Black City ; white problems.
Black City; White Problems: Historic and Systemic Blockades to Economic Parity in Philadelphia
https://sites.google.com/temple.edu/ppl/the-lab-report
Black people are fully embedded in the history of Philadelphia. Alice of Dunk’s Ferry, an enslaved woman, was born in Philadelphia around 1686, less than five years after the city was founded. Owned by Samuel Carpenter, a Quaker and friend to William Penn, Alice collected tolls for Dunk’s Ferry for decades. For more than a century, slavery was a constant presence in the city. Nine Black people were enslaved by George Washington in the President’s House, just steps away from Independence Hall. Abolition, civil war, and waves of northward migration would bring more and more Black residents to the city. As we know, the majority of Black people have not tasted equality or the fruits of success in this city.
By the twentieth century, industrialization transitioned Philadelphia away from its patrician roots in the elite history of the United States, and a gritty, working-class image of the city emerged. Philadelphia was, and in many ways still is, regarded as a blue-collar, working-class town. But access to the fruits of labor was not given to all the city’s residents. Poor, white immigrants became the majority of those employed in the union trades, city government, and the river ward factories, many finding paid work within days of arriving on American soil.
The union movement helped secure steady employment for the largely white, ethnic immigrants new to the city. Despite strong support of the union movement by Black communities, Black workers were largely denied union membership. Long-fought court battles were often the only way Black workers could get a union card. In 1944 white workers at the Philadelphia Transportation Company (PTC) went on strike to protest the promotion of Black workers from menial jobs to trolley operators. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to dispatch federal troops to the city to keep the transit system operational in a city integral to the war effort. For many, education has been a pathway to steady work and out of poverty, but Philadelphia’s public education system has failed Black and Brown communities, and the problem is only getting worse. At one time a high school education was sufficient to gain a foothold in the middle class. But today at least two years of post-high school education are needed to enter twenty-first-century careers. So what is the future for these students?
Companion to steady, union employment was access to homeownership, the greatest source of middle-class wealth in the United States. A full-time job as a skilled worker was a path to homeownership for working-class residents who were not college educated. Often the wages of the skilled and unskilled labor force could rival the salaries of white-collar workers. For Black workers, however, even those able to secure steady, good-paying jobs, structural barriers to homeownership were often insurmountable. Redlining, a social engineering effort by banks and the federal government beginning in the 1930s, denied mortgages to many Black families. As a result, huge stretches of Black neighborhoods withered and died, and Black communities were deprived of generations of wealth. Still today, Black homebuyers are being left behind. Just 45 percent of the Black population in the U.S. owns their home, compared to nearly 66 percent of the overall population.
For too long, Black and Brown communities have been left behind by their city. Thirty years ago, the real estate tax rebate was launched in Philadelphia. Who has benefited from it? Black and Brown people are becoming gentrification nomads. Condos well out of reach of working class, and even middle class, Black and Brown families are inundating inner city neighborhoods, forcing the working poor into white, working-class neighborhoods where rents are high even for well-worn, hundred-year-old properties. And, while public housing has improved somewhat, it is itself a temporary fix that seldom leads to self-sufficiency and homeownership.
White, working-class families who benefited from twentieth-century public policy are like TV’s The Jeffersons. They have been steadily moving on up, and their children and grandchildren will not have to put on construction boots because many are headed to business, medical, or law schools. Some even receive lucrative contracts to administer COVID vaccines without a proven track record or a healthcare background. This cohort of white citizens in our area colleges and universities are soon to be recognized as part of the city’s professional class. All the while Black, Brown, and other marginalized citizens are stuck in low-pay, often part-time jobs as security guards at area businesses, colleges, and big-box retail stores. They are community healthcare workers and cashiers at Walmart and McDonald’s. They are deemed essential workers but rarely seem to benefit from public policy nor reap the rewards of the robust stock market boom.
On the one hand we have continued the upward mobility of those who identify as white or work in service of white-led institutions while Black and Brown communities are mired in deeper and deeper poverty. Today, white families hold nearly ten times the wealth of Black families. Basically our collective pathways to the American dream have been intentionally blocked by a failed public education system, systemic employment barriers, and divested neighborhoods that become breeding grounds for crime. In a name, structural racism. The fundamental problems of inequality in America’s big cities are and have always been a white-created problem.
