#urban inequality

[worldhabitatday]

Tackling urban poverty and inequality have become an urgent global priority.

The pandemic and recent conflicts have reversed years of progress made in the fight against poverty, resulting in the emergence of newly poor people — those who would have exited poverty in the absence of the pandemic but remain poor, and those who have fallen into poverty on account of the pandemic. According to the UN-Habitat’s World Cities Report, the number of people affected was between 119 and 124 million in 2020, and between 143 and 163 million in 2021. Tackling urban poverty and inequality have become an urgent global priority.

[alwaysbewoke]

[whatevergreen]

'One Third of a Nation' (in poverty) - O. Louis Guglielmi, 1939. (The Met)

"In this painting Guglielmi draws attention to the horrid living conditions during the Great Depression. The forms in the foreground resemble coffins and subsequently suggest a similar reading of the brick tenements behind them. The floral wreath adorning the building’s cornice reinforces this metaphor."

[thoughtportal]

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Once You See the Truth About Cars, You Can’t Unsee It https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/opinion/car-ownership-inequality.html

By Andrew Ross and Julie Livingston

Mr. Ross and Ms. Livingston are professors at New York University, members of its Prison Education Program Research Lab and authors of the book “Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality.”

In American consumer lore, the automobile has always been a “freedom machine” and liberty lies on the open road. “Americans are a race of independent people” whose “ancestors came to this country for the sake of freedom and adventure,” the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce’s soon-to-be-president, Roy Chapin, declared in 1924. “The automobile satisfies these instincts.” During the Cold War, vehicles with baroque tail fins and oodles of surplus chrome rolled off the assembly line, with Native American names like Pontiac, Apache, Dakota, Cherokee, Thunderbird and Winnebago — the ultimate expressions of capitalist triumph and Manifest Destiny.

But for many low-income and minority Americans, automobiles have been turbo-boosted engines of inequality, immobilizing their owners with debt, increasing their exposure to hostile law enforcement, and in general accelerating the forces that drive apart haves and have-nots.

Though progressive in intent, the Biden administration’s signature legislative achievements on infrastructure and climate change will further entrench the nation’s staunch commitment to car production, ownership and use. The recent Inflation Reduction Act offers subsidies for many kinds of vehicles using alternative fuel, and should result in real reductions in emissions, but it includes essentially no direct incentives for public transit — by far the most effective means of decarbonizing transport. And without comprehensive policy efforts to eliminate discriminatory policing and predatory lending, merely shifting to electric from combustion will do nothing to reduce car owners’ ever-growing risk of falling into legal and financial jeopardy, especially those who are poor or Black.

By the 1940s, African American car owners had more reason than anyone to see their vehicles as freedom machines, as a means to escape, however temporarily, redlined urban ghettos in the North or segregated towns in the South. But their progress on roads outside of the metro core was regularly obstructed by the police, threatened by vigilante assaults, and stymied by owners of whites-only restaurants, lodgings and gas stations. Courts granted the police vast discretionary authority to stop and search for any one of hundreds of code violations — powers that they did not apply evenly. Today, officers make more than 50,000 traffic stops a day. Driving while Black has become a major route to incarceration — or much worse. When Daunte Wright was killed by a police officer in April 2021, he had been pulled over for an expired registration tag on his car’s license plate. He joined the long list of Black drivers whose violent and premature deaths at the hands of police were set in motion by a minor traffic infraction — Sandra Bland (failure to use a turn signal), Maurice Gordon (alleged speeding), Samuel DuBose (missing front license plate) and Philando Castile and Walter Scott (broken taillights) among them. Despite widespread criticism of the flimsy pretexts used to justify traffic stops, and the increasing availability of cellphone or police body cam videos, the most recent data shows that the number of deaths from police-driver interactions is almost as high as it has been over the past five years.

