Housing Segregation

     For my Intro to Urban Studies paper, we were tasked to pick a theme of Memphis and write a six to seven page paper on how this theme is carried out. I choose to write about segregation of housing. Memphis is a unique city in the sense that you can be in one area where it is very nice, and drive a half a mile where it is high poverty. What does this say about the city?
     I think in a lot of ways it shows how diverse the city is, but also how segregated the city can be. It just shows the different communities and neighborhoods that the city is willing to pour their time and resources into. A lot of times, the areas where the city is refusing to invest in is communities mostly of Minority population.
     There is a lot of different factors that affect individuals in their search for housing when moving into a new city. One of those factors is education. When looking for somewhere to live, families usually make sure that the school that they are zoned to is up to their standards. The problem with this is that usually schools within high poverty neighborhoods are not being poured into like schools of low poverty neighborhoods, so this shows the pipeline of high poverty equals low education. For this project, I interviewed Collierville High Schools Counselor. She was telling us about how she did not have the means to live in Collierville any longer, so she had to put her house up for sale. She said that within a day her house was sold because of the demand to live in a neighborhood or community that was zoned to a good school in Memphis.
     We also see that many people look at different crime rates when trying to find somewhere to live within the city. The unfortunate problem with this is that the high crime rate areas are the areas that little to no money is being poured into. It is hard to believe that 2 minutes up the road in a white community has little crime, but 2 minutes down the road in a black community there is prevalent crime.
     The question is whether anyone will every realize this trend and make moves to fix it, or will the trend continue to ruin residents lives?