forming the structural conditions we now associate with the “ghetto.”
Trends in Urban Segregation: 1980 to Present
While legal segregation has declined, de facto segregation remains through income inequality, school zoning, and housing markets. Suburban diversity has increased, but many cities still have highly segregated neighborhoods along racial and economic lines.
Theories of Residential Segregation
These include:
- Spatial assimilation: people move as they gain resources.
- Place stratification: dominant groups limit others’ mobility.
- Preferences model: people self-segregate based on comfort or safety.
Each explains different forces behind urban segregation.
Examples of Housing Discrimination
Discrimination includes:
- Redlining
- Refusal to rent to people with vouchers
- Racial steering
- Denial of mortgages
Even with fair housing laws, such practices persist and often go unpunished.
Urban Poverty and Political Decisions
Urban poverty is tied to political decisions about funding, zoning, policing, and public services. Political power is often held by wealthier, whiter communities, leading to policies that neglect or harm poor, minority neighborhoods.
Urban Renewal Programs: Impact and Legacy
Urban renewal programs demolished low-income neighborhoods in the name of progress, displacing thousands without adequate replacement housing. These programs often reinforced racial segregation and widened economic inequality.
The Rise and Decline of Hartford: A Case Study
Hartford’s decline reflects broader patterns of deindustrialization, white flight, and racial segregation. Once a thriving city, it now struggles with poverty and inequality as wealth shifted to its suburbs.
Urban Politics: Power, Resources, and Representation
Urban politics involves conflict over space, resources, and representation. Political decisions often benefit developers and elites while excluding low-income residents from decision-making.
Models of Social Control in Urban Spaces
These include:
- Policing
- Surveillance
- Curfews
- Architectural designs meant to control public behavior.
Poor and minority communities are often subjected to more intense forms of spatial and social control.
Citizen Participation in Urban Development
Genuine citizen participation is often limited by unequal power and access to decision-makers. When marginalized communities are included, it can lead to more equitable urban development, but exclusion remains common.
Key Materials: Understanding Urban Inequality
Course materials like Detropia, Evicted, and College Behind Bars illustrate how race, class, and policy shape urban life. These stories show lived experiences of inequality, resilience, and the impact of systemic forces on individuals and neighborhoods.
Intersectionality: Race, Class, and Gender in Urban Life
These identities intersect to shape how people experience urban life. Black women, for example, often face multiple layers of oppression. Intersectionality is key to understanding urban inequality and developing inclusive policies.
Rodney King Case: Race, Rage, and Police Brutality
The Rodney King case symbolizes the connection between police brutality and historical racial tensions in urban areas. It highlights how cities like L.A. and Milwaukee erupt in protest when inequality and violence intersect.
Gender and Safety: Women’s Experiences in NYC
This video shows how women, especially women of color, experience harassment in public spaces, illustrating how gender and race affect access to and comfort in urban environments.
Homelessness in L.A.: Systemic Failures and Lived Realities
This film reveals how systemic failures—lack of affordable housing, inadequate mental health services, and criminalization—shape the lives of unhoused people in urban areas.
College Behind Bars: Education and Criminal Justice
This documentary shows how access to higher education can transform lives, even within prisons. It challenges stereotypes about incarcerated people and highlights the racial and class biases of the criminal justice system.
Detropia: Detroit’s Decline, Resilience, and Revitalization
Focuses on Detroit’s economic collapse and the resilience of its residents. It explores themes of deindustrialization, racial division, and the possibilities of urban revitalization in the face of structural decline.