On
Tuesday
afternoon,
about 20 people gathered in the
Osterman Common Room for a
faculty panel on neighborhoods
and
suburbs.
Held
by
the
University of Michigan’s Institute
for the Humanities as part of the
“Humanities and Environments”
series, the event featured three
University professors, each of
whom presented their current
research on topics such as
poverty, the war on drugs and
urban neighborhoods.
To begin the event, Alexandra
Murphy, assistant professor of
Sociology and faculty affiliate of
the Population Studies Center,
drew on her ethnographic work
in Penn Hills, a suburb outside
of Pittsburgh, to discuss the
uniquely suburban ramifications
of poverty. In particular, she
focused on how the physical
landscape of suburbs, originally
designed
for
white
middle-
class families, exacerbates the
transportation and social needs
of the low-income people who
now live there.
To illustrate her point, Murphy
used the example of Roslyn,
a
woman
she
interviewed.
According to Murphy, Roslyn
moved
from
Pittsburgh
to
Penn Hills to escape crime and
violence and immediately faced
the stark physical differences
between city and suburb.
“In the half square-mile that
surrounded
her
(Pittsburgh)
neighborhood,
there
was
a
Head Start, fourteen churches,
an elementary school, a public
park, a senior center, a Salvation
Army, four bars, a barbershop,
three beauty salons, a corner
convenience
store
and
four
different bus lines,” Murphy
said. “In Penn Hills, the only
neighborhood
amenities
that
were in the same half-mile radius
within her new (Penn Hills)
house was one church and one
golf course.”
According to Murphy, Roslyn
could not afford a car. Because
Penn Hills had limited public
transportation
and
few
sidewalks, Roslyn and others
who did not own reliable
cars found they had little
mobility,
restricting
their
access to resources such as
stores,
community
centers,
employment opportunities and
social service centers.
“Those with the greatest
difficulty getting around in
Penn Hills, those I’m calling
homebound,
are
acutely
isolated,” Murphy said. “In
addition
to
mobility,
the
physical mold of suburbs also
has important relations to
people’s social networks in
this space. It shapes who they
know and what ties that they
have to draw on.”
Matthew Lassiter, professor
of history and urban and
regional planning, spoke next
on the war on drugs in the
suburbia context from the
1950s to 1980s. He discussed
how suburbs were idealized as
safe utopias, which meant the
influx of drugs into suburbias
were seen as crises. According
to
Lassiter,
mainstream
views characterized ethnic
minorities as external villains
who
were
invading
and
corrupting
innocent
white
Americans from “good” families,
especially females.
“In the 1950s, there was
explicit, racist, constant coverage
of Mexican Americans as a
crime threat who were invading
white communities,” Lassiter
said. “African Americans in this
time period are actually not
constructed
as
dope-pushers
crime threat, although they
would be later … And media often
showed white females who start
with marijuana in parked cars
with their boyfriends, and then
they end up getting wrapped up
in these pushers, and then they
become prostitutes and addicts
and they’ll never recover.”
In addition, Lassiter focused
on how attitudes and perceptions
of drug use varied between
different identities, leading to
policy disparity.
“The war on drugs is in part
about
the
impossible
public
policy of criminalizing the social
practices of tens of millions of
white, middle-class Americans
who are otherwise seen as
law-abiding citizens,” Lassiter
said. “And this of course affects
what the war on drugs looked
like in the 1980s. In suburban
neighborhoods, (there’s) more
of a public health prevention
campaign,
and
(there’s)
militarized interdiction in non-
white urban centers.”
To close, Harley Etienne,
assistant professor of urban
and regional planning, shared
his “big questions” about urban
neighborhoods,
covering
topics from inner-ring suburbs
to
the
relationship
between
poor neighborhoods and their
education
systems.
In
his
discussion
of
neighborhood
recovery
from
the
Great
FRESH FOOD
ON THE DAILY: DPSS ANNOUNCES UNIVERSITY TO GET ICED, AGAIN
THIS WEEK IN HISTORY: SNR STUDENTS RALLY ON
SHAPIRO’S FRONT LAWN
Early
Tuesday,
the
University
of
Michigan
Division of Public Safety
and
Security
released
a
winter
weather
advisory
for freezing rain, expected
from around 1 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Wednesday.
