Race
What do traffic safety and gun violence have in common? A lot, as it turns out. In both cases, hard-hit neighborhoods tend to have suffered from historical disinvestment along racial lines.
Brookings
Simply put, this scholar says, it comes down to race. With far fewer non-white urban residents, Canadian cities didn't fall prey to the redlining, white flight, and incarceration problems that so heavily impacted cities like Detroit.
The Detroit Free Press
Elijah Anderson writes that a spate of highly publicized recent incidents has highlighted the frequent racial targeting that blacks face as they live, work, study and otherwise navigate “white spaces.”
Penn IUR Urban Link
The Race, Equity and Leadership (REAL) Initiative will help six cities identify and improve institutional racism.
Smart Cities Dive
If you want to understand rural America, critics say, look beyond Hillbilly Elegy.
Chitucky
In an update to his 1986 movie "She's Gotta Have It," Spike Lee confronts the ways Brooklyn has changed since then, gentrification and racial tension included.
CityLab
A Harvard study suggests that since 2000, the number of Americans living in racially integrated neighborhoods has risen. But this may be a temporary effect of gentrification, and integration remains an exception to the rule.
Housing Perspectives
Author Scott Allard debunks lingering myths about how people experience poverty in cities. Poverty's suburbanization, he argues, has more to do with the loss of jobs than migration from "inner cities."
CityLab
Blog post
Reports of New York's gentrification are sometimes exaggerated.
Some use the phrase to refer to Midwest towns where black people "aren't welcome after dark." A legacy of racial persecution has left majority-white places where black people feel their outlier status.
Christian Science Monitor
Two studies bear out the idea that Black people face continued discrimination in transportation. They drive cautiously to avoid discriminatory traffic enforcement, and they're less likely to get picked up by rideshare.
City Observatory
Online mapping platforms are continuing to find new and improved ways to represent the inequities of American society.
CityLab
There is not one single kind of family, so there should not be one kind of "Single Family Home."
Pacific Standard
Places Journal has launched a series titled "The Inequality Chronicles." Expect high-quality longform articles.
Places Journal
Rents are on the rise in Pittsburgh, prompting some longtime residents to relocate farther away. Race, as well as class, figures heavily in this narrative.
Carnegie Museum of Art Blog
At the halfway point in the ten-year Census window, the Census Bureau undertakes research into how to improve its data collection for questions of race and ethnicity.
U.S. Census Bureau
As the nation becomes more racially diverse, so too do the suburbs.
Brookings: The Avenue
The themes of race, poverty, and change in America are as relevant as ever, as our nation grapples with the recent tragedies in Ferguson, Missouri and Staten Island, New York.
Penn Institute for Urban Research
"We asked the question: How much higher would total earnings and economic output have been in 2012 if racial differences in income were eliminated"...
Shelterforce/Rooflines
Anna Griffin, reporting for the Oregonian, produced a pair of recent articles examining the process of gentrification in Portland—a city that recent saw gentrification controversy spark over the location of a Trader Joe’s.
The Oregonian
