Saturday, March 29, 2014
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
TAKE YOUR STUDENTS ON A 13.8 BILLION YEAR JOURNEY - Big History Project
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Tuesday, March 25, 2014
The U.S. Cities Where the Poor Are Most Segregated From Everyone Else - The Atlantic
Article link: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2014/03/us-cities-where-poor-are-most-segregated/8655/
This is the second post in a five-part series on economic segregation in U.S. metros.
Poverty in America is an enormous problem. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 15 percent of Americans, or 46.5 million people, lived below the poverty line in 2012. And the poor are increasingly isolated across America. As Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff have documented, between 1970 and 2009 the proportion of poor families living in poor neighborhoods more than doubled, from 8 to 18 percent. And the trend shows no signs of abating.
This increasing concentration of poverty poses a host of problems to communities. Less advantaged communities suffer not just from a lack of economic resources but from everything from higher crime and drop-out rates to higher rates of infant mortality and chronic disease. In his classic The Truly Disadvantaged, William Julius Wilson called attention to the deleterious social effects that go along with the spatial concentration of poverty, which “include the kinds of ecological niches that the residents of these neighborhoods occupy in terms of access to jobs and job networks, availability of marriageable partners, involvement in quality schools, and exposure to conventional role models."
But just how segregated are the poor across U.S. metros?
Today I examine the segregation of poverty across America’s metro areas. To get at this, my Martin Prosperity Institute colleague Charlotta Mellander measured the distribution of poverty across the more than 70,000 Census tracts that make up America’s 350-plus U.S. metros for 2010. To calculate the segregation of poverty, she used an index of dissimilarity, developed by sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, that compares the distribution of a selected group of people with all other in that location. The more evenly distributed the poor are compared to the rest of the population, the lower the level of segregation. The dissimilarity index ranges from 0 to 1, where 0 reflects no segregation and 1 reflects complete segregation. The MPI’s Zara Matheson mapped the data.
As the map shows, the metros where the poor are the most segregated are mostly found along the Eastern Seaboard from New England to the Mid-Atlantic states, across the Midwest and the Great Lakes region, and in parts of Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado.
The table below shows the ten largest metros (those with one million or more people) where the poor experience the highest and lowest levels of segregation.
| Large Metros Where the Poor Are Most Segregated | |||
| Rank | Metro | Index | Rank of All Metros |
| 1 | Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI | 0.478 | 2 |
| 2 | Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT | 0.462 | 6 |
| 3 | Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 0.455 | 9 |
| 4 | Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, OH | 0.435 | 15 |
| 5 | Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI | 0.433 | 16 |
| 6 | New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA | 0.428 | 20 |
| 7 | Buffalo-Niagara Falls, NY | 0.416 | 29 |
| 8 | Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, CO | 0.413 | 32 |
| 9 | Baltimore-Towson, MD | 0.413 | 35 |
| 10 | Memphis, TN-MS-AR | 0.410 | 36 |
The large metros where the poor are most segregated are in the Midwest and the Northeast. Milwaukee has the highest level, followed by Hartford, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, Buffalo, Denver, Baltimore, and Memphis. Many of these are Rustbelt metros with large minority populations that have been hit hard by deindustrialization.
When medium and smaller-sized metros are taken into account, many of the places with the most concentrated poverty turn out to be college towns, where the town-gown divide seems to be very real. State College, Pennsylvania (home to Penn State), has the highest level of poverty segregation in the country; Ann Arbor (University of Michigan) is fifth; Ames, Iowa (Iowa State) is eighth and New Haven (Yale University) is tenth. Madison, Wisconsin (University of Wisconsin); Boulder, Colorado (University of Colorado); Iowa City, Iowa (University of Iowa); and Champaign-Urbana, Illinois (University of Illinois), all suffer from relatively high levels of poverty segregation as well.
