Reflections on Minneapolis, New York, Race, Policing, and Zoning - Part 2 of 3

The following is a guest post by Andrea McArdle, Professor of Law, City University of New York School of Law. Part 1 is here.

Part 2: A Tale of Two Cities

The political, economic, and social realities of Minneapolis and New York City underscore how their local experience fits the “tale of two cities” trope. At a policy level, each embraces equity and racial equality. Yet significant differences based in race and socioeconomic indicators persist, and have challenged efforts to unify disparate communities. These differences exist in employment, housing, access to health care, and education. Minneapolis has adopted laws to improve the general economic well-being of workers, increase the minimum wage and paid sick leave, and protect against wage theft, but white residents, comprising 60% of the city’s population, are the most secure economically. They surpass people of color in earnings and in homeownership, a key determinant of ability to accumulate intergenerational wealth. In Minneapolis, almost 60% of white households are homeowners, whereas fewer than 25% of African Americans, Native Americans, and Latino households own homes, a legacy pointing to the history of racial covenants in the city as well as the federal redlining policies that denied residents of African-American neighborhoods and other “inharmonious racial or nationality groups” access to financing to purchase a home.  Race, ethnicity, and income-based differences are evident in Minneapolis, and across the state, in students’ performance on standardized tests and in college readiness, even as Minnesota has equalized funding across school districts, and Minneapolis desegregated its schools. Children’s life chances reflect differences long before school begins; in Minneapolis, infant mortality rates are substantially higher among African American and Native American households than for other residents.

New York City shows similar, pervasive patterns of disparity. New Yorkers will remember that Mayor Bill deBlasio’s first election campaign invoked the tale of two cities trope to call attention to the unequal conditions that have long separated people living and working in the city. The candidate’s identification with that theme held out hope for his supporters that his administration would commit to progressive policies to reverse the effects of entrenched racial and economic segregation. Early measures making pre-kindergarten available for all New York City children and adopting minimum wage and mandatory sick leave laws seemed to fulfill that expectation. Yet New York’s public school system remains highly segregated, and its public housing stock has so badly deteriorated that it imperils health and safety, resulting in the imposition of a federal monitor after the city and its housing authority entered into a consent decree with the federal government. The terrible toll that Covid 19 has taken in New York City’s lower-income communities of color underscores how crowded housing conditions, proximity to environmental hazards, food insecurity, lack of access to quality health care, and overrepresentation among the city’s essential, but low-income service workers, have predisposed these communities to infection.