Episode 86: Where the Hood At? with Michael Lens

Shane Phillips 0:05
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice Podcast, and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. This week we are shaking things up a bit with Mike Lens joining as a guest to talk about his new book, Where the Hood At, which surveys 50 years of change in America's Black neighborhoods.

The podcast, This Day in Esoteric Political History, has a policy that whenever a host writes a book, they get to do a week's worth of episodes talking about it. And I think we're going to adopt a similar rule here. But since we only have one episode every two weeks, this is it. Longtime listeners will have heard Mike talk about the book at different points over the past few years, and we're very excited to finally see it on the shelves. It is a wide-ranging book covering five decades, starting in 1970, just a few years after the Fair Housing Act was passed, and ending in the late 2010s. As we discuss in the episode, the data tells a decidedly mixed story. One of progress in America's Black neighborhoods and shrinking disparities compared to non-Black neighborhoods, but progress that is too slow and disparities that are still much too large. It tells a story of prosperous and growing Black neighborhoods in the South, but stagnating or disappearing Black neighborhoods in the West, Midwest, and Northeast. Mike shares his thoughts on these tensions and how we should interpret them, and we talk about what the two metro areas with the most successful Black neighborhoods can teach us about improving opportunity and quality of life in the rest. We failed to mention this at any point during the interview because we are terrible marketers, but you can buy a copy of the book for yourself from the Russell Sage Foundation, which we've linked to in the show notes, or take your pick of online book sellers, or of course you can find it at the library if that's more your speed. We also had a special guest host this time, who I will introduce further once we get into the interview, but I just wanted to thank Mark Vestal up here at the top as well for joining in the conversation.

The Housing Voice podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies with production support from Claudia Bustamante, Irene Marie Cruise, and Tiffany Liu.

As always, thanks in advance for sharing the show with your friends and sending your questions and feedback to shanephilipsatucla.edu. With that, let's get to our conversation with Mike Lens.

Michael C. Lens, MC Lens, is Professor of Urban Planning at the illustrious University of California, Los Angeles, Associate Faculty Director of the inimitable Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, and author of the impressive and important new book, Where the Hood At? 50 Years of Change in Black Neighborhoods. He's also part-time cohost of this silly little podcast we do, but today he is our guest and he's going to tell us about that new book. Mike, thanks for joining us and welcome to the Housing Voice podcast. I think this might be your second time as a guest.

Michael Lens 3:12
It is, and this is, of course, a really cool opportunity to share some more of my work with the audience.

Shane Phillips 3:18
Yeah, well, I have a podcast if we're not going to put our own work on here sometimes. Exactly. And we have a special cohost today, Mark Vestal is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Critical Black Urbanism, also at UCLA. And more specifically, he is an urban historian studying the social history of residential property in Black Los Angeles during the 20th century. Sounds like a pretty fitting background for this conversation. So it is great to finally have you on the podcast, Mark.

Mark Vestal 3:44
Awesome. Yeah. Hello. Glad to be here. Excited to have this conversation.

Shane Phillips 3:48
Anything else you want to share about your background and maybe how it applies to what we're talking about today or not, or is just interesting in its own right?

Mark Vestal 3:55
Yeah, I'd study the history of race and residential property in Los Angeles. I'm working on a book right now on the history of eviction from the late 19th century to the Watts Rebellion. And the fate of Black neighborhoods have been on my mind for the last few years. So I'm definitely appreciative of Mike's book and looking forward to having a conversation about the findings, which I find really, really interesting.

Michael Lens 4:19
It's important to note, I think that Mark was one of the very first people I ever talked to about this project. So it's pretty obvious to have him around on this discussion today.

Shane Phillips 4:32
All right. Mike, before we talk about the contents of the book, how does it feel to become a published author and photographer at the same time?

Michael Lens 4:40
Yeah, I will say that success at photography is certainly a surprise. And so Shane is alluding to the fact that all of the book covers photos I took, the subjects being rappers, homes, and homes of important Black people around the country. The author part is still, of course, very surreal. This is a challenging time for the city of Los Angeles and I think some people in this country for sure right now. And so it's a little bit odd to feel such individual pride at the moment, but I'm just deciding to be happy about my situation right now and try to help on the other less happy things as I can.

Shane Phillips 5:23
I think that's the right attitude. I didn't think to ask this before, but are the photos of the homes on the cover of your book specifically meaningful or are they just kind of representative?

Michael Lens 5:32
Well, here, I've got a copy in front of me, which took me a while to actually remember to bring one to work. So of course you've got a mural of DMX followed in clockwise order by Muhammad Ali's home in the south side of Chicago. And then on the right side, you've got a couple of pictures of gentrification in DC. In between those gentrification pictures is the last apartment building that my father lived in, also on the south side of Chicago. And then continuing from the gentrification pictures in clockwise order, you have Martin Luther King's childhood home, Ebenezer Baptist Church down the street from that home. And then Dr. Dre's childhood home in Compton, which I didn't get a front view of because there was a family hanging out there. They looked at me like, do not take my picture. I kind of suspect you were not the first. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Maybe they know why people occasionally are on their sidewalk. Maybe not, but they didn't look like they wanted me to stick around very long. And I try to respect that.

Shane Phillips 6:41
I didn't even realize any of these were like special buildings. I just thought they were kind of nice together. Obviously the murals have significance, but is that actually described somewhere here in the book?

Michael Lens 6:53
Uh, I don't think so. I think it just says all photos by me, you know?

Shane Phillips 7:00
Okay. So, well, my other jokey question is just how you feel about writing a question mark into the middle of a sentence every time you write about your book. I've already written about the book three or four times in different places and, you know, where the hood at with my lens, you got the lowercase. It's uncomfortable. It is a little tricky. I don't know if you thought about that when you were naming the book.

Michael Lens 7:19
No, I certainly didn't. It is a little tricky and I guess I haven't been writing it like that very often. I just, you know, I haven't had to, I think the bigger challenge with the title is that if you listen to the lyrics of the song, where the hood at by DMX, you have to be convinced that I do not condone the transphobia and homophobia that is really delivered constantly through that song. And I do have a footnote in the book about that very, very thing.

Shane Phillips 7:54
Well, that aside, it is a very clever and fitting title. So thank you. Well, let's just start with a quick summary of what this book is, what it's about, your motivations for writing it. You know early on that no one has ever done a comprehensive quantitative study or overview of changes in Black neighborhoods over time, which sounds like it could not possibly be true, but I trust that you did your research on this. So once you realized that it really hadn't been done, it must have been a moment of like, oh, this is a real book now, isn't it?

