The Social Engineering of Segregation by Race and Class And the report discusses some promising federal and state approaches to tear down government-sponsored walls that do so much harm. It tells the struggle of people like Patricia McGee, who want a better life and strive to join and contribute to thriving neighborhoods, but are shut out by government policies. This report outlines the state-sponsored barriers low-wage workers face when trying to move to homes in safer neighborhoods with good schools in the Dallas area-barriers that are common throughout the United States. It’s real quiet out here.” 5 The ICP program worked well for McGee, but is relatively small: 350 families benefit per year in a region of 7.6 million residents, many of whom are low-income wage-earners like McGee. “I don’t have to worry about people standing all outside my yard, smoking and loud music and all kinds of stuff. “I love it out here,” McGee said in an interview in 2020. With ICP’s help, McGee was able to move to a house in Forney, Texas, a prosperous city twenty miles east of downtown Dallas, with strong schools and a safe environment. Every time you turned around, there was some crime.” 3 Then, while searching for ways she could get assistance putting together a rental security deposit, she came across a program sponsored by the Inclusive Communities Project (ICP), a nonprofit organization dedicated to fair housing and upward mobility. It was drug-smoking in my breezeway where my door was. She explains: “Living in Mandalay was one of the worst areas I have ever lived in. And while a landlord could no longer lawfully discriminate against McGee because of her race, a landlord in Texas could legally deny a tenant an opportunity based on her source of income-the fact that McGee would pay her rent in part with a government-funded Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher. Economic zoning laws that prohibit the construction of more affordable types of multifamily housing in entire regions and other exclusionary practices were keeping people like McGee physically separated from opportunity. Now, even as explicit racial discrimination by landlords, racially restrictive covenants, and redlining had all been outlawed, new, less visible barriers prevented McGee and her children from enjoying better opportunities. For decades, Dallas and its suburbs had enacted a series of policies-redlining, racially restrictive covenants, and de jure school segregation-designed to keep Black people like McGee and her children out of wealthier, white neighborhoods. The safer neighborhoods with good schools were off limits. McGee, who had grown up poor, wanted something better for her kids. They began “talking about stuff they ain’t got no business talking about,” she says. “Your kids, they pay attention to everything,” she says. Patricia McGee was living in the Mandalay Palms Apartments in a rough section of Dallas a few years ago when one day her ten-year-old son said, “Momma, look.” McGee peered out the window and saw a sex worker hanging out at the bus stop in front of the apartment “doing some things she shouldn’t be doing.” 1 McGee was horrified.
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