In the consumer arena, cars have become tightly sprung debt traps. The average monthly auto loan payment crossed $700 for the first time this year, which does not include insurance or maintenance costs. Subprime lending and longer loan terms of up to 84 months have resulted in a doubling of auto loan debt over the last decade and a notable surge in the number of drivers who are “upside down”— owing more money than their cars are worth. But, again, the pain is not evenly distributed. Auto financing companies often charge nonwhite consumers higher interest rates than white consumers, as do insurers.

Formerly incarcerated buyers whose credit scores are depressed from inactivity are especially red meat to dealers and predatory lenders. In our research, we spoke to many such buyers who found it easier, upon release from prison, to acquire expensive cars than to secure an affordable apartment. Some, like LeMarcus, a Black Brooklynite (whose name has been changed to protect his privacy under ethical research guidelines), discovered that loans were readily available for a luxury vehicle but not for the more practical car he wanted. Even with friends and family willing to help him with a down payment, after he spent roughly five years in prison, his credit score made it impossible to get a Honda or “a regular car.” Instead, relying on a friend to co-sign a loan, he was offered a high-interest loan on a pre-owned Mercedes E350. LeMarcus knew it was a bad deal, but the dealer told him the bank that would have financed a Honda “wanted a more solid foundation, good credit, income was showing more,” but that to finance the Mercedes, it “was actually willing to work with the people with lower credit and lower down payments.” We interviewed many other formerly incarcerated people who followed a similar path, only to see their cars repossessed.

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LeMarcus was “car rich, cash poor,” a common and precarious condition that can have serious legal consequences for low-income drivers, as can something as simple as a speeding ticket. A $200 ticket is a meaningless deterrent to a hedge fund manager from Greenwich, Conn., who is pulled over on the way to the golf club, but it could be a devastating blow to those who mow the fairways at the same club. If they cannot pay promptly, they will face cascading penalties. If they cannot take a day off work to appear in court, they risk a bench warrant or loss of their license for debt delinquency. Judges in local courts routinely skirt the law of the land (in Supreme Court decisions like Bearden v. Georgia and Timbs v. Indiana) by disregarding the offender’s ability to pay traffic debt. At the request of collection agencies, they also issue arrest or contempt warrants for failure to appear in court on unpaid auto loan debts. With few other options to travel to work, millions of Americans make the choice to continue driving even without a license, which means their next traffic stop may land them in jail.

The pathway that leads from a simple traffic fine to financial insolvency or detention is increasingly crowded because of the spread of revenue policing intended to generate income from traffic tickets, court fees and asset forfeiture. Fiscally squeezed by austerity policies, officials extract the funds from those least able to pay. This is not only an awful way to fund governments; it is also a form of backdoor, regressive taxation that circumvents voters’ input.

Deadly traffic stops, racially biased predatory lending and revenue policing have all come under public scrutiny of late, but typically they are viewed as distinct realms of injustice, rather than as the interlocking systems that they are. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it: A traffic stop can result in fines or arrest; time behind bars can result in repossession or a low credit score; a low score results in more debt and less ability to pay fines, fees and surcharges. Championed as a kind of liberation, car ownership — all but mandatory in most parts of the country — has for many become a vehicle of capture and control.

Industry boosters promise us that technological advances like on-demand transport, self-driving electric vehicles and artificial intelligence-powered traffic cameras will smooth out the human errors that lead to discrimination, and that car-sharing will reduce the runaway costs of ownership. But no combination of apps and cloud-based solutions can ensure that the dealerships, local municipalities, courts and prison industries will be willing to give up the steady income they derive from shaking down motorists.

Aside from the profound need for accessible public transportation, what could help? Withdraw armed police officers from traffic duties, just as they have been from parking and tollbooth enforcement in many jurisdictions. Introduce income-graduated traffic fines. Regulate auto lending with strict interest caps and steep penalties for concealing fees and add-ons and for other well-known dealership scams. Crack down hard on the widespread use of revenue policing. And close the back door to debtors’ prisons by ending the use of arrest warrants in debt collection cases. Without determined public action along these lines, technological advances often end up reproducing deeply rooted prejudices. As Malcolm X wisely said, “Racism is like a Cadillac; they bring out a new model every year.”