Michael Lens 8:26
Yeah. It was just kind of a classic situation where I went looking for comprehensive data on Black neighborhoods in particular and never really found it in one place without having to do kind of my own census data crunching or whatever. And you know, I think when you think about what's already out there in the large volume of studies on segregation, you have a lot of studies in which Black neighborhoods are like what I say implicit characters in the story or we're talking about segregation as a cause of a Black neighborhood or we're talking about these disparities between Black and white as like the subject. So what I discovered is that I could make Black neighborhoods the explicit character and the subject in ways that has really only been done in qualitative research. There's lots of ethnographies and I talk about those of Black neighborhoods or issues in Black neighborhoods. This is kind of deepest in the sociology literature, but also urban history, anthropology even. So there are plenty of studies out there, but usually that's looking at one issue, maybe one neighborhood, maybe one point in time. And so my goal was to quantitatively summarize the characteristics of Black neighborhoods in this country over this roughly 50-year time period and try to capture what's typical or average and what the extremes look like in number of neighborhoods that goes from 3,000 to 7,000 depending on the year. So that's kind of my motivation and how I felt like I was doing something a little bit different than what we have in the social science literature.

Shane Phillips 10:19
Yeah. Classic case of I wanted to read something, couldn't find it, so I had to write it myself. Right. Yep. Basically. That's pretty much how we started this podcast actually. Yeah. I wanted to find a podcast I could listen to to learn about housing policy and research and it didn't really exist in the form I wanted it, so we had to make it ourselves. Yes. Our audience knows that we would have normally asked you for a tour by now as our guest, but for this episode I want to instead have you walk us through the life of Earl Simmons, better known to our listeners as DMX, who you already mentioned. This is where your book begins, it is the image in the top left on the cover of your book. Right. Maybe this is a little unexpected, but Where the Hood At explores how Black neighborhoods have changed since 1970 and what that change means for the mostly Black people living in those neighborhoods, and so what does Earl Simmons and his experience have to do with all that?

Michael Lens 11:14
Yeah. I really honestly, I think I came up with the title of the book before I really zeroed in on DMX and how emblematic he is of the story that I'm telling in this book. So by dumb luck, for me anyway, DMX or Earl Simmons was born in 1970, so the very, really the beginning of this book or where this book begins chronologically. He was born in Mount Vernon, New York, and then moved shortly thereafter to a public housing project in Yonkers, and Yonkers is the site of the most sustained opposition to public housing dispersal and integration in the country, so Yonkers, the city of Yonkers specifically when Earl Simmons was 10 years old was sued by the federal government for intentionally segregating public housing in Southwest Yonkers.

Shane Phillips 12:09
Away from the white neighborhoods, basically.

Michael Lens 12:13
Yeah, basically Southwest Yonkers was already the heavily Black and Latino part of Yonkers, and that's where they concentrated all the public housing, and over really 40 plus years, the city of Yonkers, Westchester County broadly were in litigation and in negotiation with HUD and the federal government to provide more public housing out of these intentionally segregated communities and provide options for Black and Latino mostly residents in these other places. In 1987, there's a mayor of Yonkers who's elected Mayor Nick Wasicsko. He was a anti-integration vote by the population there in Yonkers, but right after he comes into office, a federal court mandates a desegregation plan, and there's a judge who was really on top of enforcing this plan, and so Mayor Wasicsko had to lead basically on this integration plan when he was elected to do the opposite, and so then he's defeated in a backlash election. He tragically dies by suicide at the young age of 34, and folks who want a good urban planning miniseries, there is a HBO miniseries where Oscar Isaac plays Nick Wasicsko, came out in 2015. It's called Show Me a Hero, and it's based on the book by Lisa Belkin by the same name, Show Me a Hero. Quite good. Yes, it's a great miniseries, and so this is all happening of course when DMX is a teenager largely robbing people in and out of juvenile detention and then helped in part by the proximity of Yonkers to New York City, which is the epicenter of hip hop and rap at this point in the late 80s and early 90s, he claws and scratches his way to become one of the most popular musical artists of his time. You know, I note that his first five albums debuted at number one on the Billboard charts from 1998 to 2003.

Shane Phillips 14:26
That is insane. Insane. In six years. Insane. Six years. Five and six years all debut number one.

Michael Lens 14:34
Not number one on the rap charts, not number one on the Black guy charts, like number one on the charts. So DMX was as emblematic as anybody of like this newfound dominance, cultural dominance of hip hop by the end of the 20th century. Then if, you know, you want to, I can keep pushing the kind of chronological connections between DMX and fair housing at least. In 2021, a federal monitor ruled in favor of Westchester County's fair housing efforts, which basically signaled the end of the federal government's push against Westchester County, which you know, had complied already Yonkers and Westchester County had complied with some of the orders over the years. And then also that April Earl Simmons died of a heart attack at the age of 50, ending a pretty tragic life in spite of his incredible success.

Shane Phillips 15:31
And did you mention, I know you did say the words fair housing act, but I think the starting point in 1970 is significant for that as well, right? Because that passed in 1968 and is in some ways, you know, a turning point for housing policy around housing discrimination and segregation, maybe not so much segregation, but at least discrimination.

Michael Lens 15:52
Absolutely. So, you know, 1970 is kind of an important inflection point or a starting point for this book, but an inflection point in kind of the history of Black neighborhoods for a few reasons. One is, as you note, there's the fair housing act, which at least on paper makes it much more feasible for Black Americans, particularly Black Americans of means to move out of traditionally Black neighborhoods and into something else, right? Whether it's a majority white neighborhood in the suburbs or whatever. Also at this time, which that ability for wealthier Black Americans to be able to leave those neighborhoods reduces the demand for living in Black neighborhoods and pulls away part of the Black middle class to other places, which is, which has important negative effects on Black neighborhoods. But you also have this demographic shift or kind of migration shift in which up until 1970, the great migration from the South to the urban North and the West had always provided this pipeline of people to move into Black neighborhoods and replace the Black middle class or whomever's leaving. But by 1970, the great migration is pretty much over. And so you don't have this kind of replacement effect coming from the South. And then the less kind of obvious bit of demographic and migration change that's happening at this point is immigration from Southeast Asia, China, and Latin America, particularly Mexico and Central America really increases substantially starting in the 1960s. And that goes on through of course today really. And that changes who's going to live in these neighborhoods and some of the racial change that we see in some of these neighborhoods in this book.

Shane Phillips 17:45
And you have this sort of potted history of DMX, but that's not really just a one-off for the introductory chapter. You actually start off each chapter introducing readers to Black music scenes in different cities and regions of the country, mostly but not exclusively rap and hip hop. And you're really making an argument that their styles in these different places evolved to reflect the conditions of their respective cities and neighborhoods. I think in the wrong hands that could have come across as a little bit contrived or gimmicky, but I do think you pulled this off pretty well and it feels like a contribution in its own right. I just feel like I learned something in addition to just the facts of the neighborhood change. Tell us about that choice and maybe you could share one of those stories to illustrate.

