We've Struck an Iceberg I Think?

Living in Louisville all my life has been a rewarding experience, I love this City but I must ask is everything as it should be?  Well no and let me explain.  A few observations.  We are a number of cities created and split by highways.  That is I 65 from north to south and the Watterson from east to west.  These concrete curtains and something called the "southwest outfall" charted Louisville's course.  Yet there were countless other factors I could not get a handle on.

I read an article recently that helped to shed light on the City and how it evolved  Here are a few terms that I both troubling and enlightening that describe Louisville:

Issue #147, Fall 2006

Privileged Places Race, Opportunity and Uneven Development in Urban America By Gregory D. Squires and Charis E. Kubrin

Here are but a few examples: 

• Place and race continue to be defining characteristics of the opportunity structure of metropolitan areas.

• Dominant features of metropolitan development in the post-World War II years are sprawl, concentrated poverty and segregation (if not hyper segregation).

• Clearly, these are not separate, mutually exclusive patterns and processes. Rather, they are three critical underpinnings of the uneven development of place and privilege.

• Spatial and racial inequalities are directly associated with access to virtually all products and services associated with the good life – e.g., health, education, employment
• Compounding these troubles are the “mental maps” many employers draw, in which they attribute various job-related characteristics (such as skills, experience, attitudes) to residents of certain neighborhoods.

• Such decision making is framed and limited by a range of structural constraints. Individuals exercise choice, but those choices do not reflect what is normally understood as voluntary.
  
• The end result is often an unintended subsidy of private economic activity by jurisdictions that compete in a “race to the bottom” in efforts to attract footloose firms and mobile capital, starving traditional public services – like education – for resources in the process. A downward spiral is established that further undercuts the quality of life.
  
• Colorblindness is often a euphemism for what amounts to a retreat on race and the preservation of white privilege in its many forms. In a world of scarce resources, class-based remedies dilute available support for combating racial discrimination and segregation.
  
• Many suburban employers are unable to find the workers they need, in part because of the high cost of housing in their local communities. Often there are local developers who would like to build affordable housing and lenders who are willing to finance it, but local zoning prohibits such construction

To access article click here:

If policy is largely responsible for getting us where we are today, then policy can help us pursue a different path toward severing the links among race, place and privilege tomorrow.

To me these descriptors apply to Louisville.  Are we turning a blind eye?  Maybe we do not have it so good.  The solution or acceptance?