Sprawl City: Race, Politics, & Planning in Atlanta

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Summary: less hyperbole, more scholarship
Review: Bullard states that "in a sense, every state institution is a racial institution" (Bullard and others 2000, 49). He claims that transportation decisions are often made to be discriminatory against blacks. He calls such discrimination, "transit racism," citing the example of 17 year old Cynthia Wiggins of Buffalo, New York, who was killed "because some city official decided not to build a city bus stop at an upscale suburban shopping mall" (Bullard and others 2000, 49). The black teenager was crushed by a dump truck while crossing a seven lane highway to reach the mall. The Wiggins family sued. The lawsuit was settled, with the mall agreeing to pay $2 million dollars to Cynthia Wiggin's four year old son. The truck driver agreed to pay $250,000 (Bullard and others 2000). Bullard never questions the lack of judgement in the girl's decision to cross the busy highway on foot, but rather, puts the blame, on something else¯"transit racism." Such hyperbole puts the credibility of the author into question.
Bullard cites the following examples as a basis for his claims of discrimination in housing: (1) the mortgage rejection rate for blacks was double that for whites in the city of Atlanta and four of the five counties surrounding Atlanta (Federal Reserve Bank Board-1996) and (2) the largest insurance companies in Georgia routinely charge consumers 40 to 90 percent more to insure homes in Atlanta's predominately black neighborhoods than for similar or identical houses in mostly white suburbs.
Other factors, never addressed in the book, are involved besides Bullard's blanket charge of racism in denying mortgages to African-Americans. Bank officials say they have seen upper-income black applicants "over-reaching"-trying to buy a house too pricey for their income. A Freddie Mac report released in 1999 found that, on average, blacks were more likely to have bad credit. Freddie Mac's data showed that 27 percent of the whites studied had poor credit, compared with 47 percent of blacks. A higher percentage of blacks with incomes of $65,000 to $75,000 had worse credit than whites with incomes below $25,000. Blacks also tend to default on home loans more often than whites, another study by Freddie Mac found. An analysis of 25,000 federally insured home loans from 1994 found that 10 percent of white borrowers lost their homes in foreclosure, compared with 17 percent of blacks (Nirode and Brenowitz, Dispatch.com). The fact that urban blacks are more likely to have poor credit ratings and are more likely to be purchasing homes in neighborhoods with lower property values, hurts their mortgage and insurance applications (Squires 1999).
By the end of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr., was "well aware of how racializing the poor into opposing groups would keep them from organizing along class lines that transcended race" (Stokes and others 2003, 165). While being poor often means being black, as the stark income differences in the City of Atlanta show, the reverse is not true¯the Atlanta region is home to a thriving African-American middle class. In the Atlanta area, of the 19 percent of all families that are black: almost a third make more money than the typical white family in America; forty percent are suburbanites; a third live in predominiately white areas; middle class black families living in middle class neighborhoods have virtually the same income as their white neighbors (Garreau, 1988, 145). "'Successful blacks are the most forgotten group of Americans there are,'" says George Sternlieb of Rutgers University. "`The focus has been so much on the losers [as in Bullard's book], that the very people who have been able to come through have been ignored'" (Garreau, 1988, 146). James Kunstler, the author of an anti-sprawl book, The Geography of Nowhere, said the real challenge for people worried about gentrification, usually defined as neighborhood renewal that displaces poor, mostly minority residents with affluent whites, is not race but behavior and culture. "'Most people," he says, "do not want to live next to people who are radically different from themselves'" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 6 June 1999). "Sprawl City" fails to adequately acknowledge that blacks in the Atlanta region are becoming increasingly diverse. ("In the last few decades a growing number of thinkers have shown the extent to which liberal thought often relies on implicit assumptions of cultural homogeneity. This leaves it unable to properly account for racial and ethnic pluralism" (Stokes and others 2003, 51).) Historically, whiteness and blackness have been juxtaposed to signify the extreme ends of positive and negative attributes. "With the tremendous diversity within the black community in terms of class, color, religion and national origin, blackness continues to be represented in social science literature with the poor, uneducated and socially deviant while whiteness refers to the middle class, the educated and the protocols of civility" (Stokes and others 2003, 162). Stokes calls this, "absurdity of racial taxonomy" (Stokes and others 2003, 163)."Once the lines between the races begin to blur and fade," says Katya Azoulay, "once we recognize that race and authenticity are a matter of choice, there can be no logic to the government [or Bullard] keeping track of people's fleeting and changeable self identification (Stokes and others 2003, 178).


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Summary: Most informative research on Atlanta in decades
Review: This book tells the "story" of environmental racism that has and is being perpetuated not only in Atlanta, but in all major cities across America. The magnificent work of the Environmental Justice Center has another, and wider platform to reach the masses. The chapter on public transportation is a defining piece of work. Mr. Torres' use of GIS technology to analyze the issues has taken the tool to new heights. Every school of planning should have this book read by their undergraduate and graduate classes. This is what's missing!!