6 ms·

Rubbing Shoulders: Class Segregation in Daily Activities [pdf]

42 points by wallflower 3y ago

swsieber 3y ago
I belong to a religion that's really strong in western U.S. and less prevelant as you go east. Congregations are assigned based on geography and sometimes language. I prefer the congregations out east that cover half a city because you interact with more doverse people across a lot more socio-economic classes just due to the wider geographic area. I wish there were good incentives to build combined/intermingled housing to have more mixed neighborhoods.
- hammock 3y ago
  LDS?
- irrational 3y ago
  Recently I was in southern Mexico where I attended a Sunday meeting. Looking around the chapel I realized that 100% of the people (other than my gringo self) were Mexican. The place was completely packed, but there was essentially no racial or linguistic diversity. Perhaps there was class diversity, but that is harder to tell just by looking at people all wearing their sunday clothes. I wonder how unusual the diversity of the Eastern USA is compared to the rest of the world?
- mikeyouse 3y ago
  Much "affordable housing" is built in this way -- the market rate units in new buildings subsidize the below-market units so you do get a good mix of socioeconomic classes in each building. Moderately successful in my experience.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    I have no direct experience living in such a building but I would guess that it's a mix of lower and middle, but very few upper class folks. The people who can afford other options would generally avoid living in a building like that. When I was saving for my first house I rented an apartment that was a lot cheaper than I could afford. I was one of very few white people living there, possibly the only one. I got a lot of "dude, are you lost?" looks from the other residents, especially going to work wearing a suit every day, but very little other interaction or cultural mixing happened.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- cafard 3y ago
  In general, Roman Catholic parishes tend to draw on neighborhoods. That can make for parishes pretty well uniform in income level, and other factors. It can also make for quite diverse parishes. (Though there may be multiple language communities.) It seems to be that the Washington, DC, parishes running from about noon to about two on a clock centered on the White House tend to be be fairly diverse.
- xmprt 3y ago
  > I wish there were good incentives to build combined/intermingled housing to have more mixed neighborhoods. I feel like there are natural incentives for building a diverse variety of housing in an area. You have to go out of your way to only build expensive single family homes in an area. Incentives for building mixed neighborhoods: You get a diverse population in an area which means support for all types of jobs within the city as opposed to requiring people to commute outside the city for work. Fewer homeless people because cost of living becomes more manageable. Shorter commute/travel times for people who have to go outside the city since most people are commuting within the city. Incentives for building homogenous neighborhoods: You and your children won't have to interact with people who can't afford to live there. Everyone gets to live in a single family house (whether they want to or not).
  - tomatotomato37 3y ago
    I agree, from my experience it seems that areas with a more unplanned "chaotic" buildup also seems to have both more diversity in class/social/race and also much more community activity overall. I grew up in one of those homogeneous planned neighborhoods that are supposed to be nicer with their gatehouse and HoAs, but it's my current place with it's development clusterfuck that results in pristine McMansions sitting next to mobile homes with abandoned cars in the front that I feel the most at home.
quacked 3y ago
I have never observed that, given free choice, people prefer to associate with people that are unlike them. When you've recently immigrated to the US from a foreign country, you don't think "finally, I'm away from my countrymen, I can't wait to form a work group of zero people who speak my language and don't understand any of my assumptions and references." When you're planning a high school party, you don't think "me and my friends are on the football team, so we'd better not invite too many football players and will be sure to invite the comp sci guys, the band kids, the theater kids, and the stoners." That said, I do agree with the meta-implication of this paper, which is that it's bad for society at large when the classes don't encounter each other socially at all.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  Wanna bet? Before I moved to the US, my grandfather explicitly told me to avoid associating with people from my home country. He had reasons and he wasn't wrong!
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  I'd say you should observe more. I've lived in multiple countries and have zero desire to seek out members of my default peer group. I frankly do not understand people who move abroad and then want to spend all their time hanging out with other expats.
- mikeyouse 3y ago
  I think you're thinking too narrowly -- some of the most popular neighborhoods in many cities are the very specific cultural ones (e.g. K-Town in LA, the Mission in SF, Chinatown in NYC, etc) where people from all backgrounds meet and mingle. You might go there with a few coworkers that are the same age/race/sex as you, but a big part of the reason that you don't stay on your block is for the diversity of experience. Rec sports are another good avenue where your 5-a-aside soccer team might be very homogenous but the league obviously isn't.
  - colechristensen 3y ago
