I walk a lot and as I walk I observe how people of different social classes live around here.
For the first 5 years in this town, I resided in what I can schematically call a working-class neighborhood (WN). This was an area of rental apartments where bus drivers, university support staff, janitors, and people who lost their houses in the Recession lived.
For the past year, I’ve been living in a typical middle-class neighborhood (MN), with big detached houses, pretty lawns, etc.
Right in front of my subdivision, there’s our upper-class neighborhood (UC), with houses that cost between $600,000 and $900,000 (which is a lot for our region).
All 3 neighborhoods are extremely safe and clean. Their differences lie elsewhere.
The rich UC area is the one with the greatest number of children playing outside unsupervised. Starting from about the age of 6, kids in this neighborhood stay in the street with their friends a lot. There are also many groups of teenagers who hang out with their friends outside.
In the poorer WN, it’s extremely rare to see kids play outside without adults hovering over them. Even the children who are 12-14 years of age are marched the 100 feet to and from the school bus. (Once again, it’s the safest, quietest area on the planet, so this is not about safety.) In my MN, children walk to the school bus and back alone or with other kids. Parents only take them if they are really small.
Teenagers never spend any time outside in the WN and the MN. It’s only in the rich neighborhood that I see them spend time in the street, racing their bikes, listening to music, playing basketball, and saunter around trying to look all grown up.
The poorer neighborhood is the most racially segregated. In my WN, black kids always played at a distance from white kids. I never saw them together on any occasion.
The rich neighborhood is the most racially integrated in terms of kids’ groups. (Who the adults spend time with is impossible to find out from the street). Every children’s group in the UC is a veritable United Colors of Benetton commercial with kids of different races and ethnicities. This is an area where quite a few immigrants live.
In all these areas, kids have to play in the driveway or in the street because the concept of a communal playground in a residential area is absent. Playgrounds exist only in the areas one has to access by car, as if children wanted to have bored parents hover over them as they play.
Clarissa's Blog 
Interesting observations. I think the one point i definitely agree with is that most racially segregated are wn and lower-income areas. Middle class and upper class areas are much more integrated (particularly from an attitude stand point. I think if you looked statistically african americans and hispanic populations would be slightly less in middle and upper class compared to their population simply because in aggregate they earn less).
Things are more complex than this, I get, but in general i feel like this supports my feeling that the biggest divisor and hindrance in today’s world is wealth. Now, when lack of wealth and racial status are factored in i agree being a minority is more difficult, but if you are wealthy (or even solidly middle class) race is much less of a factor (still a factor, but not very much i truly believe).
Whats your take on playing outside if not for safety? I was thinking that wn have less playing outside because less safe, which is partly a result of less play space and more density, which means more people / threats around. But you don’t think safety factors in in your neighborhoods so curious for any theories! (do you think greater parental involvement / hovering in wn vs upper class? Not how i perceive it in my part of the country but could be different there)
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Things anyone who was born into the segregated south (comme moi, par exemple) knows (even if they don’t know they know it, if you understand what I mean).
Segregation was most strongly supported by lower class whites. The upper classes (and upper middle) classes employed blacks and were generally comfortable around them – this created resentment among poor whites who were desperate to maintain a system where they weren’t at the absolute bottom.
Also, middle and upper class whites looked down on poor whites far more than they did blacks which is one reason that southern white speech is full of insulting terms for poor whites.
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Yes, that’s absolutely it. There is a great animosity directed by poor white people against black people. And the poorer they are, the worse it is. The more I talk with working class whites, the more I notice it.
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One hypothesis (which you may quickly shoot down): more international families in the upper-income community?
Don’t really know about the demographics of your area, and I haven’t seen the kind of UC neighborhood you describe where I live. Life in those extremely wealthy subdivisions always looks pretty locked-down when I have occasion to ferry my kids to parties or sleepovers.
But it is my experience that families from abroad seem to expect their kids to live more life outside, to have more pick-up games of basketball or soccer, to mingle more in mixed-age groups (rather than simply a couple of close friends from school). If tech in your area is attracting more skilled workers from abroad, that might be the difference?
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Yes, you are absolutely right. There are quite a few immigrants in this area who are affiliated with the university.
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I’ve only know of one city of those that I lived in that had a very big integrated neighborhood (that is whites and blacks living on the same streets). That was a university town and the neighborhood was mostly populated by university staff and working middle class people and grad students and potential gentrifiers (and all the other areas were pretty segregated).
When I was growing up the ‘quarters’* were close walking distance to the elementary school and I knew a bunch of white kids who lived between it and the school but we only rarely ventured in it. Recess was fairly integrated but after school each group went their separate ways…
*old southern word for the area of town where blacks were allowed/required to live, some quick googling seems to imply that it’s no longer in general use…
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Yes, university towns are different. They are like little oases of light and joy in the sea of hopelessness and futility. 🙂
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“… kids have to play in the driveway or in the street …”
There are big parks in towns here (in Somerset) that also include playground equipment, spaces for sports, and that sort of thing, but in some areas, kids still play in the street.
Apparently the councils didn’t think of adding paved areas that aren’t walkways so the kids can have a game of street hockey with improvised gear …
It’s not always about public safety — sometimes it’s about how the facilities that are available don’t actually fit every need.
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