Too many Black and Brown women, men, and children have been systematically locked out of the modern economy. They have been gated off from opportunity and sidelined into an exploitative milieu that monetizes poverty by providing remedial services to the most disenfranchised census tracts. In the United States, we still have a mythical narrative that holds a false, American ideal of meritocracy and fair play, a Grand Gaslight that encourages youth to seek blue-collar jobs that will likely disappear in the wake of the gig economy. The business press parrots mistruths about the systematic and historical barriers that were intentionally put in place to stymie our prosperity. Instead of blue collars, we will end up a no-collar, t-shirt-clad cadre of unhoused people who have been deliberately blocked by corporations, unions, educators, and government — all by design. Not to mention the most at-risk, Black youth face being snatched up into the prison system, subjected to chronic health issues, and perpetually ensnared in poverty.
For Philadelphia to recapture the influence it held at the birth of the nation, the city must become a change agent. The city must invest where investment has never gone: Black Philly. As one of the Blackest and poorest big cities, our solutions must have courage, innovation, and a spirit of liberation. Philadelphia is a majority minority city. While the percentage of those identifying as Black or African American in the U.S. is just over 13 percent, in Philadelphia it is nearly 44 percent. The city must turn every stone that holds Philly’s Black and Brown communities from success. In the past, investments in Black Philly have typically been through small, fragmented grants from nonprofits or through subsidies from the government. At the same time, elsewhere in the city private equity and global financial institutions were making large $100 million to $1 billion investments. The failure to invest in Black and Brown communities is holding the city back. According to one national study, over the past two decades the lack of equitable lending to Black entrepreneurs has cost the economy $13 trillion and more than six million new jobs per year. Closing the racial wealth gap today would add an additional $1 trillion to the economy each year over the next five years.
The African American community needs to create collectives of industry expertise in order to position Black-owned enterprises to be able to secure the funding needed to allow their businesses to thrive while also maintaining their own majority ownership. The Collective, a new real estate firm providing equity capital to a group of seven African American developers, is an example. The Collective is an experienced group of real estate developers, investment professionals, and public policy experts. The mission of the Collective is to create and grow real estate assets that produce returns for investors while increasing ownership and generating wealth within Black communities. Philadelphia needs scalable investment and impact structures that will appeal to broad and varied sources of capital. Governments have proven incapable of providing the capital needed for action-based solutions. The Collective focuses on impact-driven investments and cultivating a pipeline of Black real estate developers to create equitable and sustainable growth in undercapitalized neighborhoods. Investing in real estate should be part of a broader strategy to create healthier communities which include buildings, public spaces, neighborhoods, and whole cities. Healthy cities are inclusive, equitable, and sustainable. Real Estate is an avenue of shifting wealth into the hands of marginalized neighborhoods while encouraging digital literacy, health improvement, job creation, human dignity, and personal security. The Collective aims to break the cycle of systemic racism and inequitable access to capital by employing a holistic approach to community development and advancing social impact investing in Philadelphia’s real estate sector. This approach of pooling expertise and resources to advance the success of Black-owned businesses and investing in communities of color can be applied industry by industry.
Is America ready to end the racial wealth gap? Are policymakers and investors ready to provide equitable, non-predatory investments and capital for Black ownership and wealth creation? Can we as a nation confront the real and ugly history of racial inequality? Is America ready to embrace the rich culture and heritage available in our currently marginalized neighborhoods? Black Americans have been demanding the justice we deserve, and we are ready to take what is rightfully ours as American citizens, as the descendants of the people who undergirded capitalism and the western economy for generations. As we strive to move beyond the legacies of systemic racism and as we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, we must use this moment to right these wrongs. If we succeed in Philadelphia, America will succeed.
published via Public Policy Lab
The Public Policy Lab (PPL) is an intellectual home for researchers who study public policies and the social processes relevant to their development and consequences. Housed in the College of Liberal Arts, the non-partisan lab provides an interdisciplinary forum for discussion of contemporary policy issues, research support for faculty and student scholarship and a mechanism to disseminate participants’ research findings.
PPL’s colloquia series, conferences, fellowships, and study groups bring together the varied perspectives of scholars from a range of disciplines. Through rigorous research, these scholars address critical policy challenges at the local, state and national levels.
SIGN UP NOW!
Join PPL’s mailing list to stay up to date with news, events, and publications.
Sign up at cla.temple.edu/ppl
