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Old 05-09-2008, 07:55 AM
 
Location: Saint Petersburg
632 posts, read 1,734,001 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
Just to give a little data, as of the 2000 Census, Friendship (the official part) was around 60% white, 30% black, and 10% other. My sense is that is more or less typical of most of the bigger region I described. For comparison, Bloomfield was 85% white and 8.5% black, and that includes the areas which I call Friendship. So, I suspect the parts of Bloomfield that I don't call Friendship would have had a significantly lower black percentage.
The neighborhood I live in, North Point Breeze, is racially mixed - about 60/40 African-American vs. White.

I also believe Highland Park is a racially mixed neighborhood.
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Old 05-09-2008, 08:29 AM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by subdivisions View Post
The neighborhood I live in, North Point Breeze, is racially mixed - about 60/40 African-American vs. White.

I also believe Highland Park is a racially mixed neighborhood.
Indeed. For general reference, the 2000 Census by neighborhood is here:

http://www.city.pittsburgh.pa.us/cp/..._pgh_jan06.pdf

At that time, Point Breeze North was 68% black, 27.5% white, but I suspect your numbers are closer by now. Highland Park was 65.5% white, 29.5% black.

Another area which is racially diverse is what I call Park Place, which is officially part Point Breeze and part Wilkinsburg. Similarly, the northern parts of Regent Square and the areas just east of Regent Square and west of the Busway (which collectively could be Pittsburgh, Wilkinsburg, or Edgewood) are racially diverse.

Unfortunately these are unofficial neighborhoods and hence there are not good statistics available. But for what it is worth, in 2000 Wilkinsburg as a whole was 66.5% black, 29% white, and my general sense is that you will blend through the whole middle part of the scale in the border areas I have been describing.
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Old 05-09-2008, 10:51 AM
 
1,051 posts, read 2,602,186 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Humanoid View Post
I can say is that I've spent enough time in the black community in Pittsburgh to know that the people there don't have a particularly rosy view of the city as far as racism goes.
I don't think there are poor black people anywhere that have a rosy view regarding racism....it kinda comes with the territory when you're poor and black. It's sorta like trying to find poor white people who have a rosy view of job taking immigration.....

Anyway, this brings up an important point that may be relevent here. There are very few educated, middle-class blacks in the city. If you are a black professional (living in the city) it may be difficult to find a neighborhood where people share your "values". To find diversity among people of similar "values" you should move to the suburbs or look for neighborhoods near Regent Square.
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Old 05-09-2008, 11:13 AM
 
20,273 posts, read 32,877,652 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by zip95 View Post
Anyway, this brings up an important point that may be relevent here. There are very few educated, middle-class blacks in the city. If you are a black professional (living in the city) it may be difficult to find a neighborhood where people share your "values". To find diversity among people of similar "values" you should move to the suburbs or look for neighborhoods near Regent Square.
I agree there is a need for Pittsburgh to develop more neighborhoods which will be attractive to middle/professional class black residents. Fortunately, I think there has already been movement in those directions in some of the places we have mentioned (Friendship, Highland Park, Point Breeze North, and the areas around Regent Square). Indeed, I think eventually much of places like Garfield, East Liberty, Homewood, and Wilkinsburg could become part of these racially diverse and economically healthy areas as they expand, although of course that depends on a lot of different factors coming together.
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Old 05-09-2008, 11:14 AM
 
Location: Saint Petersburg
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
I agree there is a need for Pittsburgh to develop more neighborhoods which will be attractive to middle/professional class black residents. Fortunately, I think there has already been movement in those directions in some of the places we have mentioned (Friendship, Highland Park, Point Breeze North, and the areas around Regent Square). Indeed, I think eventually much of places like Garfield, East Liberty, Homewood, and Wilkinsburg could become part of these areas as they expand, although of course that depends on a lot of factors coming together.
I definitely think East Liberty could move in that direction in the next few years.

I don't know about Homewood though.
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Old 05-09-2008, 11:23 AM
 
20,273 posts, read 32,877,652 times
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Originally Posted by subdivisions View Post
I don't know about Homewood though.
I admit that is the boldest suggestion on my list. The thing is that Homewood has a distinguished history and great fundamentals in terms of location and housing stock. Indeed, my understanding is that back when Homewood was first a German neighborhood and then an Italian neighborhood, it also had a relatively affluent black minority population. As I mentioned, though, a number of factors would have to come together, and it will certainly take considerable time.

