C-U Segregation

The following are excerpts from a recent study on segregation in downstate Illinois metropolitan areas, including the Champaign-Urbana Metropolitan area that includes a few other adjacent towns. NPR Illinois had an interview with a couple of the people behind the study here:

Would you be surprised to learn that some of the most segregated communities in the country are right here in Illinois?   Places where the problem persists, and has so for years, with little improvement.

A six month Governing Magazine investigation culiminated in a series published this week.  Reporters Dan Vock and Brian Charles culled data and tracked down numerous sources.   They crunched the the numbers and lay out some of the reasons segregation remains so prominent in towns like Springfield, Rockford, Peoria, Champaign-Urbana, Bloomington-Normal and Decatur.

Full article with links to the audio interview here. The Governing series with links to all the articles and data are here. Excerpts from the series below:


The first article of their series: Houses Divided: How States and Cities Reinforce Segregation in America

Springfield may have launched the political careers of Lincoln and Barack Obama, but it is among the worst third of American cities in terms of black-white segregation, according to our analysis of federal data. Both the Springfield and Champaign-Urbana metro areas are more segregated than that of Charlottesville, Va., or the Daphne-Fairhope-Foley area near Mobile, Ala., even though they all have similar populations and percentages of black residents...

The truth is that segregation isn’t limited to the South, or to large cities. America’s racial divide, in fact, runs right through the Heartland...

A more troubling pattern emerges when you widen the scope to look at entire metropolitan areas, focusing not just on individual cities or suburbs but looking at cities and their suburbs together. Instead of moving to different areas of the same city, whites are moving farther away to suburbs and exurbs. That’s why, measured at the metro level, progress toward more racially integrated neighborhoods over the past few decades looks decidedly less impressive. In fact, in the metro areas for Peoria, Danville and Champaign-Urbana, the degree of segregation remains roughly as high as it was in 1980...

Segregation is so stark in these communities that it’s obvious to the naked eye as you cross the roads, rivers or railroad tracks that symbolically separate white areas of town from black areas. There’s the Rock River in Rockford, University Avenue in Champaign, Main Street in Galesburg,  and the Kankakee River and a set of railroad tracks in Kankakee.

On white flight:

Increasingly, the disparities caused by racial segregation aren’t within local jurisdictions but between them. Just look at downstate Illinois schools. The core urban school districts in Bloomington, Champaign, Urbana, Springfield and Decatur -- all still predominantly white cities -- had majorities of white students in the 2002-2003 school year. Now, none of them do. Over the same period, the share of white students in Rockford Public Schools also dropped, from 48 percent to 30.

Urban districts are losing white students far faster than their metropolitan areas at large. Decatur Public Schools, for example, lost 38 percent of its white students in the last 15 years, but the rest of the metro area only lost 7 percent of its white students. By comparison, the district lost just 11 percent of its black students in the same time frame.

They highlight what they call the "biggest obstacle" to needed reforms:

People, particularly public officials, don’t like to discuss race, segregation and disparities in candid terms. They may acknowledge, in a broad sense, that their communities are divided and conditions are unequal. But politicians, especially those who represent large constituencies of white residents, prefer to talk about lifting up all neighborhoods in their jurisdictions rather than specifically correcting injustices of the past, many of them inflicted by local governments themselves.

The second article in the series: Still Separate After All These Years: How Schools Fuel White Flight

While the Peoria area stands out, school segregation across metro areas is prevalent throughout Illinois. Eight of the state’s 10 metros ranked among the highest third nationally for black-white school segregation, when considering all metro areas in the country with at least 2,000 black students. And as the Dunlap example shows, segregation in schools doesn’t just occur because of the neighborhoods they are in. The schools themselves can also be a big reason why the neighborhoods in a metro area are so segregated.

Those are among the findings of a six-month Governing investigation into segregation in Illinois. The examination focused on the metro areas of Bloomington-Normal, Champaign-Urbana, Decatur, Peoria, Rockford and Springfield -- all places outside the orbit of Chicago or St. Louis with similar-size populations in their urban cores. That investigation found that white flight and growing black populations are drastically changing the student makeup of school districts in midsize cities as well as larger ones. Just 15 years ago, the school districts in Bloomington, Champaign, Decatur, Springfield and Urbana had majority-white student bodies. Now none of them do, despite being majority-white cities...

Sociologists use a common measure called a “dissimilarity index” to assess the extent of school integration. It determines the percentage of white students who would have to attend predominantly black schools for the black-white ratio to match the black-white ratio for the area as a whole. It’s by this measure that Peoria -- when all schools across the metropolitan area are considered -- is the most segregated in the country.

On Illinois numerous school districts:

Looking at the entire metropolitan area is a way to reveal how racial segregation is occurring. Focusing on individual school districts can be helpful in some cases, but in a state with as many districts as Illinois, it can mask the severity of the problem. For example, Chicago Public Schools has twice the rate of segregation within its own boundaries as Peoria’s. Indeed, the school districts in the Peoria area generally don’t have high levels of segregation within their own borders. But that’s because the school district borders often also follow racial demarcation lines. What matters most is the disparity among neighboring districts.

