DrUrbanPolicy

Video of an Urban Institute forum from May. I was a respondent to Janice Eberly of the Treasury Department, who spoke about inter-generational transfers. I was joined by Leticia Miranda from the National Council of La Raza, and Rolf Pendall, the director of the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center, moderated. It was a fun conversation, even though I was a little jet-lagged that day. Video streaming by Ustream

"Farewell to Chocolate City"  is an interesting op-ed in the NY Times, and part of a recent trend towards articles on segregation and gentrification. This one discusses movements of whites to majority black places in the D.C. region, but is from an "insider" angle. The story here is of Washington's "new integration" as whites move in, told from an African-American perspective. While this piece is insightful, I immediately noticed that the perspective is also affected by one more factor: the writer is not from the region. While she does not focus on that issue, she is an African American gentri fier - she moved to D.C. for college and stayed. Yes, there is a connection between race and class in D.C. - the high income and college education rates for D.C. whites is much higher than the national average, and higher than for D.C. African Americans, but the African American population is much more complex than it may seem.