Michael Lens 18:28
Yeah. The choice came pretty late actually. About just over a year ago, I received a lot of amazing feedback that the publisher Russell Sage was able to get from really a couple of the biggest experts in this field. So I was grappling with how to satisfy reviewer one and reviewer two and reviewer three, and I wasn't really quite sure how to do it. And one of the reviewers who was really supportive of the work emphasized that there's got to be a way to make this a little bit more popularly interesting to pull in people who are not just going to obsess like I do over tables and figures and graphs. And so, given the title that I had started to work with and DMX, and then once I wrote that introduction that featured DMX, I was like, I think I could do this with all of the other chapters and maybe I could find a city where this made some sense and that city's cultural rap evolution might be interesting here. The most important thing to me is that it really re-engaged me with the work. It was like, this is another aspect of what I'm doing that's interesting to me and pulling me in. And that sounds self-centered, but I think as a professor, when I'm teaching or when I'm writing or researching something, if I'm not entertained, my audience isn't going to be entertained either. So that was really important to pull myself in a little more deeply, honestly.

Shane Phillips 20:06
Sort of just showing another way why this stuff actually matters and it's not just facts for facts sake.

Michael Lens 20:13
Yeah, exactly. Not facts for facts sake. And yeah, it can be gimmicky. Any old man talking about his favorite music gets campy and silly or whatever, but hopefully it's at least able to pull some people in who wouldn't otherwise be pulled in. I think the story of Los Angeles or West Coast rap or as it's more pejoratively known sometimes gangsta rap, I think one of the best illustrations because, you know, I talk about how this kind of sub-genres emphasis on violence and violent imagery, particularly as the music video is getting very big, further diminish the already negative perception of Black neighborhoods. And this was a time when I was growing up in the early nineties where like you had all of this imagery in movies like Boys in the Hood and Menace to Society about this South Central Los Angeles or Compton that was like so unimaginably scary and violent. And like, obviously for those of us who are scattered throughout the country and the world and consuming this imagery, we didn't know the real story behind any of that whatsoever. And I think, again, on its face, what most of us did was say, oh, gosh, like young Black men in Los Angeles are scary and those neighborhoods must be so scary. That's I think the kind of first way that we consume these things. But there's a reason, you know, why NWA and Ice Cube and later Snoop Dogg and countless other MCs and artists, there's a reason why they were telling us these stories, right?

Shane Phillips 22:01
We are recording this the day after the Super Bowl, just maybe to mention Kendrick Lamar as well.

Michael Lens 22:06
Yes, and of course later on. That's what I was thinking. Later on.

Mark Vestal 22:09
I was like, this is good timing because we get, we get Crip walking at the Super Bowl. I mean, this is a significant moment. Yeah. So I guess what are, what are some of your thoughts on the trajectory? Because it's a, it's a big difference between how the countries received NWA and the way that the country is receiving Serena Williams, Crip walking at the Super Bowl.

Michael Lens 22:31
Right. Right. And so, you know what, like first to just kind of finish my thought, like, you know, there was an incredibly important social good that these artists were providing, which is telling the country and the world, like, this is the way that the police treat us in our city and in our neighborhoods, like this is what we're up against. And so to me, when Rodney King is on everybody's televisions, much of America had already been primed by NWA and you know, and some East coast artists too, but like by NWA and Ice Cube to be like, this is what happens to us, right? In our, in our cities and our communities. And you know, most of white America is not ready for that, but their kids were, and the other piece that's interesting, I think about LA is how suburban LA's like artists were. If you think about Snoop Dogg in Long Beach and you know, NWA and Compton, and then how suburban its audience was. So white America is hanging out, listening to NWA and Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg and The Chronic and whatever in these suburban locations. The evolution of America's, America's like acceptance of these early titans of Los Angeles and West coast gangster rap is endlessly fascinating to me. You know, I mean, obviously like Kendrick is, is this beloved figure amongst like, you know, I don't know, the Pitchfork crew, right? The critics love Kendrick, you know, the Grammys love Kendrick. And so that's obviously quite a bit different than what your Dr. Dre's and Snoop's lived lived through back then. But like, just look at Snoop Dogg himself. I mean, Dr. Dre and Ice Cube too, but like Snoop Dogg is, I mean, last night Samuel L. Jackson called himself Uncle Sam in the Super Bowl. And so I think he's trying to act like he's America's uncle, but America's uncle is Snoop, right? He is at the Olympics in Paris, who was our ambassador to the French Snoop Dogg, right? He's the one we're putting. And it's crazy. Like, you know, like my mom thought he was like the angel of death in 1992. You know, I look at that guy, I'm like, oh my God, you're so like beloved and everybody hated you 30 years ago. It's crazy.

Shane Phillips 24:59
Mark, did you grow up in LA or are you from elsewhere?

Mark Vestal 25:03
Born in Inglewood, parents, mom's from Inglewood, we had deep roots in Los Angeles. I've lived all over though. So I've lived in the suburbs of Los Angeles, East Coast, I lived in the south.

Shane Phillips 25:15
I'm kind of curious what your experience was. I think you're probably quite a bit younger or decently younger than Mike and maybe even probably even me. But Mike grew up in St. Paul, largely, I think. And so, you know, he was seeing this from afar, you were maybe a little too late, but this was your backyard.

Mark Vestal 25:32
Yeah. And I would say the music that defined like my youth in Los Angeles was like in the late 90s. So it was mostly Tupac. And I would say Tupac had a similar kind of opposition to the police state and aggressive like anti-gang task forces. And so that's the way that I think about Los Angeles and kind of the same trajectory and like tradition of critique that NWA had.

Shane Phillips 26:02
Okay. Well, I think we can finally actually talk about the book itself or the non-rap section of the book. We're talking about Black neighborhoods. What makes a Black neighborhood and how much does it matter what definition we use for a Black neighborhood?

Michael Lens 26:16
Yeah. So I define a Black neighborhood using census data at each one of these points in time, from 1970 to roughly 2017, the decennial every 10 years, census data, plus 2017, when we have the American Community Survey. I take all the census tracts in all the big metropolitan areas or, you know, even some of the smaller metropolitan areas. Sounds like we've got a little helicopter going overhead, sorry. And using these census tracts, I define a Black neighborhood as one in which Blacks, they are the largest racial or ethnic group out of the flawed four categories that we usually use, which it is white, Black, Hispanic, or Latino, and Asian. It increasingly matters how you define a Black neighborhood. So I don't, I said, I define these neighborhoods in which Blacks are a plurality, not a majority. And so all you have to do is be the largest racial or ethnic group. In 1970, plurality and majority for Black neighborhoods were one and the same basically. So 98% of neighborhoods where Blacks were the largest group, they were also a majority up to like 90% of the population. Like that's the level of segregation that we used to have. In 2017, that was down to 80%. So there are an increasing, but still a small share of Black neighborhoods where Blacks are the largest racial ethnic group, but they're not quite a majority.

Shane Phillips 27:48
As we talked about your starting point for this 50 year overview is 1970. And I don't want to imply that everything is rosy today, but in many ways that was a particularly tough time for a lot of Black neighborhoods. You talked about this inflection point. Can you paint a picture of where things stood?

