Residential Segregation Quotes

Reggie Campbell and Kathleen Goldsmith are participants in an American success story, the unprecedented boom of home-buying by African-Americans in the 1990s. Only he is black and she is white. When he moved into the neighborhood, she moved out.

Many times when we are talking about displacement, we talk about it within the frame of gentrification, which focuses on transitioning neighborhoods. But man, every city I've looked at, Milwaukee included, most evictions are right there, smack dab in ungentrifying, poor, segregated communities.

One of the most interesting social trends of the past 20 years is the rise of residential segregation. So rich are living with rich and poor are living with poor.

Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, Palo Alto, or Chevy Chase. These places used to have impoverished neighborhoods nearby, but the poor people got chased out by young singles living in group homes, hipsters, and urban homesteading gay couples.

My neighborhood is fairly white, yet the local middle school is all black. It is bad. It is very bad.

Mexicans refuse to live in vertical housing. Each Mexican wants to live in his own individual home.

Staten Island is segregated, but it's also - I don't know. It's, like, it's not - it's not unprogressive.

The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed U.S. society enormously.

There were only two kinds of people in our town. ―The stupid and the stuck- ―The ones who are bound to stay or too dumb to go. Everyone else finds a way out.

You know, the biggest indicator of where you live is your income. If you live in this suburb you make this much money, and if you live in that suburb, you make that much money, and if you don't have any money you live where you're allowed to live.

We still have many neighborhoods that are racially identified. We still have many schools that even though the days of state-enforced segregation are gone, segregation because of geographical boundaries remains.

I literally integrated the small town of Libertyville, Illinois. I was the first person of color to reside within its borders.

When I lived in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., I was rather proud that my landlord was almost the only African-American in my unofficially segregated neighbourhood (the other one was the adopted child of our admirable next-door neighbours).

The thing that's very puzzling to somebody who's been in Pakistan repeatedly since 1983 is lots of people live in compounds with high walls in Pakistan. I mean, that's so completely routine. In fact, you know, it would be un-routine to have the reverse.

The reason our country looks the way it does is through social engineering that distinctly benefits suburban communities, exurban communities, and often white residents. And we are socially engineered in such a way as to, often unconsciously and unintentionally, but sometimes intentionally, perpetuate this divisive inequality.

It wasn't the ghetto here or anything like that. But it got rough. I'll put it this way. I always knew where I lived. I always knew I was in Seaside. That wasn't plush. I wasn't in Monterey. I wasn't in Carmel. I was in Seaside. I knew what that meant.

When well-qualified, upper middle-class blacks or Latinos or Asians move to predominantly white neighborhoods, there's what's called the tipping point. That tipping point is generally 15 percent; at 15 percent you begin to see white flight.

The freeways create economic and racial borders in Los Angeles. South of Interstate 10 is one group of people, west of the 10 another, and south of the 405 North yet another.

I lived in Park Slope, which is probably one of the most homogenized areas of Brooklyn. No offense to Park Slope.

In a sense, mass incarceration has emerged as a far more extreme form of physical and residential segregation than Jim Crow segregation. Rather than merely shunting people of color to the other side of town, people are locked in literal cages - en masse.

The suburbanization and the ghettos that were created as a result of the limits of where [African-Americans] could live in the North [still exist today.] And ... the South was forced to change, in part because they were losing such a large part of their workforce through the Great Migration.

Suburban subdivisions encouraged buyers to live with their “own kind,” constantly sorting people by religion, ethnicity, race, and class.

While housing discrimination and segregation in 2005 still affect millions of people, that's not the way it has to be. Some things can change and should.

In Los Angeles, wealth and poverty are separated by the freeways. In New York, they're next to each other.

Schools are no longer legally segregated, but because of residential patterns, housing discrimination, economic disparities and long-held custom, they most emphatically are in reality.