Andrew Ross and Julie Livingston are professors at New York University, members of its Prison Education Program Research Lab and authors of the book “Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality.”

[berniesrevolution]

Adam Something | How Suburbs Destroyed America

[rotzaprachim]

a wild flavor of tumblr user is a certain kind of white American self id’d leftist or commie who reblogs and posts things about I just think all liberals and centrists should DIE (*guillotine* meme) and then posts things needing to be nicer to demographics that vote 80% Republican and are very systemically involved in the structural and practical oppression of people of color and the whole US hegemony like brooo I get having a seriously messy relationship with your own cultural background but who are you talking about? Guillotining everyone at mawmaw’s thanksgiving?

[feodortum]

[00baixo]

A black man and his belongings, which include a supermarket car and recycling pages, thrown at the curb of the intersection between Ana Cintra and Roberto Piva streets.

Friday, on the 21st day of April 2023. Tiradentes Day holiday, at Rua Ana Cintra, City of São Paulo, Brazil.

[salonnierealexis]

Madhusudan Katti, an ecologist at North Carolina State University who has worked at the intersection of biodiversity conservation and human well-being for most of his career, agreed. “Often the interests of other species and marginalized humans align,” he said. “It’s very much a colonial perspective to think about humans and wildlife as separate. We need to start thinking about humans and wildlife together in the landscape and mitigate things that will help both.”

Why Warblers Flock to Wealthier Neighborhoods

In the unequal distribution of birds and other species, ecologists are tracing the impact of bigoted urban policies adopted decades ago.

[indizombie]

Pre-poll surveys, exit polls, and analyses of election results emerging from Karnataka have all made it apparent that the highest preference for the right-leaning BJP – which, at least symbolically, frowns upon freebies – was shown by the wealthiest and most educated segment. Preference for the left-leaning Congress and JD(S) – which campaigned on the plank of welfare schemes – increase as we proceed to the poorer and less educated segments. Three of the four districts in Karnataka where the BJP managed to win a majority of the Assembly seats are Bengaluru Urban (16/28), Dakshina Kannada (6/8), and Udupi (5/5), districts that constantly top the Human Development Index and per-capita income rankings in the state, statistics that indicate a higher concentration of the rich. Everywhere else, the Congress and the JD-S won a majority of the seats. This dissonance in the voting pattern can be attributed, at least in part, to the increasing inequality between the rich and the rest, in Karnataka and across India.

Rakshith Ponnathpur, ‘The rich, the rest and freebies: Unpacking a problematic narrative’, Deccan Herald

[reasoningdaily]

The Dark Side of Urban Growth: Study Reveals Rampant Inequality in Cities

The researchers followed the careers of 1.4 million Swedish wage earners and discovered that those who started off successfully in big cities saw even greater success compared to those in smaller cities. On the other hand, the average wage growth for individuals in both big and small cities was nearly the same.

Urban scaling laws arise from disparities within cities.

Urban inequality in Europe and the US is so pronounced that the majority of the benefits from the agglomeration effects of big cities go to urban elites, leaving a significant portion of the urban population with little to no benefits. A study published in Nature Human Behaviour conducted by researchers at Linköping University reveals that the higher-than-expected outputs of larger cities are heavily reliant on the exceptional success of just a few individuals.

Recently, researchers from various fields have discovered remarkable and seemingly universal correlations between the size of cities and their socioeconomic activity. As cities expand, they generate more wealth, interconnectivity, and innovations per resident. However, what may be accurate for the overall city population, may not apply to individual residents.

Marc Keuschnigg, associate professor at the Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University and Professor at the Institute of Sociology, Leipzig University. Credit: Marc Keuschnigg

“The higher-than-expected economic outputs of larger cities critically depend on the extreme outcomes of the successful few. Ignoring this dependency, policymakers risk overestimating the stability of urban growth, particularly in the light of the high spatial mobility among urban elites and their movement to where the money is,“ says Marc Keuschnigg, associate professor at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University and professor at the Institute of Sociology at Leipzig University.