Michael Lens 28:03
Yeah. So as I mentioned, there's a few demographic and legal forces that make 1970 kind of an important starting point. You know, 1970 is also an interesting time macroeconomically and in terms of inequality and poverty in this country. So around 1970, this is pretty much the high point of Black-white segregation throughout any time period in which we have been studying segregation. So 1970, urban America was more segregated than in 1960, 1950, 1940, et cetera, and more segregated than 1980, 1990, 2000, et cetera, just in terms of Black-white segregation. So that's important. Poverty rates are pretty high at this point. This is the early period of the war on poverty still. And when we had started to monitor poverty rates in the early sixties through that point, the early nineties were pretty high period for poverty. This is one of the lower points of income inequality in this country after 25 or so years after the, after World War II, huge gains for the middle class and lower middle class by the early 1970s that helped to erode income inequality. And it was about to reverse in the early 1970s. So those are some things going on. And then as I mentioned, a challenging time for demand in Black neighborhoods. So this is around the time where housing values or property values in Black neighborhoods started to fall precipitously. So in the 1950s, 1960s, homes were actually abnormally expensive in Black neighborhoods because there were only a, there's only a fixed number of places where Black people could live in a lot of cities because of discrimination and kind of enforced segregation. And once those restrictions eroded over time, and particularly with the 1968 Fair Housing Act, and then this fall in the population in Black neighborhoods due to the end of the Great Migration, you really started to see a pretty fast drop in value. And then this carries through the 1970s, through the 1980s, particularly as the drug war and a lot of the things that NWA was telling us about, was really taking hold in too many Black communities across the country.

Shane Phillips 30:32
I kind of get the impression, you know, with all of the legislation in the 60s, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Civil Rights of 1968, which included the Fair Housing Act, seems like this would be a time of hope for the 70s. But at the same time, you point out that 1970 was actually the best year on record for Black neighborhoods poverty rates relative to and controlling for the metro area fundamentals around them. So maybe overall poverty rates declined because they just declined across the board. But the sort of status of Black neighborhoods, at least on that metric, and relative to the white neighborhoods or non-Black neighborhoods in those same metro areas, things actually seem to have gotten worse. Did I interpret that correctly??

Michael Lens 31:19
Well, I think you're talking about findings from when I control for a bunch of other things using regression models. So if you want to just compare 1970 to the present in terms of the difference between Black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods poverty rates, that's gotten better and better. So in 1970 and 1980, the average Black neighborhood was three times as impoverished as the average non-Black neighborhood. By 2010, that ratio had gone down to two to one. So from three to one early in this period to two to one now. So just like not controlling for a bunch of other things and throwing that stuff into a model, like the basic comparison is much better right now. But that comes from two parts. So in 1980, the average poverty rate in Black neighborhoods was 28% and in 2017 it was 23%. So nice drop. That's good. But the other side of this is the average poverty rate in non-Black neighborhoods went from nine to 12% during that time period. So it's both poverty rates going down in Black neighborhoods and going up in non-Black neighborhoods. And then some of the non-Black neighborhood changes are due to immigration, right? And it's not all that, but like some of it is because our non-Black neighborhoods are much more racially diverse than they were in 1970 and 1980. Some of that diversity is from people from other countries who are less wealthy when they get here. Some of it's not. And then some of those immigrants are also in Black neighborhoods too.

Mark Vestal 32:58
Just thinking about your question about how Black neighborhoods have changed over time. And from what you're telling us, your findings are saying that Black neighborhoods on average have improved in terms of poverty rates. How should we think about, like it's good that it's decreased, but how should we be thinking about that decrease in other ways? Like are there comparative ways to think about how maybe other ethnic enclaves have improved over time, maybe like a majority Italian-American neighborhood and how that's fared over time? I guess what I'm trying to say is it's good, but should we be...

Shane Phillips 33:32
Should we expect more? Is it good enough?

Mark Vestal 33:34
Yeah. You know, I don't know if it's like, I don't want to say I'm grateful because I had to throw out the racial implications, but yeah.

Shane Phillips 33:44
I think this is a really important foundational point of the book is that things have gotten better, but there's still so much further to go and it took 50 years just to get to this point. Yeah.

Mark Vestal 33:58
Right. And it's like Black people have been in the country for a long time as long as Anglo settlers have been here.

Michael Lens 34:04
longer than the country together.

Mark Vestal 34:05
Longer than the country. Yeah. So it's like, I guess that's where some of my, like, I just don't know how to feel about it where it's like it improved, but the expectation in 1970 after the civil rights movement was equality immediately because that's what's deserved and it's just what's dignified. But obviously like just given the fact that the massive societal changes, like racial wealth inequality is not going to change immediately, I'm just interested in some ways you think about, or what I can encourage us to think about how we should feel about that kind of change.

Michael Lens 34:42
Yeah. So I have a couple of specific answers to that question. First is I really think that somewhere a really, really interesting extension to this kind of inquiry that somebody might want to do is looking at 30, 40, 50 years of Asian neighborhoods, Latino neighborhoods would be Latinos, I think are the obvious best comparison for Black people or Black neighborhoods. Obviously it's not a perfect comparison for a lot of reasons, but then, and then you went somewhere I didn't even really think about it's just like, you know, what about the hundreds of Italian neighborhoods we had from like, I don't know, 1890 to 1940, right? Like those are some interesting ethnic enclaves and like what, what was the pace of change for those folks? Like I think that would be endlessly fascinating for somebody to provide as a, as a compliment or extension to some of the stuff I do in this book. Then the other, the other side of this is of course, like you have the neighborhood as the unit of analysis and you have the people, right? And so another obvious comparison is like, well, how did Black people fare during this time period? And we can look at a couple of different things. So I have in one of my tables, the poverty exposure of Black people. And so that's really, that really closely mirrors like poverty rates in Black neighborhoods. So that goes from like 24% to 20%. That's the average poverty rate that a Black person experiences in this country. That's the way you should think about that. More specifically honing in on individuals is the poverty rate for Black households. What's that look like from 1970 to 2017? 1970 it was 35% and 2017 it's exactly what the Black neighborhood rate is, which is 23%. So that tells us that Black households were worse off than Black neighborhoods in 1970. Now they're the same. One thing that tells me is that there's something about Black spaces and neighborhoods where like disadvantage or poverty is a little stickier. And I think this has a lot to do with public perception and what we think and what we associate Black neighborhoods with. And that's part of the reason why I wrote this whole thing is I was like, Hey, a lot of people can say a lot of really interesting things about Black families and their outcomes and they have, and they do. But what about the neighborhood in particular is, is actually driving some other outcomes that we might care about.

Shane Phillips 37:33
I don't think I took a note of this in the book, but do you recall what share of Black people in the US live in a plurality Black neighborhood or at least a plurality Black neighborhood?

Michael Lens 37:45
I honestly don't think that I report this in the book, but somebody luckily asked me this in a talk. And so I can tell you that in 1970 was 69%, 65% in 1980, and that's down just under half. So it's 48% now. So now for the first time, most people, most Black people don't live in Black neighborhoods, but almost half.

Shane Phillips 38:14
If it was 20% or something, that might be a little, it's still important, but if it's not the experience of the vast majority of Black people or households, then that's just a different kind of story we're telling. Well, let's move on to location. Where would we find Black neighborhoods in 1970 and where has their number been growing and where has it been shrinking? I know that California does not come out looking good on this metric.

