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Like other growing economic regions in the US, the Twin Cities is rapidly becoming more diverse. Perhaps it is the lure of jobs in suburban communities in Minnesota that has attracted immigrants to communities that heretofore were home to predominantly white residents of European origin. The number of foreign-born residents has increased, as has the number of children with Limited English Proficiency (LEP). Between 2000 and 2004, the greatest increase in LEP children in the state occurred in suburbs surrounding the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. For the most part, however, increasing racial and ethnic diversity at the state and regional levels has not been accompanied by comparable increases in integration at the neighborhood level. Although the most recent census evidence indicates that black-white residential segregation continues to decline slowly, it remains extremely high. Moreover, in many neighborhoods and schools experiencing transition, integration may occur temporarily, but over time they resegregate and stay segregated.
During the 1980s and 1990s, as the suburbs grew rapidly, schools closed in some districts, while other districts on the edge of the region built new ones. During those decades, the region, especially its central cities, became more racially and ethnically diverse. The number of students of color attending non-white segregated schools in the Twin Cities skyrocketed from 2,832 in 1992 to 29,788 in 2002. The middle class increasingly chose to locate away from high poverty schools further out into the suburbs, and the schools they left became severely racially and economically segregated. But attending a suburban school is not a sure-fire way of avoiding segregation. In fact, students of color whose families move to the suburbs to escape the social and economic ills of the city, are finding themselves in segregated schools again.
Changes in schools often reflect changes in housing and the middle class’ desire to seek “better” housing. As metropolitan areas like the Twin Cities develop along class lines, the most rapid turnover in home ownership occurs in the middle-class housing markets. New housing in a region’s periphery most often appeals to the middle-class, who seek to move into “better” housing. Middle-class sectors therefore appear as asymmetrical bulges of housing construction at the region’s periphery. Movement to new housing in the outer suburbs creates vacancies in inner-ring suburbs, with those vacancies often being filled by residents moving from the city’s central core. The centers of these “vacancy chains” are often left with excess housing and low demand when there is rapid peripheral growth. With this declining demand come declining prices, opening up home ownership opportunities for the region’s lower income residents. 1
Fund for an OPEN Society’s Minnesota Initiative, includes the creation of a new first suburbs caucus within the existing structures, launch of the Sustainable Integrated Community Leadership program, and laying the groundwork to engage at least one diverse community in implementing pro-integrative strategies and developing an active citizenry.
OPEN is also providing public participatory geographic information system – http://www.openmaps.info —an asset mapping project that will allow diverse, yet fragile, communities to tell the world of their strengths.
Most First Suburbs: · Existed before 1950 · Have growing populations · Experiencing rapid racial change · Increasing home to foreign-born residents · Relatively low poverty level · Include many cultural and neighborhood assets · Aging infrastructures · Fully developed · Tax-stressed (Robert Puentes and David Warren, The Brookings Institution, February 2006)
OPEN seeks to raise awareness, forge partnerships, generate interest, and instill trust in diverse communities and with individuals and groups who care about those communities. We seek to plant the seeds that will grow into a crop of communities deciding to take intentional steps towards becoming stably integrated so that all residents have equal access to affordable housing, good schools, safe neighborhoods, employment opportunities, and reliable infrastructure. By promoting the benefits of stable integration, creating forums for people to get involved, and equipping them with the knowledge and skills they need to build social capital, OPEN hopes to lay the foundation for lasting change in Minnesota’s first suburbs and throughout the state.
For more information about our work in Minnesota call 763.566.4332 or email open@opensoc.org
We thank our funders: The Minneapolis Foundation, The Otto Bremer Foundation, The Katharine B. Anderson Fund of the St. Paul Foundation
1st Suburb Events 1st Suburb News OPENmaps Links
1 These two paragraphs are taken verbatim from Katherine Fennelly and Myron Orfield, Impediments to Integration of Immigrants: A Case Study in Minnesota (Forthcoming in: Suburban Immigrant Gateways: Immigration and Incorporation in New U.S. Metropolitan Destinations, Audrey Singer, Caroline Brettell and Susan Hardwick, eds.). |
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Fund for an OPEN Society |
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because separate can never be equal. |
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First Suburbs |
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Contact Us
Email: open@opensoc.org NJ Office: 973.821.4198 PA Office: 215.546.0511 |
Minnesota |
