Summary: In this episode of the newest podcast in the Race and Wealth network, Spotlight, Dedrick discusses integration and dismantling structural racism as we look at urban planning and housing with Dr. Edward Goetz, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning and the Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Professor Goetz specializes in housing and local community development planning and policy with a research focus on race and poverty and is the author of The One-Way Street of Integration: Fair Housing and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in American Cities. --------------------------- Episode Highlights: Goetz: The book is not a critique of integration per se, it is a critique rather, of how we tend to pursue integration. The critique is based on my argument that we generally place the burden of integration on people of color and we generally accept the limitations to integration that are imposed by white communities. What I try to do is push back a little bit on the argument or assumptions in a lot of fair housing advocacy that people of color need to live near white people in order to live a good life. Goetz: As we have been pursuing integration, we do so by trying to integrate people of color into predominantly white neighborhoods. Why do we do that? Why is it that this is our approach to integration? We do it because we have this sense of what a lot of people call the ‘tipping point’. Which is the level of racial diversity in the neighborhood that essentially triggers white flight. By incorporating that into our policy we incorporate the racism behind it. Goetz: It essentially presents racial justice as a kind of situation where whites agree to share the benefits of white neighborhoods, of white society. It forever puts people of color in this position of supplicant; of benefiting from the generosity of whites who are willing to share their advantages. And that too incorporates an inherent hierarchy that I think we need to get away from. Goetz: To the extent that we start focusing on this spatial distribution of people and mix of people we can lose focus on what the real objective is. The real objective is equal status and equal economic power in society. My fundamental argument in this is that it can result in taking one's eye off the true objective. I think that simply the spatial arrangement of people doesn’t quite get to the dynamics that have caused the kind of disparate outcomes that we see from one neighborhood to the next. Goetz: The definition that I use (of gentrification) is both a physical upgrading of a community and an economic upgrading in terms of the entry of new households, of higher socio-economic status so that likely means higher levels of education, higher incomes. It is usually associated with a certain amount of displacement of the incumbent residents who are now much less able to compete in the housing market because of rising rents and rising home prices and are forced to move to other parts of the cities. Goetz: I see this happening in a few cities where people who live in lower resourced communities and communities of color essentially standing up and arguing that the solution to their problem isn’t to move away from their communities. That they very well understand the disadvantages that they face in their communities. But the solution is not to move away and to disperse to white neighborhoods. What they want is the ability to have greater self-determination over the outcomes that occur in their community. They want control over economic assets, and I think you see more emphasis now on ownership of land, community land trust, recycling of wealth within communities and reserving for community members the notions of how to improve those communities from within.