Michael Lens 38:39
California and the West, well, California kind of drives what you see in the West of course, but California, there's a kind of two things going on moving in opposite directions. One is that indicators such as poverty and income are the strongest in the West or in California's Black neighborhoods, the least disadvantaged places we have, but Black neighborhoods are basically disappearing in the West. So in 1970, 11% of Black neighborhoods were in the West and that's down below 3% now. The worst of that is because there were 268 Black neighborhoods or census tracts in Los Angeles in 1970 and now there's 77. That's wild. That's absolutely wild. There's nowhere else in the country where that's happening and so I'm sure we'll get into a little bit of why that is. Just to talk about where these Black neighborhoods are more generally, they're highly concentrated in particular metropolitan areas. So New York, Chicago, LA, Philadelphia, DC, and Detroit accounted for 45% of all of the relevant census tracts in 1970. That's now down to 36% because of the Los Angeles numbers I just told you. So if you take Los Angeles out and you put Atlanta in, then that gets back to like, you know, 41% or something. So now it's New York, Chicago, LA, Philadelphia, DC, Detroit, and Atlanta that, you know, kind of are your main census tracts. And then the source, the largest source of growth right now is in the South and basically Black neighborhoods are holding steady in number in the Midwest and Northeast where the conditions there are the worst. Just over 50% of Black neighborhoods exist in the South actually.

Mark Vestal 40:33
Yeah, I find that really interesting. So the Black communities in the West, the ones that are still around are doing relatively well, but the neighborhoods are disappearing. But in the Northeast and Midwest, those neighborhoods are doing the worst but remaining somewhat stable. Do you have a sense of why that is? Why the neighborhoods in the West are disappearing? And it seems counterintuitive too, because Black folks have a good amount of political power in Los Angeles. Some people can even say that it's kind of an outsized political power given their declining population. And when comparing that to the long political disenfranchisement of the city's Latino population, yeah, it's just like a really interesting finding. I had a sense like growing up in Los Angeles that the Black community was just, I could see it, but just seeing your data, it was shocking. And it's causing me to reassess, maybe not the goal of the Great Migration, but it seems like one way of thinking about it is like the Great Migration failed, at least as a Western destination. Or maybe we can rethink what we thought the purpose of the Great Migration was. Because when we listen to blues music, down home blues, if we just got to get back to the out of rap but stay in Black music, there's always a sense of, well, we can always go back home. And that was to the south. For Los Angeles, Texas was huge, but there was always this hesitation about making the West a kind of permanent home, the constant way that you could reject it. The findings on the West are just like really interesting, shocking, troubling. Yeah. Yeah. How should we be thinking about that? What are ways that you thought about it?

Michael Lens 42:25
Yeah, I mean, as far as the Great Migration and the role of the South vis-a-vis the West or vis-a-vis the North, I think I spent a decent chunk of time in my final chapter. Basically the most radical thing I say in that chapter is like, we should really make it easier for Black people to move back to the South or to the South, whatever. It could be back. You could consider it back. You could consider it too. I never lived in the South, but my grandparents were sharecroppers in Mississippi and then started a life in Chicago. And then my upbringing was all Midwestern. But obviously if I moved to the South, it would be, as far as my family's lineage, it would be back to the South, right? And so I think this idea of rethinking what the South can and already does mean for like urban Blacks is I think super interesting and was an unexpected direction that I think my book took for sure. When it comes to Los Angeles and the West and what's kind of happening mechanically to create these huge declines in Black neighborhoods, I mean, I think it's really something like three forces. One is that the baseline share of Black people in Western Black neighborhoods in 1970 and 1980 was often lower than what you saw elsewhere. So in 1970 and 1980, South Central was, of course, heavily, heavily Black. But like even some of those neighborhoods would have had a smattering or more of Latinos already living there, which is very different than what you saw on like the South Side of Chicago at that time. The second piece then is also related to the presence of Latinos and the just dramatic numbers of immigrants that moved to Los Angeles and Southern California more broadly during the 1970s, 80s and 90s. You know, I can't remember what the number was, but at some point, one in every four immigrants was moving to Southern California or something like that. It's just numbers. And then, you know, I think the last pieces, we talked about the dramatic violence or the imagery around that violence and the perception of violence, you know, gang warfare in South Central Los Angeles, whatever it was. I think before the riots, after the riots, Black people were looking around and saying, this is not a safe place for me to live or my children to live. And so they were heading out to Lancaster and Palmdale and Riverside and San Bernardino County. And, you know, so I think those are the kind of special circumstances that I think were happening in Los Angeles.

Shane Phillips 45:18
This is something I actually wanted to maybe ask about, or maybe it's just a point to make, but I'm looking at the Black share of the population in Los Angeles County from 1960 to 2000. And I had the 2010 and 20 numbers elsewhere. But we were at 7.7% in 1960, up to 10.9% in 1970, peaked at 12.6% in 1980 and then declined from there. And now we're back down to around 7 or 8%, I think. So, you know, a big decline from a peak in 1980, but less than half, you know, less than 50% decline, whereas the decline in Black neighborhoods has been much larger. And so I wonder how much of this is just like dispersion into other non-Black neighborhoods that did not become plurality Black. And what might have driven that, why that might have happened here, but not in other places that have remained more segregated.

Michael Lens 46:12
Yeah, I don't really have the answer to that question. You know, I can only... Let's speculate. Yeah, I can only speculate. I think, you know, your movie, a lot of these places are particularly geographically far flung, right? It's not like in Chicago where, you know, you're creating a new Black suburb just over the Chicago city line. You know, you're moving way inland where housing is cheaper and that's, you know, this kind of massive expansion that this county and region have undergone and Black people are mapping onto that and they're just not concentrating in the same way. I think immigration also plays a role where like Black people are moving maybe perhaps into a Latino neighborhood rather than the white neighborhoods where they're not as welcome. But I don't know.

Shane Phillips 47:09
I want any listeners who are not in the Western region of the United States to know we're going to talk a little bit more about the Midwest, Northeast, and the South. But I want to move on here from locational changes for a minute to talk about the changing Black share of the population in Black neighborhoods, which has been falling quite a bit. We're kind of just started talking about that. If you look at neighborhoods that were at least plurality Black in 1970 and follow that cohort, those exact neighborhoods all the way to 2017, their Black population share fell from 84% to 57% on average. So that's a pretty big drop. I think that partly explains why the number of Black neighborhoods has increased so much more than non-Black neighborhoods. You find that the number of Black neighborhoods by your definition is more than doubled, whereas the number of non-Black neighborhoods has maybe gone up, I can't recall, 20%, 30%, maybe even less, might even be like 10% or so. So what I think might be happening there is a lot of Black residents ended up in other neighborhoods and maybe changed the composition of those places, but enough stayed in the places that were already plurality Black in 1970 so that they're still plurality Black. They're still Black neighborhoods today. And I think that's interesting in its own right, but some of the most intriguing parts of this book for me are where you talk about the positive enclave effect, which really complicates this idea that increased racial homogeneity is necessarily bad for Black households. And I just want to note, I initially wrote increased racial segregation here and Mark correctly changed this to homogeneity because the distinction between homogeneity in a neighborhood and segregation is really important, but I will let Mark explain that in just a second. But I think a lot of this comes down to whether communities are racially homogenous by choice or whether they're segregated by law or violence or otherwise. And the fact that racial homogeneity is not always bad certainly doesn't mean that it's always good, but just curious to hear you talk about this enclave effect and maybe the surprising finding to some folks that more Black people in a neighborhood can actually be good for the people in that neighborhood.