The
freezing
rain is expected to spread
into Southeast Michigan late
Tuesday night, but may shift
from freezing to normal
rain sometime Wednesday
afternoon.
However,
there are warnings about
especially
hazardous
and
slick travel conditions.
According to the National
Weather Service, freezing
rain is liquid precipitation
that
freezes
on
contact
with
cold
surfaces
with
cold surfaces within a small
range of temperatures at
or below 32 degrees. Often,
a coating of ice is created
on roads, walkways, trees
and powerlines and has the
potential to be dangerous.
DPSS
spokeswoman
Melissa
Overton
offered
safety
tips
for
handling
the
potentially
hazardous
temperatures.
Recommendations
include
wearing
shoes
or
boots
with non-slip rubber soles,
walking slowly with short
steps and traveling along
grassy
edges
for
more
traction.
Feb. 4, 1983
School
of
Natural
Resources students tied a
green ribbon around the old
oak tree in front of University
President Harold Shapiro’s
house yesterday to protest
proposed budget cuts to the
school.
More than 150 students
marched from the Diag to
Shapiro’s house and chanted
“save SNR” while the ribbon -
their symbol of opposition to
the University’s redirection
was tied. A few students
said the tree was actually
an elm, but no one seemed
concerned.
After
musicians
played
songs about SNR, speakers
praised
the
school’s
programs
and
criticized
the
University’s
five-year
financial redirection
“Teaching
is
being
sacrificed because teaching
is not important to Dow
Chemical,” said LSA senior
Tom Marx. He urged students
not to “sit back and watch”
the redirection process. “Get
involved,” Marx said. “Rallies
are not enough.”
During the rally, organizers
in the crowd tried to get more
people involved by soliciting
donations to fund a full-page
newspaper
advertisement
publicizing
the
school’s
plight.
The students said they
hoped publicity would cause
the Regents to be sympathetic
when the budget cut comes
up at their Feb. 24 meeting
and said they were pleased
with the exposure
yesterday’s rally provided.
“It graduate student Martha
Tableman. “We filled the
Diag.”
After the rally, one SNR
student who asked not to
be
identified
complained
that many people do not
understand
the
present
budget reviews. “It’s more
than just cuts in SNR we’re
upset about,” he said. “The
money is not being cut
because it’s not there. It’s still
in the budget, but it’s being
put into other programs.
Rally
organizer
Susan
Denzer agreed, saying the
reviews are “pitting schools
against
each
other.”
She
criticized the lack of student
input in the review process
and
said
administrators
should consider alternative
2A — Wednesday, February 6, 2019
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Recession, Etienne highlighted
Detroit’s housing vacancy issue.
“We can see that there is a
massive problem with housing
vacancy in Detroit,” Etienne said.
“Part of it is where Detroit started
off, and then we have all these
other factors like the bankruptcy
and the tax foreclosure crisis that
exacerbated the issue.”
According to Etienne, his “big
questions” all ultimately centered
on the empowering the use of the
word “ghetto.”
“All this is actually leading to
this implicit question, which is,
‘How do we put all this together
to reassert the term ‘ghetto’?”
Etienne said. “The use of the
word ‘ghetto’ could actually be a
provocative way to draw attention
to really oppressive conditions in
particular neighborhoods. We’ve
actually morphed into using
euphemisms … Given declining
property values, underfunded
schools, police violence et. cetera
— can we put all this together and
come up with a new framework
and justification for using the
term ‘ghetto’?”
LSA junior Charde Madoula-
Bey told The Daily after the
event that Lassiter’s presentation
struck a chord, as it addressed her
own interests.
“I wrote a research paper in a
previous class about how the war
on drugs was a political agenda
to eradicate the Black population
through
mass
incarceration,”
Madoula-Bey
said.
“With
Matthew’s point of view, it was
really interesting how it kind of
took away the criminalization of
African Americans and put it on
Mexican Americans, which was a
perspective I was totally unaware
of.”
However,
Madoula-Bey
expressed
she
wished
the
speakers could have presented
more on possible solutions to the
issues they discussed.