    It didn't feel like "meet and mingle" in the mission... more like a strange outlandish transition from people living in tents on the street and three blocks away Valencia street filled with nice shops and restaurants. Walking to work was like "oh this is nice" interspersed with needles and feces in the sidewalk.
mhb 3y ago
Marginal Revolution comments: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/08/which-businesses-mix-the-classes-best.html#comments https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/08/wh...
- dublinben 3y ago
  Has the comment section on that site always been so terrible, or is it just inspired by certain topics? Yikes
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    IMO, the articles tend to be horrible too. But every once in a while there's something very good.
frankus 3y ago
Not directly related, but a fun(?) anecdote: I worked for a dog-friendly company in Seattle for a few years in the mid 20-teens. I started out commuting from my parents' place (who dog-sat for me), taking a commuter train and then a bus. I rarely chatted with anyone on the train/bus during that period. After a few months I managed to find a place in the city and would ride the (pet-friendly) bus with my 90-pound samoyed, who despite usually being anxious in crowds took to it really well. Long story short, the dog was an amazing cross-class ice breaker. I'm pretty introverted, but just about every trip someone would strike up a conversation with me, and it was usually folks I wouldn't otherwise interact with. So anecdotally, usable public transit can be a good class desegregation strategy, and taking a charismatic dog with you supercharges it.
- hindsightbias 3y ago
  No dog required: in college I would throw a t-shirt on in the dark morning and run to the bus. 50% chance the shirt was inside-out. Drives other people crazy. Whomever was behind me would tap me on the shoulder to tell me. Met a lot of people that way.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  Yes! Public transit is mentioned, so this is now a certified HN thread. But seriously, whenever I go for a walk, people with dogs are the only ones I see stopping and interacting with each other. It seems like the dogs have the right idea, and they take their humans with them...
  - ncr100 3y ago
    In my opinion, I see this as affirming that sharing resources can facilitate human interaction. In this case "personal space". I speculate this increase in interaction is dogs facilitate boundaries being crossed with people. Boundaries like: they sniff (suggesting something important is smelly, to us all with noses), stare (eye contact communicating starts), make odd sounds (prompting communication), are furry + warm (texturally appealing for touching), and they are usually naked (shocking taboo trigger). In short, they are "an experience" to most nearby humans. Extrapolating, when one person depends on another person, this can deepen a relationship (good / bad). So, to increase human interactions, increase number of scenarios where we depend upon each other.
irrational 3y ago
Not class segregation, but racial segregation. Yesterday I flew to the Atlanta airport and from there to the Portland Oregon airport. Probably 75-80% of the people flying to Atlanta were black. I was in the airport for about 5 hours and 80+% of the workers were black. When it was time to fly to Portland, I looked around the departure area and realized that 100% of the people flying to Oregon were white and when I got to the Portland airport, I paid attention to the workers are realized that 100% of them were white. For some reason, I’d always assumed that cities would naturally have a diverse mix of people, apparently not.
- bluepod4 3y ago
  Now fly to Minnesota and see that most of the people on the flight are white but 90% of the airport workers are Somali.
- bluedino 3y ago
  It's really dependent on the area that you are in https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Black2017-1024x768.jpg https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Black2017-1...
- Fricken 3y ago
  I'm Canadian, and when road tripping through the states, coming up from California, I was struck by how suddenly white Portland was relative to all places south of it.
  - kec 3y ago
    There were laws making it illegal for people of color to live in Oregon territory which persisted through statehood and weren't fully stricken until into the 20th century.
- mandevil 3y ago
  Portland- and Oregon in general- is something of a special case, because of its history legally excluding Black people. In general cities are better about accepting people of different ethnicity and backgrounds, but individual history and laws can override that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws
hammock 3y ago
Fascinating to me that the corporate chains we love to hate like Olive Garden, Applebees, and big chain stores in general, have the benefit of facilitating the most cross-class* interactions of any business type. I saw a comment explain this could be due to a mixed social group where everyone can agree to go to Applebees because it's acceptable socially to the higher class people and acceptable financially to the lower class people. *Important to note that "class" in this paper is defined as income class, even though they refer to it at times as social class
- Paul-Craft 3y ago
  > *Important to note that "class" in this paper is defined as income class, even though they refer to it at times as social class Those are essentially the same thing in the US, as opposed to, say, the UK, where it's quite a bit more complicated.
  - hammock 3y ago
    I would disagree. Social class divide is very opaque for those who aren't looking/ don't know how to see it, but it does exist. Take a rich general contractor of Southern Italian descent (say third generation American) compared to a middle-class elite private school teacher of English/Scottish descent (say 14th generation American). They aren't running in the same circles or living in the same neighborhood