Michael Lens 49:20
I think one of the findings that you're getting at that I think is important from some of the regression modeling that I did is that cities or metropolitan areas with larger shares of Black people have neighborhoods, have Black neighborhoods with lower poverty rates. So I think that's one of the protective effects that I find there and I don't have the ability to really tease out exactly what's going on there, but I think maybe that's some of why you see better outcomes in the South is because these are not isolated Black neighborhoods like you might see in some of the parts of the Midwest where there might even be some political leadership at the city or county level that's more likely to be Black and more likely to be attentive to Black neighborhood conditions or Black employment, things like that. And Atlanta, the history of Atlanta, at least since they've had Black mayors has been one in which you have city leadership that is explicitly pushing the business of the city towards Black entrepreneurs, Black neighborhoods, not all of it by any stretch of the imagination, but much more activist in that sort of realm.

Shane Phillips 50:35
And even if you don't have that attentiveness and proactiveness, at least you're maybe less likely to have dismissal or outright opposition, antagonism toward Black employment and businesses and households and people.

Michael Lens 50:49
Right. And then the other thing that I want to reflect on as part of your question here is one of the things I try to emphasize in this book is that Black people routinely report that they want to live in integrated but Black or mostly Black neighborhoods. And you know, we know this from a lot of surveys where we ask people like, what's your ideal like racial composition of your neighborhood? And we try to figure out what the ideal looks like for those people. And Black people are flooded with all of the negative imagery and perceptions about Black neighborhoods that any of us are. And yet they still, when asked, are like, eh, maybe like 40% Black or 50% Black. And you know, some other people live in there is fine too. You know, they don't want a hundred percent Black neighborhood because they know what that usually comes with in this country probably.

Shane Phillips 51:44
But 40 or 50% for people who don't know the demographic makeup of the country, that's three or four times more than the population share nationally, which is 12, 13%, I think.

Michael Lens 51:54
Absolutely. I think that gets to kind of this difference between what is homogeneity and what is segregation or what, you know, and how it's caused and how that happens.

Shane Phillips 52:05
I think it's really important. Right. Mark, can you talk about that distinction?

Mark Vestal 52:08
Yeah. Just, I wanted to, I mean, honestly, I didn't really, it wasn't something that I thought a lot about, but I wanted to make a distinction between there is a history, an intellectual history of Black political leaders and Black intellectuals trying to advocate for exactly what Mike is talking about in terms of what we're picking up in those surveys that Black folks want to live in neighborhoods with, let's say 40 or 50% Black people. And it's like, we don't necessarily have a name for that. And just want to highlight that it's not segregation. Segregation is something that's imposed by law, violence and custom. Whereas Black folks wanting to live in a neighborhood that is a plurality or majority Black is something else. So just to make a distinction between what it means when if folks do have the choice and those levers of violence and market discrimination aren't present. And if folks are doing this voluntarily, then they end up in a neighborhood with 50% Black people, that this isn't another form of segregation. It's not voluntary segregation. That's something else. Kind of an oxymoron. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a name that history. I mean, this used to be Black town building in the 19th century. This used to have other names for it. But yeah, I just wanted to make sure that we had that distinction. And also to highlight the fact that, I'm trying to think about how to phrase this, the motivations are very different. So exactly what Mike said in terms of we want to live in a neighborhood with 40 or 50% Black people and some other folks there too. There isn't like a goal to exclude where segregation was very much about excluding and not just for the purpose of like perception or we think Black people are dangerous, but these were we've developed throughout the early 20th century, a real estate science, zoning and appraisal practices that relied on Black exclusion in order to uphold and support and maintain property values in white neighborhoods, that system of segregation. And we can also talk about schools and the recycling of tax dollars. That's all part of the framework and mechanism of segregation that Black folks are not advocating for. It's let's not have any of that. And I want to live in a neighborhood that's half Black because it feels safe and there's community and there's support. And obviously we want some other folks there, but there isn't, I haven't seen, not to say that there's not some scandal somewhere in the country where Black people are trying to keep people at their neighborhoods, but there isn't, we don't have the power to have kind of systematic mechanisms of excluding other people from neighborhoods and bending tax dollars and affecting appraisal values of non-Black people moving to Black neighborhoods. So these are the kind of distinctions that I just wanted to make sure that we had on the table. But appreciated the opportunity to kind of think through it in a somewhat systematic way.

Shane Phillips 55:14
And you put it as like, we just don't really have a word for the voluntarily Black neighborhood. And I think that's why I was sort of thoughtlessly defaulting to, you know, if it's different than the rest of the Metro, if it's different than the average makeup of whatever, you know, I don't know what the reference point is here, but that's just like segregated. If it's like too many white people, it's segregated. If it's too many Black people, it's segregated. But as you say, like the mechanisms or laws or pressures that are causing it to be one way or another really determine whether it's segregation or not

Mark Vestal 55:47
Yeah. And I appreciate you opening up the conversation and your transparency. That's what we're here for is to discuss the issues and potentially offer up, like, what could that language be? And I think Mike has given us that in the title is Where Is The Hood At? I think in thinking about the history of music, NWA, gangsta rap, just like Mike said, like the hood used to be a derogatory, you don't want to, you didn't want to choose like if you could choose to live in a hood or not the hood. Yeah. Yeah. But now I think what Mike's book, what it's suggesting, and I think this is a positive outcome is that the hood is a place where folks can choose to live and have property values that reflect how Black people value the community. And if we want to call it the hood, I mean, I work with million dollar hoods and we meant something different in terms of the million dollar has to do with incarceration. But the incarceration of those neighborhoods don't define them as hoods. And so that's one way that I think folks could go. Some people might push back against that, but it's a great question. It's like, what do we call it? Do we have a name both in terms of social science, but then also in terms of popular discourse to describe like prosperous neighborhoods that aren't necessarily Black suburbs? Because I think we do have that scholarship and literature, but urban neighborhoods that are plurality or majority Black where people chose to live there, continue to choose to live there, value them, love them highly. What is that when Black folks do it? And I guess it's a complicated question or topic because of the history of segregation that as soon as we start getting into conversations about neighborhoods and saying, well, I want to live in a neighborhood with this proportion of Black people, it's just a really touchy. Oh, for sure. Yeah. So it's, it's difficult to talk about.

