By: Paige Panek, Research Associate
Research has long supported a correlation between housing and land use, racial inequality, and segregation. A variety of metrics have been used to prove this correlation, including, but not limited to, socioeconomic status, educational opportunities, and food deserts. While invaluable, these metrics are often housed in research journals, databases, and other resources that the average person may not come across often. This piece posits, though, that there is a universally-available metric that can further exemplify what that data tells us without doing much more than observing our daily surroundings—the built environment.
To adequately use the built environment as a metric for indicating racism and segregation in housing and land use, this piece encourages you to view all human-made interior and exterior spaces as two things:
1. A time capsule of the attitudes and policies upheld by the people who created them. No home, park, office building, etc. could be located where it is or be designed the way that it is without an underlying foundation of societal and regulatory support.
2. A mirror physically reflecting historic and current attitudes back to us. An affluent neighborhood is discernable from a low-income neighborhood simply by passing through them. A well-funded school is often discernable from a chronically underfunded school simply by looking at them. These striking comparisons are not accidents; architecture reflects attitude, and it tells us who is valued in a place and who is not.
These disparities can be seen almost universally, so their omnipresence in New Haven is not unique. However, the fact that New Haven is only the 225th largest city in America1 while also being home to Yale University—one of the most prestigious universities in the country—means that architectural disparities can sometimes be seen on the same block, which is unique. Today, the architecture throughout New Haven’s Wooster Square and Dixwell neighborhoods is noticeably different despite both neighborhoods being redlined in the 1930s, likely due to the differences in their historic and current racial makeup.