KCRag Forum

Remember when the city renamed Baltimore Ave to "Royals Ave" last October?

It might be time to re-name Baltimore Ave again.

AllThingsKC wrote:Remember when the city renamed Baltimore Ave to "Royals Ave" last October?

It might be time to re-name Baltimore Ave again.

I know you are just being funny.

What has happened in Ferguson or Baltimore, however, clearly can no longer be compartmentalized to just those places. This is a larger process, and I don't think there are too many cities that are entirely immune.

warwickland wrote:What has happened in Ferguson or Baltimore, however, clearly can no longer be compartmentalized to just those places. This is a larger process, and I don't think there are too many cities that are entirely immune.

I disagree. St. Louis is one of the most racist places I've ever experienced. And Baltimore is the most segregated city in America, behind Chicago. If this does spread, it would be to places like Philadelphia or Cincinnati that have the same pervasive segregation with large populations. You can't just say that it happened in Ferguson randomly and that it could have, and possibly will happen, in many other places.

what the fuck? kc does have a sense of denial re: the east side and sometimes exhibits a bit of exceptionalism. racism is real in kc, just brushed aside. placed in a container. people speak in code and hushes. polite.

and johnson county is on the other side so you know they are cool.

anyway, cop knocked off his bike in denver, pepper spray for everyone.

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_28016 ... own-denver

Wonder if we will ever get to a point where we experience Sao Paulo type gangs/militia only targeting police.

brewcrew1000 wrote:Wonder if we will ever get to a point where we experience Sao Paulo type gangs/militia only targeting police.

City of God is a fantastic movie that portrays the issues surrounding Brazil's favellas. When I watched it on a DVD there was a full length documentary included about the real world Police and Gangs of the favellas. Its very instructive on what they feel about the relationship between the two are and how the class structure in Brazil tacitly are ok with the situation. Their is particularly an interview with the chief of police regarding their role that is just mind blowing. I'll see if i can find a Youtbue clip on it.

Edit: Here is a link to the part I am thinking of. It gives further details on the documentary I was thinking of. It's called "News from a personal war". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpp3veiOrrs

i think city of god may still be on netflicks. powerful film. i watched it about a month ago.

FiveThirtyEight has a great article that distinguishes between neighborhood-level and city-level diversity for the 100 largest US cities, and plotted the relationship for each city for how far above/below the regression line for all cities.

On that list, Chicago is the farthest below the regression line (i.e., most segregated); St. Louis is 5th; Baltimore is 7th.

KC is 18th - between Birmingham and Dallas in a tie for 16th and Detroit at 19th.

does that account for size of core city limits? its laughable to me that detroit is 19th, as well. st louis feels much more mixed to me than detroit - anecdotally. there arent places like south city in detroit city where people mix quite that much...or kc really, either. urban kc feels more like chicago in that regard.

i really dont think there is much useful information to glean from such a thing - to make some kind of argument that kc is much less segregated than a lot of cities and therefore more immune to things that are happening, currently.

i think everyone needs to take a step back and stop thinking that their city isnt connected to this because of exhibit a.

theres larger questions here that i think in light of this unrest we need to ask ourselves. hopefully in 50 years people will wonder how we tolerated allowing part of society to suffer and be disconnected to this extent in the middle of our cities. a murder every day or every other day (or whatever) i hope someday will be unthinkable and police brutality unthinkable. we have to fucking do something, the free market isnt fixing this. we have to try harder. this is a bigger picture thing.

warwickland wrote:does that account for size of core city limits? its laughable to me that detroit is 19th, as well. st louis feels much more mixed to me than detroit - anecdotally. there arent places like south city in detroit city where people mix quite that much...or kc really, either. urban kc feels more like chicago in that regard.

i really dont think there is much useful information to glean from such a thing - to make some kind of argument that kc is much less segregated than a lot of cities and therefore more immune to things that are happening, currently.

I thought the methodology was interesting, but I agree that comparing cities using city limits alone doesn't provide a full picture; MSAs or Census urban area comparisons would have been more useful. Also, I don't harbor any illusions that if a suspicious-looking police-related death happened in KC, we'd be somehow immune from the reactions that have occurred elsewhere.

(On a kinda-sorta-related note, someday I'll get on my soapbox about how state and local government in Missouri systematically makes live more difficult for poor people vs. the setup in my home state of Nebraska, but that's something for another day.)

Missouri is definitely the south of the north, swid.

And Warwick, to your point..........the unofficial view of the KCPD is that KC is just one bad shooting away from being Baltimore.

People are pissed. It varies by degrees from place to place, but no location in America is devoid of reason to be black and ready for immediate change.

One of the primary problems in most large cities with urban poor is that much of the manufacturing, and smaller retail operations, that used to employ people in those neighborhoods has gone, and those jobs haven't been replaced.

The free market hasn't solved this problem. It's one of the primary examples I use to show that free market capitalism doesn't solve all problems. And I'm not blaming the concept of free market capitalism per se. The problem exists because the people who run businesses that create jobs, the capitalists, don't choose to place their operations in or near those neighborhoods, or anywhere close where the people can take public transit to work.

I'll give a local example. The placement of the Harley-Davidson and Smith Electric manufacturing plants in the Northland on raw land, instead of placing them somewhere in the existing Blue River Valley manufacturing centers of Sheffeld, Manchester, and Leeds. The same goes for the new auto-related manufacturing plants that are locating in Riverside.

The placement of those manufacturing plants on the East Side, where there is so much unemployment, would have helped those neighborhoods tremendously. The jobs would have been close to where they were needed, and they could have been reached by bus. These types of lower-skilled assembly jobs would have provided employment for those who need it the most, and also face problems like having the financial means to own and operate a car. Placing those jobs in faraway parts of the city adds an additional burden because the unemployed on the East Side have a difficult time getting to those locations.

The Blue Valley industrial district was set up to be a manufacturing district, so it would have made sense to place those new plants there instead of the Northland, which has traditionally been a manufacturing center.

So much manufacturing has left the USA, and Kansas City, so it's especially important that manufacturing that remains here be put in the right place.

Where city and state government can have a huge effect is when they are giving out incentives to manufacturing operations by steering them into these locations instead of on raw land in suburban areas.

A lot of the problems in inner cities could be solved just making a concerted effort to place jobs there, and extending opportunity for those people to pull themselves out of poverty through a steady job.

^ and what are the disincentives to placing jobs in inner cities? Why would businesses want to put businesses in areas where real estate is more expensive, wages are higher, and where industrial infrastructure isn't already built up? I still think capitalism works, so there has to be barriers that are either monetary, social, or time/regulation based. Remove those and manufacturing will come back. I still trust the greed of the businessman.

Lots of interesting facts about disparities in the justice system.

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/29/8687205/cr ... ice-racism