Michael Lens 57:36
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, broadly speaking, the literature uses the phrase residential preferences, I think, and, and then you can talk about racial preferences in housing or something like that. A couple of things I wanted to append on to that, you know, first thinking about suburbs versus urban neighborhoods, like I do explore that in chapter five, I think. And it's, of course, just like the rest of the country, Black people live in the suburbs. They increasingly live in the suburbs. The level of advantage is higher and the level of disadvantage is lower in Black neighborhoods in the suburbs, even if we are seeing, you know, improvements in some Black neighborhoods. But the strongest Black neighborhoods are, you know, Prince George's County and other areas of suburban DC, suburban Atlanta, suburban Chicago, et cetera. The other piece is I was at Penn on Tuesday delivering a book talk and Akira Drake Rodriguez, my good friend, asked me what role incarceration might be playing in these improved outcomes in Black neighborhoods. And I was-

Mark Vestal 58:45
That's a spicy question.

Michael Lens 58:49
I know. I was thrown, man. I was like, oh, yeah. So mechanically, if you take enough Black people who are not gainfully employed out the hood, you are probably lowering the poverty rate. On the other hand, if we think that the drug war and mass incarceration have, you know, decimated some Black communities and raised the likelihood that multiple children or hundreds of thousands, whatever children are not growing up with a parent in the household that they otherwise would or blah, blah, blah, like that should actually make poverty rates higher in that neighborhood. So I just, when you said million dollar hoods, I was like, I just said the phrase million dollar hoods on Tuesday. So there you go.

Mark Vestal 59:38
Yeah. And I mean, Ruth Gilmore argues that incarceration, the second thing that you said was that it tears communities apart. Right. Right. That seems like the stronger mechanism. I guess what Gilmore argues is that what we end up seeing in neighborhoods that have high rates of incarceration is that they're actually less stable than communities that don't have or have lower rates of incarceration. But it was a good question. I know. Yeah, my eyebrows would have been raised up.

Michael Lens 1:00:07
Yeah. What's he going to say?

Shane Phillips 1:00:11
Oh, this is maybe a decent transition to gentrification. So a different kind of neighborhood change, maybe in the other direction. And you touch on it at several points throughout the book and you kind of show that it's a mixed story. Could you tell us about, I think to illustrate, I just want to have you tell us about Shaw and the U Street corridor in DC and the really massive changes that it has seen in just a generation or so. And then maybe you can juxtapose that against what is really the more typical story of Black neighborhood change across the US.

Michael Lens 1:00:43
There's a couple of stories here that I really kind of obsess over. I mean, so just to start with meeting home values in Black neighborhoods across Washington DC in 1970, it was just over a hundred thousand dollars. And in constant dollars that had tripled by 2017 to just over $300,000. So we know that the cost of living in Black neighborhoods is skyrocketing in some places and especially in Washington DC. And you asked specifically about the Shaw U Street neighborhood in DC. In 1970, that neighborhood was 87% Black and 11% white. By 2020, it was 25% Black and 45% white. The poverty rate's been cut in half. The median home value has risen over half a million dollars. So I mean, this is one of the most, it's the most unique racial transition or a unique racial transition in this context. There's no other traditionally Black neighborhood and people should understand the Shaw U Street neighborhood of DC is basically the Harlem of DC. This was founded by escaped slaves during the civil war. This has been a Black place and a very, very important Black place for a long time. So no other neighborhood has seen that kind of transition from Black to white. South central LA has seen that kind of transition from Black to Latino, but no other neighborhood has seen that kind of transition. And it also hasn't seen that kind of incredible wealth infusion, right? So you know, south LA, what we call it now is still pretty poor, right? The Latinos that replaced Black people in those neighborhoods are roughly as poor as the Black people they replaced. In DC, they're being replaced by very high income white people. And that is an unprecedented change in Black neighborhoods in the United States. So the other pieces like that I want to emphasize is not only is that atypical, it's also, well, gentrification happens in a lot of Black neighborhoods. I estimate that in 2010, roughly 11% of Black neighborhoods gentrified, and then seven years later, another 9% gentrified. But the vast majority of Black neighborhoods are maintaining relatively high poverty rates or they're becoming more impoverished. They're not becoming gentrified, right? And then only one has become gentrified in the way that the Shaw U Street neighborhood has, but it's a really important case study because of all the great things that are happening there in terms of much less disadvantage and poverty. This really important cog in the Black wheel in DC has roughly disappeared.

Shane Phillips 1:03:47
I don't recall how in depth you go into the regional variation here, but is this a story of the more affluent, the places with the stronger regional or metro area economies, the places with more opportunity being the neighborhoods or the metro areas where Black neighborhoods are gentrifying and the places like in the Midwest where they're stagnating or declining are the ones that are not. And so when you say it's 9% this year, 11% of tracks in the next decade, that's probably not evenly distributed. And so what do we know about where this is concentrated?

Michael Lens 1:04:24
Yeah. So one thing is that Black neighborhood disadvantage is generally lower in places with strong regional economies or strong metropolitan economies. But there are a lot of places in which there's quite a lot of inequality between Black and white neighborhoods. Most of that is in the Midwest. I pick on Peoria, Illinois where- Yes, repeatedly. More Peoria. Where Richard Pryor grew up in a brothel, which of course is, that tells you quite a lot about growing up as a Black person in the middle of the 20th century in Peoria. But Peoria is this place with something like 41% poverty rate in the Black neighborhoods and 10% in the non-Black neighborhoods. So I just want to emphasize that there's some places where there's just a lot of inequality. And most of that is in the Midwest. Even in strong economy locations like where I'm from in the Twin Cities, there's a big gap between income in Black and non-Black neighborhoods. But you asked specifically about gentrification, and I do think that gentrification broadly is happening in places with strong regional economies. So whether it's a Latino neighborhood or just a high poverty neighborhood that's relatively mixed or it's a Black neighborhood, it is mostly where stronger economies are and where housing demand is rising. And in Black neighborhoods, that was 17% gentrification rates in the West, which is roughly double the national, 25% in the Bay Area, obviously a very strong economy there, 17% in New Orleans, not a strong economy, but probably a Katrina hangover that I'm seeing there, and then 12% in Atlanta, New York City, and DC. So yeah, strong economies are definitely at play here.

Shane Phillips 1:06:13
And maybe worth emphasizing that, as you point out in the book, home ownership rates among Black households are consistently 30 percentage points lower than among white households. And so all else equal, a Black neighborhood gentrifying is going to have more negative consequences for the people in that neighborhood, assuming displacement occurs and the rents are going up in response to this because so many more are renting. And so rather than becoming wealthy off of this, and maybe there are other downsides, but at least your home value is going up, if most of the population is renting, largely all that you're getting or the biggest effect on you is just that you're paying more for housing.

Mark Vestal 1:06:52
100%. So when you gave a talk on this at the Luskin School, and I'm trying to paraphrase, but please correct me if I'm not using the correct word, but that our conversation about gentrification given this data may be a bit overheated. So as the story of gentrification in urban metros with strong regional economies, are they kind of like hijacking the conversation broadly? Are we talking about Black disadvantage and Black neighborhoods that are stagnating? Do you feel like the discourse about those neighborhoods and about what's defining the vast majority of neighborhoods is perhaps not receiving our due attention given the fact that we're so concentrated on that? Coastal metros have that kind of effect where they drive conversations and planning broadly, but then just any discipline or political conversation that's concerned with racial inequality or just equality generally. So if we were to adjust our discourse around racial inequality, how would you suggest we do that if we were to do so in line with the data?