In a study published in Nature Human Behaviour, the researchers analyze geocoded micro-data on social interactions and economic output in Sweden, Russia, and the United States. It shows that inequality is rampant in earnings and innovation, as well as in measures of urban interconnectivity.

An individual’s productivity depends on the local social environments in which they find themselves in. Because of the greater diversity in larger cities, skilled and specialized people are more likely to find others whose skills are complementary to their own. This allows for higher levels of productivity and greater learning opportunities in larger cities.

But, not everyone can access the productive social environments that larger cities provide. Different returns from context accumulate over time which gives rise to substantial inequality.

The researchers traced 1.4 million Swedish wage earners over time and find that those who were initially successful in large cities flourished to a greater extent than the successful in smaller cities. By contrast, the typical individuals in both smaller and larger cities experienced almost identical wage trajectories.

Consequently, the initially successful individuals in the bigger cities increasingly distanced themselves from both the typical individual in their own city, creating inequality within the big cities, and the most successful individuals in smaller cities, creating inequality between cities.

The study also finds that top earners are more likely to leave a smaller city than larger ones, and that these overperformers tend overwhelmingly to move to the largest cities. The disproportionate out-migration of the most successful individuals from smaller cities results in a reinforcement process that takes away many of the most promising people in less populous regions while adding them to larger cities.

The biggest cities are buzzing because they also host the most innovative, sociable, and skilled people. These outliers add disproportionately to city outputs—a “rich get richer” process that brings cumulative advantage to the biggest cities.

From a policy perspective, the study considers the sustainability of city life against the backdrop of rising urban inequality.

“Urban science has largely focused on city averages. The established approach just looked at one data point per city, for example, average income. With their focus on averages, prior studies overlooked the stark inequalities that exist within cities when making predictions about how urban growth affects the life experiences of city dwellers”, says Marc Keuschnigg.

With respect to urban inequality, the study draws attention to the partial exclusion of most city dwellers from the socioeconomic benefits of growing cities. Their lifestyle, different than of the urban elite, benefits less from geographical location. When accounting for the cost of living in larger cities, many big-city dwellers will in fact be worse off as compared to similar people living in smaller places.

Reference: “Urban scaling laws arise from within-city inequalities” by Martin Arvidsson, Niclas Lovsjö and Marc Keuschnigg, 26 January 2023, Nature Human Behaviour. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01509-1

[urban-surfin]

The wealth gap between rich and poor is like the wealth gap between urban and rural: Corporations and billionaires have taken industry and opportunity to the cities.

[faithfromanewperspective]

Omg what is 5sos city?

the city with the brightest lights

[mexicanistnet]

In the 1940s Mexico City, poverty and inequality birthed youth gangs. These weren't hardened criminals, but teens finding belonging and escape amidst urban sprawl. Their stories, etched in graffiti and court records, urge us to see them as victims of a city growing too fast, leaving them behind.

[worldcitiesday]

Women-led Cities: Bringing Gender Responsive Actions, Solutions and Partnerships from the Local Level to Scale.

The Women-led Cities side-event will discuss how women leaders of businesses, cities and communities can join forces to drive positive local transformation through inclusive leadership, economic empowerment and reduced inequality. 

Side Event at the SDG Action Weekend organized by UN-Habitat, UNCDF, Ellaimpacta, The Gambia, Bangladesh, UCLG.

To maximize the SDG Summit's impact, the Secretary General is convening an SDG Action Weekend, which will generate opportunities for stakeholders, UN entities, and Member States to convene inside the United Nations Headquarters and set out specific commitments and contributions to drive SDG transformation between now and 2030.

The SDG Action Weekend will consist of the SDG Mobilization Day on Saturday, 16 September, and the SDG Acceleration Day on Sunday, 17 September at UNHQ in New York.

The SDG Action Weekend includes a select number of high-level side-events identified through an open call that concluded in August. They are jointly organized by coalitions of Member States, UN agencies and other international organizations, and global stakeholder networks.