{"id":10643,"date":"2007-10-15T18:53:34","date_gmt":"2007-10-15T22:53:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/10\/15\/10643.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:57:00","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:57:00","slug":"not-very-zippy-after-all-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/10\/15\/not-very-zippy-after-all-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Not very zippy, after all"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger is quite late to the game in linking to ZIPskinny (beta)<\/a>, a site that takes the Census 2000 data and makes it available by ZIP code. I, of course, plugged in my own locality<\/a>, which did not have a lot of surprises. We are rich, well-educated, white and old. Hurrah for us! We win! But that’s not all! We achieve all this richness, this well-educatedage, this whiteousness, and this oldicity while maintaining a population density of 7381and a half people per square land mile. In other words, we are rich, well-educated, white, old and urban<\/I>. How can this be?\n

I did a comparison (or rather, fed a comparison into ZIPskinny) of the densest twenty ZIP areas in our fine state. My area is 14th, by the way, out of 20. The first thing that jumps out is that 06269 is a bizarre outlier. What’s up with that? Nobody at all below the poverty line? 99% with a high school degree, and 84.9% with a bachelor’s? A median income of $87,945? 78.4% single, and only 0.3% divorced? Only 26.1% of residents have been there more than five years? The median age is twenty<\/I>, and 97% are under 30? Oh, right, it’s UConnsberg. Let’s just agree that that’s an outlier, and doesn’t really count.\n

Other than that, let’s see. By median income, we are only third richest out of the remaining nineteen, behind Stamford<\/a> and Stamford<\/a>. By percentage making more than $200,000 a year, we’re again third behind those. Also by $150K plus, and by $100K plus. At the bottom end, by least making less than $10K, we’re in-between the two Stamfords, and again $15K minus, and again $25K minus, and by $35K minus we’ve slipped into third, and by $50K minus we’re still in third. We edge them on unemployment, but slip into second by percentage under the poverty line. So, OK, let’s call us third richest, behind 06906, 06902 in second, both with slightly less density than my local. By the way, none of the others is even close.\n

We’re the whitest, by a smidge over 06906. But take a look: mine is 78.3% white, 06906 is 73.3% white, then the drop is to 56.5%, then it’s under half. 06902, by the way, is 45.5% white, good for fourth. We’re the oldest, again over 06906, with 06902 fourth. For education, we’re second in graduate or professional degrees as well as four-year college degrees (behind N’Haven, again not counting Storrs), and second counting cumulatively as well. And we’ve got the oldest median age, as well. ZIPskinny doesn’t do a comparative breakdown by age group, but my local has a big sixty-plus cohort (13.3%), although not as big as 06906 (16.4%) or 06902 (17.1%).\n

What’s my point? My point is that if you look at the rest of the ZIP codes, they are poor, ill-educated and non-white. Fifteen, say, out of the nineteen (or twenty, if you want to throw Storrs back in) densest areas are immediately and obviously lousy places to live. Twenty percent poverty, twenty-five percent— five are at thirty percent<\/I> poverty or more. Nine have a high-school degree rate of under two-thirds, eleven have a college-degree rate under 15%. Sixteen have median incomes below the national median. Fourteen have median incomes below the median income for Mississippi<\/I>. Twelve have median incomes below the national median for black households. Five have a median income under $25,000 a year<\/I>.\n

My point is that demographically speaking, richest<\/I>, best-educated<\/I> and whitest<\/I> are synonyms if you are talking about urban areas. Compare, if you will, my ZIP code area with one of my neighbors<\/a>. It’s only moderately dense, being on the north edge of Hartford, but it’s next door to my lovely, white, rich, dense, old neighborhood. It’s got a median income of $15,727. 44.8% of its residents are under the poverty line. Half have high-school degrees, but only 4.5% have college degrees. And, of course, it’s 3.3% white. Or look at this even closer neighborhood<\/a>, with 31.1% below the poverty line. 54.5% with high-school degrees, 9.8% with college degrees. And, yes, 20.8% white.\n

My point is that this is a national scandal and a disgrace, and that if we are going to save our cities, our self-respect and incidentally the planet we should be taking not just affirmative but aggressive action through our state and federal governments. This is directly because of vile and vicious racism of the recent past, but at this point it goes beyond racism, it’s a decay that can’t be stopped by not-racism any more than you can fill a cavity by deciding to start brushing and flossing. I dare you, I demand<\/I>, Gentle Readers, that you look at your own areas, and those of your neighbors, look at the poverty and wealth, and look at race, and see if we are doing enough about this.\n

Two Americas? Class war? Look, it would be bad enough just to admit to these enormous pockets of degradation and decay in our wealthy country. But they are race-based pockets of poverty, and it is a daily reproach. I’m shocked by it, and so should you be—every day all over again.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger is quite late to the game in linking to ZIPskinny (beta), a site that takes the Census 2000 data and makes it available by ZIP code. I, of course, plugged in my own locality, which did not…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10643"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18128,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10643\/revisions\/18128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}