The problem is that American cities are structured to keep the poor and minorities in nominally independent cities or suburbs that are geographically indistinguishable from the richer areas, but just independent enough to ensure that property taxes aren't shared.
It's also hard to escape the fact that many, if not most of these suburbs were explicitly set up to keep out blacks, latinos, Jews, and other undesirable groups. Until the sixties, houses in these communities often carried a restrictive covenant that explicitly prohibited sales to non-whites.
Canada shares a lot of the basic educational structure as the US, and sadly a good share of the racial baggage as well, but our cities are far more monolithic than most American cities. There are only two school districts in my city (pop. ~1 million) and students can register in any school throughout the district. The only choice I make as a taxpayer is which district, public or Catholic, I want my property taxes to fund.
> It's also hard to escape the fact that many, if not most of these suburbs were explicitly set up to keep out blacks, latinos, Jews, and other undesirable groups.
Actually, it's pretty easy to escape that "fact" because it simply isn't true.
Yes, there were some covenants like that, but they were relatively rare.
And, most of the housing stock is newer than that, so even if such covenants were somewhat common and were still in force, they'd cover a small fraction of the population.
Since they haven't been in force for decades....
> Canada shares a lot of the basic educational structure as the US, and sadly a good share of the racial baggage as well, but our cities are far more monolithic than most American cities.
More "monolithic" is right. Canada is about as diverse as Minnesota.
Restrictive covenants were not rare, especially in the post-war suburbs. The first modern suburb, Levittown, NY, was racially segregated. It wasn't called 'white flight' because the people fleeing the inner city wanted to live with blacks. Restrictive covenants didn't end up the Supreme Court because no one was interested in enforcing them.
> Restrictive covenants were not rare, especially in the post-war suburbs. The first modern suburb, Levittown, NY, was racially segregated.
Pointing to an instance doesn't make the "not rare" case.
Levittown takes good pictures, but it isn't representative of post WWII housing development.
Moreover, you're still ignoring the fact that even if covenants were't rare before, the affected housing is a very small part of today's housing stock. As a result, covenants which haven't been enforceable for 50 years can't have much, if any, effect today.
The absolute numbers don't tell the whole story, and illustrate part of the difference between the U.S. and Canada on this.
The Wikipedia article on Canada is horrible on one point: "Black" isn't a single minority group in Canada. We have people from the Caribbean and people from many different regions in Africa and, yes, like U.S. we also have descendants of black slaves (in sometimes surprising places). But while they often share similar skin colourings, that is often the only thing they share in common. Many of the Ghanaians, Nigerians, South Africans, and Caribbeans I know have nothing in common except their skin colour—and their love of partying, at least the ones that I've come into contact with over the last ten years.
So, the 2.5% Canadian "black" population is a substantially more diverse population than the 12.6% U.S. "black" population, which is primarily descended from black slaves. This group may be less diverse, but it's also something that the U.S. must come to grips with as much as Canada must come to grips with its treatment of its Aboriginals (which, to be honest, the U.S. must do, too, but they're not as visible to most Americans).
> So, the 2.5% Canadian "black" population is a substantially more diverse population than the 12.6% U.S. "black" population, which is primarily descended from black slaves.
Maybe half of the US black population is descended from slaves. The rest, which is about 6% (from your numbers) comes from the same places Canada gets its 2.5%.
And then there are all of the different groups under the hispanic label.
> Since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, an estimated total of 0.8 to 0.9 million Africans have immigrated to the United States, accounting for roughly 3.3% of total immigration to the United States during this period.[4] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_immigration_to_the_Unit...
> One of the more noted aspects of Black Canadian history is that while the majority of African Americans trace their presence in the United States through the history of slavery, the Black presence in Canada is rooted almost entirely in voluntary immigration.[17] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Canadians
I reiterate the original point: Canada is a substantially more diverse place than the U.S. in terms of places of origin, even though the U.S. has a larger percentage of visible minorities.
Africa isn't the only source of black people. Also, as your source points out, there were basically no controls on African immigration until the 1920s.
BTW, a significant number of fleeing slaves went to Canada....
It's simply not a matter of your assessment. Canada's non-white population, at 16.2%, is less than the US 27.6%. I have spent a lot of time in both Canada and the US. I'm not just quoting the figures, although that should be enough to make my case. Canada is noticeably whiter.
> It's simply not a matter of your assessment. Canada's non-white population, at 16.2%, is less than the US 27.6%.
How are we defining "white"? I ask because Hispanics just passed Black as a percentage of the US population. Both are around 13%, which leads me to suspect that the 27% "non-white" doesn't include Hispanics.
Yes. In Edmonton, although schools have "attendance areas", there's always spots for students outside attendance areas. If a school fills up there's a lottery to determine who gets in from outside the attendance area, but only one high school ever goes to lottery (Harry Ainlay) and there's schools like Lillian Osborne that are just as good as Harry Ainlay. Even students in the Edmonton suburbs can go to any school in Edmonton as long as the school doesn't go to lottery. I've always found this to be a good system.
"just independent enough to ensure that property taxes aren't shared."
This is actually a good thing for everyone, in terms of improving the quality of schools for both rich and poor kids. What normally happens is that rich towns have higher millage, which poor town can't afford. Whereas poor towns tax the big box stores and businesses that tend to be more prevalent. When you combine the rich and poor districts you can't sufficiently tax either the houses of the rich people or the businesses, so the school quality for both declines. This is partly why Florida schools are so underfunded, because they only have 60ish districts for the entire state so they can't properly tax anyone.
There are special cases like Palo Alto/East Palo Alto, which might actually be common. One city has a huge commercial tax base, and fixed institutions (Stanford) which can't move. The other, recently incorporated, has only poor people living in low value housing; no sales tax, high demand for city services like medical and police, and such.
Even if EPA's property taxes were 10x Palo Alto's, EPA would still be a horrible place. The only viable solution is to destroy it -- probably by absorbing it into neighboring cities -- so it would be diluted across a larger tax base.
(Palo Alto actually DID cherry pick certain assets, like a golf course and airport, and rerouted the creek which determines the border to take them as part of Palo Alto, a few decades ago)
It's also hard to escape the fact that many, if not most of these suburbs were explicitly set up to keep out blacks, latinos, Jews, and other undesirable groups. Until the sixties, houses in these communities often carried a restrictive covenant that explicitly prohibited sales to non-whites.
Canada shares a lot of the basic educational structure as the US, and sadly a good share of the racial baggage as well, but our cities are far more monolithic than most American cities. There are only two school districts in my city (pop. ~1 million) and students can register in any school throughout the district. The only choice I make as a taxpayer is which district, public or Catholic, I want my property taxes to fund.