cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3482200
USA apartheid
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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chapotraphouse
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In 1954, you had a White water fountain and a Colored water fountain.
In 2024, we have abolished water fountains and try to sell you the same water in a plastic bottle that costs $5. Also, whites live in these enormous suburban enclaves where you'll never seen a person of color because real estate agents simply won't sell to them.
It's also because our state and local officials either A) completely misunderstand how to distribute Low-Income Housing Credits or B) Have a full understanding of the consequences of concentrating poverty within a central location via Low-Income Housing Credits, and do it anyway.
If you do not spread the LIHCs around your state / city within “High Opportunity” areas, you just compound the poverty. When you stack poor people on top of poor people under the guise of “Well this area is full of poor people so let's designate more LIHC there because they need them.” you just create a multiplicative effect on the areas' poverty. No one can afford to patronize the businesses in the area, and no one living in the area can afford to open a business. Which means no local employment for the poor, and no local commerce for the poor. They have to travel for work, travel for groceries, travel for everything. This means they're either buying a car and maintaining it, or attempting to rely on dilapidated public transportation.
What you get are dens of poverty that actually make it even harder to rise out of poverty, and total segregation of a population that ultimately skews black and brown. The real estate agents hardly need to expend any energy to be racist when the structures they work inside of area doing most of the heavy lifting for them.
All that is true. But there's also the issue of Red Lining and race-based lending practices and real estate shitfuckery that make certain neighborhoods - which would otherwise be affordable to everyone in the given income bracket - inaccessible to PoCs. This, combined with staunch refusal to adopt multi-lingual education (particularly the dreaded Spanish), and segregation of education (whites-only Universities), and segregation of career paths (engineering firms and legal firms and hospitals/clinics that won't take on junior hires outside their ethnic group), force people to cluster together by circumstance.
This doesn't even need to be segregation by income, either. Houston's Bellaire district is overwhelmingly Vietnamese (and South East Asian generally speaking) in large part because its the only part of town that caters to Vietnamese non-Native speakers. There's no shortage of wealth and even some amount of political power consolidated in Bellaire, but its still functionally a ghetto.
It's definitely B. The wealthy don't want the poors anywhere near them, and they'll go to great efforts to ensure they never have to notice or interact with them.