42 points by wallflower 3y ago

I belong to a religion that's really strong in western U.S. and less prevelant as you go east. Congregations are assigned based on geography and sometimes language. I prefer the congregations out east that cover half a city because you interact with more doverse people across a lot more socio-economic classes just due to the wider geographic area. I wish there were good incentives to build combined/intermingled housing to have more mixed neighborhoods.

hammock 3y ago
LDS?
irrational 3y ago
Recently I was in southern Mexico where I attended a Sunday meeting. Looking around the chapel I realized that 100% of the people (other than my gringo self) were Mexican. The place was completely packed, but there was essentially no racial or linguistic diversity. Perhaps there was class diversity, but that is harder to tell just by looking at people all wearing their sunday clothes. I wonder how unusual the diversity of the Eastern USA is compared to the rest of the world?
mikeyouse 3y ago
Much "affordable housing" is built in this way -- the market rate units in new buildings subsidize the below-market units so you do get a good mix of socioeconomic classes in each building. Moderately successful in my experience.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  I have no direct experience living in such a building but I would guess that it's a mix of lower and middle, but very few upper class folks. The people who can afford other options would generally avoid living in a building like that. When I was saving for my first house I rented an apartment that was a lot cheaper than I could afford. I was one of very few white people living there, possibly the only one. I got a lot of "dude, are you lost?" looks from the other residents, especially going to work wearing a suit every day, but very little other interaction or cultural mixing happened.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
cafard 3y ago
In general, Roman Catholic parishes tend to draw on neighborhoods. That can make for parishes pretty well uniform in income level, and other factors. It can also make for quite diverse parishes. (Though there may be multiple language communities.) It seems to be that the Washington, DC, parishes running from about noon to about two on a clock centered on the White House tend to be be fairly diverse.
xmprt 3y ago
> I wish there were good incentives to build combined/intermingled housing to have more mixed neighborhoods. I feel like there are natural incentives for building a diverse variety of housing in an area. You have to go out of your way to only build expensive single family homes in an area. Incentives for building mixed neighborhoods: You get a diverse population in an area which means support for all types of jobs within the city as opposed to requiring people to commute outside the city for work. Fewer homeless people because cost of living becomes more manageable. Shorter commute/travel times for people who have to go outside the city since most people are commuting within the city. Incentives for building homogenous neighborhoods: You and your children won't have to interact with people who can't afford to live there. Everyone gets to live in a single family house (whether they want to or not).
- tomatotomato37 3y ago
  I agree, from my experience it seems that areas with a more unplanned "chaotic" buildup also seems to have both more diversity in class/social/race and also much more community activity overall. I grew up in one of those homogeneous planned neighborhoods that are supposed to be nicer with their gatehouse and HoAs, but it's my current place with it's development clusterfuck that results in pristine McMansions sitting next to mobile homes with abandoned cars in the front that I feel the most at home.

quacked 3y ago

I have never observed that, given free choice, people prefer to associate with people that are unlike them. When you've recently immigrated to the US from a foreign country, you don't think "finally, I'm away from my countrymen, I can't wait to form a work group of zero people who speak my language and don't understand any of my assumptions and references." When you're planning a high school party, you don't think "me and my friends are on the football team, so we'd better not invite too many football players and will be sure to invite the comp sci guys, the band kids, the theater kids, and the stoners." That said, I do agree with the meta-implication of this paper, which is that it's bad for society at large when the classes don't encounter each other socially at all.

HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
Wanna bet? Before I moved to the US, my grandfather explicitly told me to avoid associating with people from my home country. He had reasons and he wasn't wrong!
anigbrowl 3y ago
I'd say you should observe more. I've lived in multiple countries and have zero desire to seek out members of my default peer group. I frankly do not understand people who move abroad and then want to spend all their time hanging out with other expats.
mikeyouse 3y ago
I think you're thinking too narrowly -- some of the most popular neighborhoods in many cities are the very specific cultural ones (e.g. K-Town in LA, the Mission in SF, Chinatown in NYC, etc) where people from all backgrounds meet and mingle. You might go there with a few coworkers that are the same age/race/sex as you, but a big part of the reason that you don't stay on your block is for the diversity of experience. Rec sports are another good avenue where your 5-a-aside soccer team might be very homogenous but the league obviously isn't.
- colechristensen 3y ago
  It didn't feel like "meet and mingle" in the mission... more like a strange outlandish transition from people living in tents on the street and three blocks away Valencia street filled with nice shops and restaurants. Walking to work was like "oh this is nice" interspersed with needles and feces in the sidewalk.