| Large Metros Where the Poor Are Least Segregated | |||
| Rank | Metro | Index | Rank of All Metros |
| 51 | Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL | 0.274 | 277 |
| 50 | Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA | 0.299 | 240 |
| 49 | Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL | 0.319 | 191 |
| 48 | San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 0.322 | 184 |
| 47 | Jacksonville, FL | 0.325 | 179 |
| 46 | Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL | 0.327 | 177 |
| 45 | Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 0.331 | 171 |
| 44 | Salt Lake City, UT | 0.334 | 163 |
| 43 | Oklahoma City, OK | 0.336 | 160 |
| 42 | Riverside-San Berardino-Ontario, CA | 0.338 | 159 |
Conversely, the large metros where the poor are the least segregated are mainly found in the Sunbelt and the West. Four of the ten least segregated large metros in terms of poverty are located in Florida—Orlando, Tampa, Miami, and Jacksonville. Many of these metros have lower wage service economies, but several are centers of high tech industry and knowledge work, including San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley, as well as Portland, Oregon; Seattle, and Salt Lake City.
The metros where the poor are least segregated are all smaller metros. In fact, there are about 80 smaller and medium-sized metros where the poor are less segregated than the least-segregated large metro. Jacksonville, North Carolina, has the lowest level of poverty segregation in the country, followed by Medford, Oregon; Hinesville-Fort Stewart, Georgia; and Prescott, Arizona.
To get at this, Mellander ran a basic correlation analysis between the segregation of poverty and key economic, social, and demographic characteristics of metros. As usual, I note that correlation does not equal causation and points only to associations between variables.
The poor face higher levels of segregation in larger, denser metros. The segregation of the poor is closely associated with the density (.54) and slightly less so with size of metros (.43). This may simply be because large metros have greater numbers of very rich and very poor people; density and high real estate values encourage sorting by class and income. The competition for housing is greater, prices tend to be higher; and this may leave the poor with fewer neighborhoods to choose from, leading to more concentrated poverty.
The segregation of poverty is more pronounced in more affluent metros, as the index of segregation is positively correlated with three key markers of regional development: average wages (.46), per capita incomes (.42) and economic output per capita (.34). The poor also face greater levels of segregation in more advanced, knowledge-based metros. The segregation of poverty is positively associated with the percent of adults that are college grads (.51), a commonly used indicator of human capital; the share of workers in knowledge, professional and creative jobs (.48); and the concentration of high tech industry (.47).
Almost by definition, one would think that the places where the poor are more segregated would be beset with higher levels of economic inequality. But interestingly, Mellander’s analysis finds only a modest relationship between the segregation of poverty and income inequality (with a correlation of .20). In other words, the segregation of poverty is more strongly connected to how affluent metros are on average than to the unequal distribution of incomes. How much money people have seems to matter more than how big the gap is between the rich and the poor. One possible explanation is that people in these more affluent metros have greater means to segregate themselves. Since housing prices typically track incomes, higher prices may well leave poorer residents with fewer options, reinforcing these higher levels of segregation.
In America, race clearly overlaps with poverty. But the association between race and the segregation of the poor across America’s metros is much weaker than one might assume, according to Mellander’s analysis. The segregation of poverty is positively associated with the share of the population that is African American (.12) and Asian (.22), but is not significantly associated with the share that is White or Latino. It is useful to point out that our analysis does not consider the long-held connection between race and poverty overall, but rather the connection between race and the segregation of the poor. Even though race and poverty have historically been linked in American cities, the poor are only slightly more or less segregated depending on the overall racial characteristics of metros. Here again, this may indicate that the segregation of the poor is shaped more by the housing and location choices of more affluent groups.
My next post in this series turns to the segregation of the wealthy, which brings its own set of troubles.
Top Image: A vacant, boarded up house is seen in the once thriving Brush Park neighborhood with the downtown Detroit skyline behind it (REUTERS/ Rebecca Cook).
Richard Florida is Co-Founder and Editor at Large at The Atlantic Cities. He's also a Senior Editor at The Atlantic, Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, and Global Research Professor at New York University. He is a frequent speaker to communities, business and professional organizations, and founder of the Creative Class Group, Sunday, March 16, 2014
Reflecting on the long war and the toll it has taken - Stars & Stripes
Article link: http://www.stripes.com/reflecting-on-the-long-war-and-the-toll-it-has-taken-1.272915
A U.S. Marine walks through the desert at the end of a clearing operation in Helmand province, Afghanistan, on Dec. 21, 2013.
| |
Timothy Habedank pulled his Air Force uniform out of the closet, gathered his gear and flew out of the country a second time to help defuse bombs in Afghanistan.
