Segregation & The City

My friend Kirsten is a local historian, and she often has cool projects happening. This one is interesting - mapping Minneapolis by "restrictive deed covenants" - meaning the real redlining that happened in our fair city. Not enough to just know that it happened - Kirsten's group is showing exactly where & when.

http://www.startribune.com/mapping-prejudice-project-traces-history-of-discriminatory-deeds-in-minneapolis/402943496/

It's so easy for us to write off segregation in the 21st century as all about choice, but it's not. As Professor Ed Goetz of the U MN's Center for Urban & Regional Affairs put it: "It's important to understand how our cities came to look the way they are. We relegate them to natural market outcomes without reference to the very engineering and intrusive interventions that these things are."

Indeed.