Anyway, we shall see (eventually).
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Old 05-09-2008, 11:33 AM
 
20,273 posts, read 32,877,652 times
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By the way, I don't mean to be mysterious when I talk about other factors. As I see it, one of the two big questions is whether we as a society will eventually find a way for members of the black "underclass" to become ordinary participants in the economy. The second big question is whether urban living will become more popular among the middle class in general, at least to around the level it was in the streetcar days (which in fact will depend in part on things like redeveloping public transit systems). If all that is happening, then there will likely end up being enough resources and demand for neighborhoods like Homewood to be redeveloped into racially-diverse and economically healthy places.
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Old 05-09-2008, 04:33 PM
 
Location: Los Angeles Area
3,306 posts, read 4,133,707 times
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Quote:
At that time, Point Breeze North was 68% black, 27.5% white,
These percentages are highly deceptive and I'm surprised you are even posting them as a way to indicate what areas are actually racially mixed in any meaningful way. I find this doing future residents a huge disservice...

These percentages have little value as they say nothing about how mixed the area is as defined by whites and blacks actually living on the same streets etc. The cases mentioned are a bit silly really, they have higher numbers of blacks because they border black areas. For example the black community in East liberty isn't defined by the map for East Liberty, instead if overflows a bit into surrounding communities (friendship, highland park etc). The same can be said of north point breeze and Homewood.

Anyhow, in general its VERY easy to point to the black area vs the white area. They are rigidly defined in that within 1-2 blocks you go from 90%+ black to 90%+ white. The white vs black areas are only roughly defined by the official neighborhoods.

Quote:
There are very few educated, middle-class blacks in the city.
Just from my experience I know this is nonsense. But where did you get information that suggests this? Just from looking at the Census BrianTH posted 47% of East Liberty's residents have done "some college" work (around 30% with degrees) And 8.6 have graduate/professional degrees. These figures alone suggest educated middle-class blacks (East Liberty's median income is in line with many middle-class white areas of the city) are more than "few" in number.
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Old 05-09-2008, 06:49 PM
 
Location: Saint Petersburg
632 posts, read 1,734,001 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Humanoid View Post
These percentages have little value as they say nothing about how mixed the area is as defined by whites and blacks actually living on the same streets etc. The cases mentioned are a bit silly really, they have higher numbers of blacks because they border black areas. For example the black community in East liberty isn't defined by the map for East Liberty, instead if overflows a bit into surrounding communities (friendship, highland park etc). The same can be said of north point breeze and Homewood.
This statement is absolutely not true of North Point Breeze, and I know because I live here. The black people in this neighborhood are typically middle-class, and many of them go to great pains to separate themselves from Homewood both physically and culturally. For instance, I remember reading an article a while back about the fact that kids from Homewood were crossing over to N. Point Breeze to play league football in Westinghouse Park, and the (majority) African-American homeowners in the area were completely up in arms about it because they didn't want the riff-raff filtering over from Homewood during the football games. A N. Point Breeze community organization has also been recently pressuring the city to build a fence beside the railroad tracks in a further effort to physically separate this neighborhood from Homewood.

In other words, the African-American community here is not simply a spillover from Homewood into a "whiter" neighborhood. The residents of this neighborhood live here quite deliberately. And given what some of my white neighbors have told me about how they came to live here, I have to assume the white minority does also, rather than just finding themselves encroached upon by Homewood. Actually, I don't know this for sure, but I have the impression that this has been a more black neighborhood in the past, but that the demographics are changing because whites and other ethnic groups are moving in (quite an unusual situation for any city neighborhood anywhere, I think).

Also, whites and blacks are definitely mixed on the same streets here, in just about the percentages that BrianTH suggested. I feel that, among the racially diverse homeowners on my own block, there is definitely a friendly and neighborly atmosphere. I personally do not perceive a lot of racial tension here, although of course I can't speak for the typical African-American resident who might have a different perspective on the matter.

If you want to see what a typical African-American resident of N. Point Breeze looks like, here is an article about a family who originally planned to live in the suburbs, but decided to renovate an old house next to Westinghouse Park instead: House in North Point Breeze changed couple's mind about leaving the city
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Old 05-09-2008, 08:51 PM
 
20,273 posts, read 32,877,652 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Humanoid View Post
These percentages are highly deceptive and I'm surprised you are even posting them as a way to indicate what areas are actually racially mixed in any meaningful way. I find this doing future residents a huge disservice...
I know these areas quite well, and in the areas we have been discussing there are indeed people of different races living together on the same blocks.
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