mhb 3y ago

Marginal Revolution comments: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/08/which-businesses-mix-the-classes-best.html#comments https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/08/wh...

dublinben 3y ago
Has the comment section on that site always been so terrible, or is it just inspired by certain topics? Yikes
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  IMO, the articles tend to be horrible too. But every once in a while there's something very good.

frankus 3y ago

Not directly related, but a fun(?) anecdote: I worked for a dog-friendly company in Seattle for a few years in the mid 20-teens. I started out commuting from my parents' place (who dog-sat for me), taking a commuter train and then a bus. I rarely chatted with anyone on the train/bus during that period. After a few months I managed to find a place in the city and would ride the (pet-friendly) bus with my 90-pound samoyed, who despite usually being anxious in crowds took to it really well. Long story short, the dog was an amazing cross-class ice breaker. I'm pretty introverted, but just about every trip someone would strike up a conversation with me, and it was usually folks I wouldn't otherwise interact with. So anecdotally, usable public transit can be a good class desegregation strategy, and taking a charismatic dog with you supercharges it.

hindsightbias 3y ago
No dog required: in college I would throw a t-shirt on in the dark morning and run to the bus. 50% chance the shirt was inside-out. Drives other people crazy. Whomever was behind me would tap me on the shoulder to tell me. Met a lot of people that way.
JimtheCoder 3y ago
Yes! Public transit is mentioned, so this is now a certified HN thread. But seriously, whenever I go for a walk, people with dogs are the only ones I see stopping and interacting with each other. It seems like the dogs have the right idea, and they take their humans with them...
- ncr100 3y ago
  In my opinion, I see this as affirming that sharing resources can facilitate human interaction. In this case "personal space". I speculate this increase in interaction is dogs facilitate boundaries being crossed with people. Boundaries like: they sniff (suggesting something important is smelly, to us all with noses), stare (eye contact communicating starts), make odd sounds (prompting communication), are furry + warm (texturally appealing for touching), and they are usually naked (shocking taboo trigger). In short, they are "an experience" to most nearby humans. Extrapolating, when one person depends on another person, this can deepen a relationship (good / bad). So, to increase human interactions, increase number of scenarios where we depend upon each other.

irrational 3y ago

Not class segregation, but racial segregation. Yesterday I flew to the Atlanta airport and from there to the Portland Oregon airport. Probably 75-80% of the people flying to Atlanta were black. I was in the airport for about 5 hours and 80+% of the workers were black. When it was time to fly to Portland, I looked around the departure area and realized that 100% of the people flying to Oregon were white and when I got to the Portland airport, I paid attention to the workers are realized that 100% of them were white. For some reason, I’d always assumed that cities would naturally have a diverse mix of people, apparently not.

bluepod4 3y ago
Now fly to Minnesota and see that most of the people on the flight are white but 90% of the airport workers are Somali.
bluedino 3y ago
It's really dependent on the area that you are in https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Black2017-1024x768.jpg https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Black2017-1...
Fricken 3y ago
I'm Canadian, and when road tripping through the states, coming up from California, I was struck by how suddenly white Portland was relative to all places south of it.
- kec 3y ago
  There were laws making it illegal for people of color to live in Oregon territory which persisted through statehood and weren't fully stricken until into the 20th century.
mandevil 3y ago
Portland- and Oregon in general- is something of a special case, because of its history legally excluding Black people. In general cities are better about accepting people of different ethnicity and backgrounds, but individual history and laws can override that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws

hammock 3y ago

Fascinating to me that the corporate chains we love to hate like Olive Garden, Applebees, and big chain stores in general, have the benefit of facilitating the most cross-class* interactions of any business type. I saw a comment explain this could be due to a mixed social group where everyone can agree to go to Applebees because it's acceptable socially to the higher class people and acceptable financially to the lower class people. *Important to note that "class" in this paper is defined as income class, even though they refer to it at times as social class

Paul-Craft 3y ago
> *Important to note that "class" in this paper is defined as income class, even though they refer to it at times as social class Those are essentially the same thing in the US, as opposed to, say, the UK, where it's quite a bit more complicated.
- hammock 3y ago
  I would disagree. Social class divide is very opaque for those who aren't looking/ don't know how to see it, but it does exist. Take a rich general contractor of Southern Italian descent (say third generation American) compared to a middle-class elite private school teacher of English/Scottish descent (say 14th generation American). They aren't running in the same circles or living in the same neighborhood