The senior airman and Xenia native left behind his wife, Lauren, and a 6-month-old daughter, Kylie, at an Air Force base in Louisiana.
Since 2001, servicemembers like Habedank have left their families to serve in one of the world’s hot spots. Thousands have paid the ultimate price and thousands more have come home damaged. Families back home have endured untold hardships as deployments drag on during a war in Afghanistan that long ago became the longest in U.S. history.
“It’s hard. I mean, you wonder if your spouse is OK, whether he’s able to sleep or what he’s doing at that moment,” said Lauren, 28, who took her daughter and moved in with her mother back in Ohio while Habedank was at war. “It’s always a concern if he’s going to get hurt or if he’s going to come home at all.”
Three days before he left in January 2012, Habedank’s best friend and two other airmen were killed in an improvised device explosion in Afghanistan, according to news accounts.
Habedank’s deployment this time, his third since he met Lauren and the first since his daughter was born, would be his last. He left the military in June for a new life in Troy, away from firefights, snipers, exploding mortar rounds and bomb blasts.
“It’s one thing to be gone from your child for six months, or seven, eight months at a time and come home,” said Habedank, 25. “It’s another thing for your child to never know you.”
Overseas multiple times
Like more than 1.1 million service members across the nation, Habedank served multiple tours of duty overseas, twice to Afghanistan and once to Oman.
The stress and strain are familiar to service members on active duty, and to reservists and National Guardsmen. The Pentagon estimates 2.6 million American service members have been sent to Iraq or Afghanistan at least once since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base alone, the largest military base in Ohio, the number of deployed personnel reached a peak of 1,039 last year, compared to 565 in 2002.
Even as the war in Afghanistan winds down, military commanders in other areas of the world have called on service members stateside to fill positions overseas, said Col. Cassie B. Barlow, commander of the 88th Air Base Wing at Wright-Patterson. The Air Force doesn’t assign as many airmen to bases in foreign countries as it once did, so deployments have been greater, she said.
“I think there’s going to be a constant level of deployment from here on out as far as I can see because there are so many combatant commands that are in need of support,” she said. Barlow said she recently talked to an airman who had 10 deployments.
“We have many, many multiple time deployers, which is also a new phenomenon in our American history,” she said. “We haven’t seen that much in the past.”
Col. Norman A. Poklar, commander of the of the 269th Combat Communications Squadron at the Springfield Air National Guard Base, has seen the phenomenon at work in his unit, where he said members want to deploy to practice their skills in real world conditions.
“We’re not seeing an immediate reduction in the demand for our services,” he said.
The Air Force has attempted to prepare airmen with realistic expectations of life down range while helping families prior to and during their family member’s absence and with reintegration when they come home, she said.
The military has been more open about talking about issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder, she said. “First and foremost we’ve come to a point where we can talk about it,” she said. “Years ago, nobody wanted to talk about it and we talk about it.”
The costs of war
The Pentagon reported nearly 4,500 service members died in Iraq and nearly 2,200 in Afghanistan, where 33,900 U.S. troops remain entrenched in America’s longest war at 12 years and counting with a timeline for most and perhaps all to depart by the end of the year. More than 32,000 U.S. service members were wounded in Iraq and more than 19,500 in Afghanistan.
The deployments, and the demands of military life, can take their toll. Many troops have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder, brain injury, musculoskeletal injuries such as back problems or lost limbs.
Kathy Platoni, a Centerville psychologist and retired Army Reserve colonel who deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba, said multiple deployments have exacerbated issues for service members such as sexual assault and suicides in the ranks and joblessness and homelessness.
The most common problems deployed service members cited were family separation, concerns about the relationship with their spouse or significant other, and “toxic leadership,” or commanders who put their self-interest ahead of the needs or safety of troops, she said.
Returning service members may find themselves isolated when they come home to a culture where less than 1 percent of the population has served in the military and doesn’t understand the aftereffect of war, she said.
“Nobody comes back unscathed,” she said. “People go searching for their old selves hanging in the closet and you’re just not there.”
Help is available, but many veterans don’t know where to turn to find it when they hang up their uniform, she said.
