Yet plenty of non-religious communities run just fine, and there lots of impoverished religious areas. There is zero "solution" down that road (mandating certain types of "religiosity"?). The fact remains that we have allowed large levels of resegregation along socio-economic lines, which overlaps strongly with historical racial segregation, and have no desire to adddress that reality. That resegregation has continued to build a durable culture of poverty in concentrated locales, with all of predictable results that we have seen.

When in history has society, any society, not been segregated by socioeconomic factors?

You seem to have ignored the primary point that segregation and relative poverty have been increasing over the past several decades, in comparison to other countries as well as the USA of the fairly recent past. Are you in favor of ever-increasing levels of segregation and greater disparities in opportunity?

Psst. I'll let you in on a secret. The neighborhoods where the vast amount of the shootings take place have never been integrated.

You can't have resegregation if there was never any desegregation

Thank you, Captain Obvious! Of course some communities never were desegregated in any manner, but other formerly mixed communities have segregated. In many cases, "white flight" has morphed into "human capital flight". Take a strictly segregated and disadvantaged community, then create huge incentives for all affluent and educated folks to leave (i.e. doctors, lawyers, teachers, business owners, etc.), while property values devalue for several decades. Is the resulting segregated community worse off than the previous one? Of course! Is this an argument to go back to the good ole' 50's? Of course not! It is an argument to stop being mindlessly oblivious about trends that have been obvious for decades, and realize that a host of local/state/federal policies have in fact made it worse, and should probably be mitigated or overturned.

Great post. Has nothing to do with where the majority of shootings happen in Chicago though.

Why. Thanks a lot! Are you referring to the South Side?

Specifically Englewood neighborhoods. The Southside is something like 20 neighborhoods basically anything South of Congree or 22nd depending on if you include the South Loop.

Look at a heat map of murders in Chicago

Yes, and your point is that my point is great, but it may not exactly align with the history of those neighborhoods (a very debatable point), therefore, nothing should be ever done? Is that the totality of your argument?

No my point is your root cause is not the root cause in the shootiest part of Chicago

I have, are you seeing that Englewood neighborhoods didn't undergo massive resegregation due to white flight? Demographic maps from 1960-1980 show a massive increase in racial segregation.

Uh Englewood is a historically black neighborhood (in the 60's 3/4 of the population was black). Now if you want to talk about the Ryan cutting Englewood in half as the start of the economic decline of the area I'm game, but there was significantly more white flight in both real and percentage terms in other Chicago neighborhoods.

Bronzeville is another historically black neighborhood and it is WAY less shooty than Englewood but obviously never experienced white flight leading me to....

Calumet Heights is another relatively historically black neighborhood but unlike Bronzeville had white flight. It's not shooty at all and a large number of professionals live there.

Your hypothesis I find specious.

I argue that racial AND non-racial socio-economic segregation have been happening. The fact that not every single example is racial (there are less poor predominantly black neighborhoods) doesn't change the fact that there is has been flight from poor neighborhoods which have left them decimated and far more segregated along economic lines. Englewood was 69% black in 1960 and 99% in 1980. That is an astonishing level of flight along racial lines. Other areas have had different types of flight. We as a society have simply ignored all of the problems associated with such demographic shifts which leave large areas without econimc or social capital (in fact, we have largely accelerated them with many policies). Ignoring that is somewhat specious ;).

I saw someone reference these numbers yesterday on the TV. They are skewed enough that I wasn't going to quote them until I verified them from another source. And they fit in with a conversation we were having at work where my 55 year old co-worker is sure Social Security won't be around when she retires. People who think the program will simply be shut off don't seem to be aware that for vast swaths of the country, Social Security is the only thing available for people to live on in retirement.

I'm not going to pretend I know the answer to this, or if there even is an "answer" to it.

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I'm beginning to think that we are much more fucked than I thought.