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199 CHAPTER SEVEN White Property and Homeowner Privilege Atlanta exemplified the problem of urban inequality at the turn to the twentyfirst century. As economist David Sjoquist outlines in a May  Russell Sage– funded study titled The Atlanta Paradox, poverty was highly concentrated and largely located in the older urban core. Despite the city’s reputation as a magnet for black business and the black middle class, white household income was over twice the average black household income. Jobs had moved to the suburbs , while many of the poor and working class remained confined to the central city. The Russell Sage Foundation series investigating economically and racially divided cities continued a twenty-five-year run of urban decline literature, a trend that accelerated in the s as the nation’s cities exploded with racial and economic tensions. The riots and protests that spawned the analysis of the “urban crisis” capped four generations of urban development that had rent the city into zones of economic homogeneity—wealthy, middle class, working poor, destitute—that overlay a more pervasive geography of black and white. But for all the studies and policy initiatives, as the publication of The Atlanta Paradox indicates, Atlanta still carried the burden of a divided city. A core city of decaying infrastructure, economic devastation, poor schools, and unhealthy, unsafe, and unaffordable housing remained surrounded by a ring (a sprawling ring) of affluence marked by stable public schools and a vibrant economy. Atlanta wasn’t alone. American cities remained so racially segmented at the end of the twentieth century that social scientists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton boldly label the issue “American Apartheid” in their  analysis of the pervasiveness of racial segregation. If anyone wondered why our “city too busy to hate” was rent into giant swaths of black and white, rich and poor, he or she didn’t have to look far for at least part of the answer. As Atlanta’s Russell Sage study moved through its last stages of publication , housing developer Tim Jones filed suit against Henry County, Georgia’s Board of Commissioners, contending that the county’s zoning plan discriminated against low- to moderate-income home buyers. “Exclusionary zoning,” his lawyer charged. Jones’s proposal to build  homes on his  acres in Atlanta’s suburbs near Interstate  and Jonesboro Road drew protests from  Chapter Seven neighbors in nearby, higher-priced subdivisions. Jones acquiesced and lowered his proposal to  homes ranging in size from , to , square feet on ,-square-foot lots. Henry County’s commissioners modified their classification to require that  percent of properties have a minimum , square feet on ,-square-foot lots, but Jones took the issue to court. Henry County attorney Wade Crumbley told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “The notion that Henry County is discriminating against the working class is not only not supported by the record, it’s absurd.” Jones’s attorney Douglas Dillard disagreed and asserted that local governments throughout Georgia were using minimum lot sizes and house sizes as a way of excluding low-income people. The courts found in Jones’s favor. The case was appealed, but the ruling was upheld. Indeed , policy analysts no longer bother with proving whether exclusionary zoning is used in the United States but simply move on to discussing how it is effected or outlining the extent of the practice. The exclusionary Atlanta of the early twenty-first century contrasts sharply with the Gate City of the s and s. Then, residences abutted businesses. Some blocks were mixed by race, and many were mixed by class. These uses existed without threat to adjacent properties’ values, at least for a time. But by the end of the s, white homeowners increasingly approached housing and neighborhoods with a new collection of desires and sensibilities. White, owneroccupied neighborhoods were marked by architectural and landscape continuity , a narrow range of housing values, and some form of buffer that separated the area from undesirable land uses—and undesirable people. These shared understandings about residential landscapes emerged between  and , took hold in the wave of suburban park-neighborhood building in the s, and were embedded into local public policy in the s and federal public policy in s. Thereafter, this tangle of raced and classed landscape understandings powerfully influenced succeeding generations of white working- and middle-class city and suburban residents. They helped maintain class and racial divisions after racial segregation was outlawed, even after racist rhetoric became taboo. Although Americans maintained a belief that theirs was a classless society, these shared understandings...

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