February’s unemployment rate for post-9/11 veterans at 9.2 percent is higher than veterans of all eras who had a 6.2 percent jobless rate in the same month, according to federal statistics. The national average for the month was 6.9 percent.
The hunt for a job after leaving the military is one Ashlie Hawes, knows well.
When the 23-year-old Enon resident and Wright State University student left the Marine Corps, she filled out 10 to 15 job applications daily for a few months until she said she got a job as an administrative assistant at the Montgomery County jail.
Although she served stateside during her time in uniform, she said veterans battle the stigma of employers fearful to hire those who served because they may have mental health issues from their wartime experiences or assume they may be called back to duty despite not being in the military any longer. “It’s still very difficult, even for veterans, to find decent paying jobs when they leave,” she said.
For some, deployments have brought emotional upheaval, or financial hardships, or strained family ties.
And even when not deployed, some jobs, like Habedank’s, kept him away from his family about 70 percent of the year.
“We actually as a couple spent more time apart than we did together in the first four years of our marriage,” said Lauren Habedank, a legal assistant in Dayton.
When her husband was deployed, they communicated sporadically via email and satellite phone.
“There’s periods of time when you go to certain places there’s no communication or you go on certain missions where she won’t hear from me for two weeks,” he said.
The combat death of his friend and fellow bomb technician, Senior Airman Bryan R. Bell, of Erie, Pa., and the final six-month deployment made it a rough time for his family, he said.
“We felt like that we were drifting apart in a sense and we wanted to focus on our family,” he said.
“The whole world fell apart at one time,” he said. “Deployment for an EOD tech, that’s a great way to escape because when you’re there, you’re focused on two things and that’s keeping this guy and this guy alive. That’s your job. … I didn’t have to worry about Bryan’s death or things going on at home.”
Habedank said a senior leader told him after his best friend died he did not have to deploy then, but he felt compelled to go. “I justified to myself I would be doing him a dishonor,” he said. “He wouldn’t want me to stay home because something happened to him.”
When Habedank made the decision last year to get out, he had a new set of worries about finding employment.
“There’s not a lot of jobs in the Dayton area for somebody trying to disarm IEDs,” he said.
A family member tipped him off about a job opening at a materials testing firm in Lewis Center near Columbus, and after two phone interviews he had a civilian job in Ohio waiting before he left Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
For Lauren, the prospect of no more deployments has brought relief.
“I can breathe,” she said. “It’s nice knowing that he’s going to walk in the door at the same time every day.”
Yet despite the hardship of family separation, Habedank said when he reaches the one-year anniversary of leaving the Air Force, he’ll ponder re-enlistment. He misses the camaraderie in the military and the family-like unit he served in and the purpose behind a job he said saves lives.
Lauren said she would support his choice.
“I think it takes a special kind of person to be able to risk their lives on a daily basis for people they don’t know,” she said, wiping her eyes, “and he truly loved it.”
The danger patrol
Marine Sgt. Mathew E. Demers lived through a barrage of hit-and-run attacks from snipers and improvised explosive devices in his two deployments to Iraq.
“The first couple weeks were extremely boring,” the 34-year-old Enon man said. “A lot of patrolling, a lot of getting to know the area.”
U.S. and coalition forces eradicated large scale, coordinated attacks by enemy forces within Iraq, he said, but the danger never left. He was sent to Camp Fallujah on his first tour in 2005.
“We had to deal with a lot of IEDs, a lot more attacks,” said Demers, now a student Wright State University studying economics.
Three of his fellow Marines were killed and 30 wounded in that first tour, he remembered.
“We lost most to IEDs and mortars,” he said.
It was his first exposure to combat. “The first time it happened you’re not really scared per se,” said Demers, who left active duty last year and transferred into the Marine Corps Reserve. “You’re kind of like waiting for it to happen. You kind of know it’s going to happen. You’re kind of prepared for it. The weirdest thing about it was how ridiculous it was.”
Bystanders would scatter when shots rang out, and wait for the disturbance to cease.
“But as soon as it was over, as soon as we stopped moving, they were just shopping in the markets and going about their day like nothing happened,” Demers said. “It was such a norm for them for that to happen. So it was kind of weird … a really intense part of my life was just another day to them.”
