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Sunday, November 3, 2002
 Daniel Mears / The Detroit News
Phyllis Hurks-Hill and her three children, Dagny, left, Leah and Naomi, live in the upscale, mostly African-American area of Detroit Golf Club. The family's cost of living includes high taxes and private schools.
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Wealth doesn't stop race divide
Choice and mistrust keep blacks, whites apart
By Brad Heath, Oralandar Brand-Williams and Shawn D. Lewis / The Detroit News
DETROIT -- The contrasts are etched in black and white: Metro Detroiters who do the same jobs and earn the same pay go home each night to very different neighborhoods, divided not by income but by race.
The civil rights movement's drive for wage and job equality was supposed to bring the races together. But economic successes have done little to tear down the sharp divisions that have made Metro Detroit the nation's most segregated metropolis, a Detroit News analysis shows.
Most striking are the living patterns of those who earn $200,000 a year or more, families with the earning power to live almost anywhere. More than 61 percent of those affluent black families are in Detroit, compared to fewer than 1 percent of affluent white households.
It's as simple as Mack Avenue, flanked by wealthy whites in Grosse Pointe on one side and wealthy blacks in Detroit on the other. And it's as complex as the suburbs, where blacks rush to Southfield and whites prefer Livonia.
But the reasons remain part opportunity, part distrust and part preference.
Living in Detroit costs David Hill and his wife about $45,000 a year to send three children to Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, plus untold more in higher taxes and insurance rates.
"We factored in all these extras, like paying extra for car insurance and private schools, when we considered living in Detroit," said Hill, 39, a black Detroit dentist.
"We couldn't ask for a nicer home for our three daughters," said his wife Phyllis Hurks-Hill, an attorney in Pontiac. The family moved from Ann Arbor.
The Detroit News study, using 2000 census data released in September, found that Metro Detroit is unusual in the way that blacks and whites live apart at virtually every income level.
Nationally, people with lower incomes tend to be more integrated. But here poor whites generally live in neighborhoods that are 80 percent white; poor blacks are clustered in areas where 80 percent of the population is black, census figures show.
"Honestly, I prefer to live in a predominately white area," said Bill Helton, a 41-year-old former truck driver on disability who avoided heavily black neighborhoods when choosing a new Taylor home. "It was a big consideration."
But most people say their housing choices had nothing to do with race. More often, they said they were searching for good schools, safe neighborhoods and comfortable homes.
Other factors are unmistakeable. Regardless of income, blacks remain far more likely than whites to be turned down for home mortgages. Decades of discrimination and not-so-subtle steering have bred wariness about crossing traditional boundaries. And some just prefer living in places where their neighbors look like they do.
The result: Forty years after the civil rights movement lauded integration as a worthwhile goal, living apart continues to carry dramatic prices, an earlier Detroit News report found. Blacks face more health risks, higher crime rates and typically stunted home values, while whites find longer commutes, pay higher mortgages and decry suburban sprawl.
The latest News' study found that in some places, such as Raleigh, N.C., and Orlando, Fla., a new integration is under way, especially among the poor and the middle classes. Nationwide, it's whites and blacks with the most money who tend to be the most segregated.
In Detroit, there's little distinction among economic classes, said University of Michigan demographer William Frey.
"The story for Detroit is that in terms of segregation, income doesn't matter," he said.
You can reach Brad Heath at (313) 222-2563 or bheath@detnews.com.
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