Mayors Bloomberg and Giuliani Oversaw NYC's Segregation Increase
By Albert Samaha
Folks have been in a real reflective mood in these waning days of the Michael Bloomberg Administration. Sunday's New York Times, for instance, dedicated much its New York section to detailing and assessing the three-term mayor's rule--from his sweeping quality-of-life accomplishments to his "tireless coddling" of Wall Street to his regular attendance at a favorite restaurant.
As much of this retrospective reminds us, the narrative arc of Bloomberg's era picked up where his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, left off. Despite differences in temperament and political tactics, the mayors' combined 20 years in City Hall tell a cohesive tale: New York City's transformation into a modern, healthy, smooth-operating metropolis that proudly stands as "America's safest big city."
But the social contract Bloomberg and Giuliani drew up has some important fine print at the bottom. During their tenures, New York City has also stood as America's most increasingly segregated big city.
In The Atlantic's September issue, the magazine published illuminating stats from an Urban Institute study that measured segregation using a metric called the Index of Dissimilarity. The Social Science Data Analysis Network (SSDAN), which compiles the index scores among its Census analysis, explains the measurement this way: "If a city's white-black dissimilarity index were 65, that would mean that 65% of white people would need to move to another neighborhood to make whites and blacks evenly distributed across all neighborhoods."
Read more at
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/08/mayor_bloomberg_nyc_segregation.php
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