Take, for example, two grade schools three blocks away from each other in the Peoria area. On the west side of Knoxville Avenue is Hines Primary School, where just over half of the students are black. Just a few blocks east is Peoria Heights Grade School, which is part of another school district and is two-thirds white.

The far-flung villages in the countryside, such as Dunlap, are booming, primarily by attracting white residents. Their schools reflect this. The Central School District in the town of Washington, on the other side of the Illinois River from Peoria, is actually growing faster than the one in Dunlap; it has more than doubled its student population in the last 15 years. The boom has brought some diversity to the school district, but not much. It has gone from 99 percent to 90 percent white.

Growth like this is especially notable at a time when many school districts are losing students. The core city districts are losing students fastest of all. The Champaign and Urbana school districts, for example, both lost a third of their white students in the last 15 years, but the rest of the metropolitan area in which they are located lost only 11 percent.

Champaign example:

The line dividing blacks from whites in Champaign, while it can be a bit porous, has been and continues to be University Avenue. Black families and black majority schools lie to the north of University, and white families and white majority schools to the south. In the 1940s, black children on the North End were sent to either the cramped Willard School or Lawhead School. White kids in the area were assigned to the all-white Columbia School. The district built a bigger facility, called Booker T. Washington Elementary School, to replace Lawhead in 1952; it became a magnet school during the 1960s in an effort to try to entice white students to the North End. By and large, though, the district remained divided by geography and race.

The article goes on to explain the attempts at desegregation, the legal set backs, and a current reality where schools are becoming more segregated again.


The third article in the series explains some of the historical roots of segregation and how they're maintained or even worsened by modern policies that enshrine the outcomes of the past using colorblind terminology: Broken Homes: How Housing Policies Keep White Neighborhoods So White (and Black Neighborhoods So Black)

It has deep roots in racial animus, going back to the days of redlining and racially restrictive covenants. The aftereffects of those policies linger on in the 21st century.

Today, the stated motivation for the existing arrangement is not race, but money. It’s why homeowners protest public housing projects or apartment buildings that could bring down their property values. It’s why subdivision developers sell homes with strings attached that keep neighborhoods homogeneous and unaffordable to lower-income residents. And it’s why Hightower’s rent, and the federal subsidies it generates, improve the bottom line for a multinational company headed by the owner of the Miami Dolphins.

Regardless of the motivation, the effect is largely the same: Cities and, indeed, entire metropolitan areas, remain largely segregated along racial lines...

Local governments help create those divides in several ways, but one of the most important is by regulating land use, especially residential development. The regulations include zoning restrictions, housing subsidies, tax incentives, public housing policy and restrictive covenants. None of them are necessarily discriminatory by themselves, but the way they are routinely used combines to create that effect.

“At the bottom of all that is that are whites trying to preserve opportunities for themselves,” says Domenico “Mimmo” Parisi, a sociology professor at Mississippi State University and the executive director of the National Strategic Planning and Analysis Research Center.

The fourth article in the series looks at the differences in policing and criminal justice outcomes that further reinforced disparities in housing, employment, and education: Black, White and Blue: How Police and Anti-Crime Measures Reinforce Segregation

RHA had hired the private security firm, Metro Enforcement, to police its properties. Together, the agency and Metro had taken a hard line on enforcement. Small infractions, such as not having ID, could lead to expulsion from RHA property. In 2012, when Clewer became CEO, hundreds of people a year were being kicked out for trespassing. More often than not, that merely meant the offenders had failed to carry or show identification to a security officer. Being banned from one unit could disqualify them for Section 8 housing assistance vouchers, which the housing authority also administered.

A low-level offense could quickly escalate, as it had in the son’s case. Because the security guards were hired by the RHA to monitor its own property, they didn’t have to operate under the same strict rules police officers do. So, for example, they could search a 15-year-old without probable cause and, when they discovered a joint, turn him over to the Rockford Police Department. When Clewer began looking at data on arrests at RHA properties, he found that 80 percent of them were linked to the RHA’s bans. “We weren’t providing safety,” Clewer says now. “We were providing military control.”

The intense scrutiny of the residents at the Rockford Housing Authority is common in areas where poor black people live. Heavy-handed enforcement tactics are often employed in the name of protecting residents from crime. But often they catch only low-level offenders, with dire consequences for the offender’s ability to get a job or decent housing. That, in turn, reinforces deep-seated patterns of segregation in the communities where zero tolerance policies are used...

Our review found many practices that placed greater burdens on black residents than white residents because of where they lived. These practices were used not just by police, but by non- law enforcement agencies like the Rockford Housing Authority. They included increased surveillance, frequent ID checks and rigorously enforced nuisance ordinances. 

All of the articles, data, methodology, etc are available at the series' main webpage here. More Cheat Sheet posts on racial disparities in Champaign-Urbana include Pedestrian and Traffic Stop Data, School Punishment Data, "Pushout" in Unit 4 schools, and the Reentry Housing Issue in Champaign.