While Demers lived through the danger of war thousands of miles from Ohio, his mother waited and worried.
Demers’ brother, Timothy, enlisted in the Marines and was sent to Afghanistan. With her two sons in the Marines and sent off to war, it was an trying time for Jeanna Kilgore, 51, of Springfield.
While proud of their military service, it was “very emotional like a roller coaster ride,” she said. “You’re going up and down and up and down. You don’t want to watch the news (because) that’s the worst thing in the world.
“I’m very overprotective of my children, so for them to be over there in that situation it literally tore me apart,” she said.
“That was a little bit different dynamic because I saw how stressed out she was about it,” Mathew Demers said. His brother “did join after I did and was really kind of concerned about him because I did kind of have the sense that he kind of followed me so I felt some kind of responsibility for whatever would have happened to him.”
At times, Kilgore said she went weeks without hearing from Mat.
“I would just sit here and just cry,” she said. “Just cry from not hearing from him. You can receive a letter but until you hear their voice … then you know they’re safe.”
She poignantly recalled her son, Timothy, losing a friend in Afghanistan.
“It breaks my heart that my youngest son over in Afghanistan was sent to pick up the pieces of a friend because he stepped on an IED,” she said. “As a mother, that’s a horror you can never erase from your child’s brain.”
Kilgore turned to family and friends and her faith when her sons went to war.
“You put a lot of faith in God,” she said. “I lean so heavily on my religion and on my Catholic upbringing. Every day I would pray for them. Every day. It’s a lot easier now to breathe that they are both home.”
Her son, Timothy, who has suffered back problems since he joined the Marines, will be leaving the military soon. “I’m thankful that he made it home from Afghanistan in one piece,” she said.
Many Ohio Air National Guardsmen have been sent to combat zones as the war on terror grew hotter.
Staff Sgt. Cody J. Gebele, 24, a security police officer with the 178th Fighter Wing at Springfield Air National Guard Base, bonded with fellow air guardsmen when he returned home from Iraq on emergency leave because his mother died of breast cancer at age 41.
“Being away from home was the hardest thing for me,” he said.
Master Sgt. Matthew Dill, 33, went from working on communications gear at the Springfield base to assignments in Afghanistan and Iraq, among other locations.
A member of the 269th Combat Communications Squadron, he spent two months in Afghanistan. “Basically, there’s some excitement, a lot of stress,” the Centerville man said of his deployment after years training in the Air National Guard.
“Then there’s the seriousness (of war),” he said. “I’ve never been a gun owner and I’m now armed with an M-16 with live ammunition. There’s that kind of surrealness to it.”
Maj. Steven Dudash, 44, of Terre Haute in Champaign County has deployed to Afghanistan, Kuwait and Germany while his wife, and two children waited at home.
“It’s probably I would say it’s harder on them than it is on me,” Dudash said. “I go there I know where I’m going to go to bed at night, I know where my meals are going to come from and they’re left at home to have to take care of everything.”
He missed much of his daughter’s high school senior year. “I barely made it home for her high school graduation,” he said.
Waiting at the tarmac
Thousands of other troops have not made it home. More than a hundred times, 1st Lt. Michael A. Gibson waited on the tarmac for the return of fallen service members flown back to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
“It was emotional,” said Gibson, a public affairs officer at the 178th Fighter Wing assigned to Springfield Air National Guard Base. He had a six-month assignment to the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations at Dover.
“I mean, when you deal in a role like that it’s going to be emotional just because of the nature of what that is. But I was proud to be able honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice to ensure when they came home for that dignified transfer that everything was perfect.“
When the aircraft cargo door swung open, an American flag-draped coffin would emerge, carried out slowly by service members in uniform.
“There could be a dignified transfer at 2 a.m., another at 8 a.m., another one at 4 p.m. and I make sure we’re there at every single one,” the Huber Heights man said.
The length from the aircraft to the waiting hearse was the same, every time, carefully measured in a precise choreography for a fallen service member’s final journey home.
“We actually measured the length from the end of the aircraft to the vehicle where they were brought,” Gibson said. “And it was the exact same length every single time.”
Those walks were expected to become far less frequent with the draw down in American forces in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
Saturday, March 15, 2014
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