Michael Lens 1:08:05
Yeah. I mean, it's tough to think about discourse in particular because I think the pitfall is that you go back to almost an early 90s language and where you're just talking about these neighborhoods pejoratively across the board. But the data before my book, if you look at what's happening in the vast majority of high poverty neighborhoods over time, they're staying poor or they're getting poorer. If you look at the vast majority of Black neighborhoods, Latino neighborhoods, what's happening to them? They're staying pretty poor or they're getting slightly poor, right? So if you follow the data, that's the problem that we should all be concerned with first and foremost is how do we find ways for those neighborhoods to become places that can offer their residents better opportunities and have better supported schools and lower crime rates and all that, yada, yada. So it's like where gentrification is a problem, it is a pretty big problem, right? In Los Angeles and in the Bay Area and DC and Seattle and whatever, where it's a problem, it's an important problem. But in the rest of the country and most of the country, concentrated at disadvantage is way more prevalent than gentrification and for 13 years, I've been meeting extremely smart and eager planning students at UCLA that come here to study gentrification and I'm like, oh yeah, that's important, but what else is going on that we should be studying?

Shane Phillips 1:09:46
I mean, maybe a way of synthesizing this a little bit and bringing in the last question because we've had a lot of fun here, but we're running out of time.

Michael Lens 1:09:54
There might be a part A and a part B here. Mark's got to get back to work.

Shane Phillips 1:10:02
Well thinking about solutions and something I appreciate about your book is that you're not just chronicling change for its own sake and you're not just focusing on the Black neighborhoods that are struggling, but you're trying to look at what are the Black neighborhoods that are doing well and what can we learn from them? So I'd like to have you talk about Washington DC and the Atlanta metro areas as these sort of Black meccas as they're often called. But you know, to connect this to that gentrification conversation, I think part of the concern or the opportunity or whatever you want to call it is if we can't ensure that the Black people living in Black neighborhoods where the economy's really strong and gentrification is occurring, if we can't keep those communities together, ensure that people aren't displaced, if we can prevent them from gentrifying or at least gentrifying in harmful ways, then what are we doing here? I feel like those neighborhoods have to be sort of the model of how you create a stronger or grow Black neighborhoods because the places with the strong economies where those pressures exist is where that's most likely to happen it seems like. Maybe you feel differently, but that's kind of where I'm landing here.

Michael Lens 1:11:13
I think that these metropolitan area characteristics are a critical piece of this strong regional economies, a large Black population, but also a history of Black enfranchisement or Black kind of political power. And that's a big story in Atlanta and DC. Political economic and cultural power, I think is a somewhat unique ingredient in Atlanta and DC compared to other cities in metropolitan areas. So you could say on the one hand, like, well, we can't necessarily recreate the situations like that in Atlanta and DC elsewhere. Well you can't, you can't recreate that history necessarily, but I think there are some other things going on. One thing that I emphasize is that our model for improving people's neighborhood conditions is mainly using a housing voucher based on the moving opportunity study to give them a kind of ticket out of a high poverty neighborhood and a ticket into somewhere else. Those efforts have had limited but important effects. We've also tried to invest in neighborhoods through housing policy. We've tried to invest in neighborhoods through economic development and community development policies. All of that work is kind of piecemeal. It's not very well sustained. It's not super holistic unless you think about things like the Harlem Children's Zone and the choice neighborhoods that is kind of built off of the Harlem Children's Zone example. But I think one thing that I'm trying to add to the conversation is that we should focus on regions more intentionally or metropolitan areas or entire cities because it's really hard to improve somebody's neighborhood location if they're going to move within the same metropolitan area. People don't make very integrative moves if they just move somewhere else in town. They don't change their kind of poverty and income makeup of their neighborhood. Usually when people leave their market entirely, they're more likely to make those kind of integrative moves. I think focusing on regions is important. One way we could do this is helping people move entire regions. That's where I kind of try to provoke people with this idea that Black people should move back to the south. If you want a Black neighborhood that's doing well, most of them exist in the south. You can try going there. It's not just Atlanta and DC. It's Raleigh. It's Charlotte. It's Houston. It's Dallas. There's a lot of these examples.

Shane Phillips 1:13:53
I think maybe important context that's actually going to come up in our next couple episodes after this on housing vouchers, the way that housing vouchers work is essentially you get a voucher in the city that you've applied for a voucher in. Technically you are allowed to use that in different locations oftentimes, but in practice 99% end up being used in the housing authority jurisdictions where it was issued. That's the city, the county, whatever. It's extremely rare for someone to get a voucher in Los Angeles and take it to Dallas, for example. Right. Like extremely, almost zero chance.

Michael Lens 1:14:31
For sure. The other kind of regional piece is I think we should also invest in the Midwest. There's a lot that the government can do. There's a lot that state governments can do to invest some of their public resources in the Midwest. The other piece that I talk about that really gets to the neighborhood side of things that's trying to address the ownership gap in Black neighborhoods is there are several models of community land trust-like interventions that we could lean on more frequently in these places to make it feasible as property values are rising in Black neighborhoods due to higher demand, folks are able to stay, they're able to build equity, things like that.

Shane Phillips 1:15:15
It seems like though by the time you're really facing up to the prospect of gentrification, it's almost too late for that kind of solution though, because the amount that you can buy with even if you come up with billions of dollars is just a tiny fraction of the land in that place. It's a different story when somewhere like Detroit that has thousands of vacant parcels and those have been acquired and demolished and could someday become something as the city recovers. But when every home here is 600 or $800,000, a lot harder to make a real dent in that.

Michael Lens 1:15:47
It really is. And do you hear that from people in the CLT or community land trust area a lot, just like we have to get out in front of this so that people can benefit?

Shane Phillips 1:15:59
Folks can listen to our conversation with Annette Kim on that one.

Michael Lens 1:16:02
Yeah. And also our conversation with Andre Perry. There you go. Let's just drop the mic there.

Shane Phillips 1:16:10
Mike Lens, your book is Where the Hood At? 50 Years of Change in America's Black Neighborhoods. I can't remember the title. I got it right here. 50 Years of Change in Black Neighborhoods. Thanks for being a guest this time on the Housing Voice Podcast.

Michael Lens 1:16:23
This was a super fun one. Thank you for staying late, Mark.

Shane Phillips 1:16:29
This was fun. Yes. Thank you for co-hosting, Mark. It was great.

Mark Vestal 1:16:30
Thank you for inviting me. Bye guys.

Shane Phillips 1:16:38
You can find a link to Mike's book on our website, lewis.ucla.edu. Show notes and a transcript of the interview are there too. The UCLA Lewis Center is on the socials. I'm on Blue Sky [at]shanedphillips and Mike is there [at]mc-lens. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.