An audience listening to a scholarly panel at Hartford’s Trinity College last week was treated to a wide variety of intriguing, vexing, and occasionally overwhelming data to parse related to the establishment, growth and current status of the city and the region, portrayed through different lenses.

Short on pictures and long on tables and graphs, presenters from three institutions of higher learning in the state offered pieces of information in the giant puzzle that is the study of the city, touching on demographic issues related to ethnicity, culture, poverty, education, transportation, and the job market.

They were convened as a first event in a seminar series at the college, hosted by the new Center for Urban and Global Studies and its director, Professor Xiangming Chen (pictured). The academic and civic effort will eventually lead to a research-based book. This first event was titled, “The Transformation of Hartford Through the Early 21st Century: Local, Regional and Global Perspectives.”

Part of the center’s mission is to strengthen the relationship between the school and the city, including surrounding neighborhoods, schools, cultural institutions, governmental agencies, business communities, and non-governmental organizations in the area.

The center pledges to “work to develop mutually beneficial and attainable goals with input, direction, and support from community neighbors and partners.” It also hopes to “uncover the local, regional, and global dimensions and sources of the economic, social, cultural, and spatial transformations in Hartford.”

Professor Chen was welcoming at the seminar, which took place in Trinity’s Mather Hall. While I was sharing a tentative introduction with a fellow early arrival, a woman who works at the Learning Corridor nearby, Chen came over and greeted us simultaneously. “You’re from off-campus?” he correctly guessed. “Welcome,” he said, shaking our hands, making a point of it.

The scholars presented academic works-in-progress, often posing more questions than answers. Below are the first two presentations, with more to come in a subsequent post.

African-American Migrants and First White Flight

The first presenter, Kurt Schlichting of Fairfield University, shared information culled from a massive data research project centering on the migration of African-Americans to Hartford over two decades, from 1900 to 1930. The project entails building digital maps of the city from databases he has created using a number of resources, including old insurance maps, voting data, Census data, and city directories. Schlichting added that he is using a geocoding system, IPUMS, a tool also used at the University of Minnesota. The overriding question he is striving to answer is, when did distinctly African-American neighborhoods emerge in the city?

A 1920 residential map, Schlichting explained, shows that African-Americans were clustering in the city near the Connecticut River and along Farmington Avenue, one of Hartford’s primary east-west corridors. The previous decade brought a lot of African-Americans from Georgia, who were recruited to work on tobacco farms when the workers already in the area went to work in factories. Georgians clustered especially close together, and the 1920 map shows a distinct emergence of African-American neighborhoods consisting of these migrants, as well as people who had migrated from Virginia much earlier, and people coming from other states.

Schlichting characterized the groups as having some tension among them, saying the Georgian migrants lived in the “worst” of the six defined African-American neighborhoods at the time.

The neighborhoods were identified (pictured at left) in a 1921 National Urban League study by sociologist and activist Charles Johnson (pictured), who depicted the areas as “deteriorated” and “dirty.”

Some such areas, for example Bellevue Street in the North End, Schlicting said, were formerly occupied by Eastern European immigrants. “Where did the whites go?” he asked.

He ended by asserting that the exit of white immigrants replaced by black immigrants in the city was a case of some of the “first white flight.”

“Amazing” Poverty

Louise Simmons of the University of Connecticut’s School of Social Work, a resident of the city since 1971, she pointed out, next presented a detailed set of data focused on poverty and inequality in Hartford.

She explained that her interest lies in examining issues related to poverty along with how social movements and local politics can work to change present conditions.

“Why do we have the amazing level of poverty we have in Hartford?” she asked. She said her work tends to focus on themes rather than any given research project, although being asked to present information gave her an opportunity to assemble related data.

Hartford has “a staggering number of kids” in poverty, Simmons said; in 2007 it was 41.3 percent of its children, and in 2006 it was 43.4 percent. The city is sixth in the nation with the highest rate of child poverty, which is down from 2000, when the city was second. “Other cities are jumping ahead,” she explained, but not because Hartford’s conditions are improving; rather, family poverty, inadequate health care, a burdened education system, a troubled labor market, and very low levels of income are all worsening factors for cities over 100,000 people.

Hartford has nearly two times the unemployment rate of the rest of the county, Simmons said, and a smaller share of the area’s labor force. The decline in manufacturing jobs in Connecticut between 1990 and 2006 caused a loss of 117,000 jobs.

Employment that was added only exacerbated what Simmons described as a two-tiered job climate, one where high-end jobs contrast starkly against low-end jobs. Hourly wage-earners in the bottom 20 percent of the state’s job market have stagnated or declined in income, while the top 20 percent have risen more rapidly, and the percentage of people earning below poverty wages is increasing.

The state is known for its high per capita income, most recently measured at a median of $65,859, Simmons said. Hartford itself, on the other hand, has a median per capita income of $29,150.

There are also striking ethnic demographic characteristics in the city, especially as compared with its county. As of 2007, Simmons said, using data from the Connecticut Economic Resource Center, Hartford had 44 percent of the African-American population in the county, and 49 percent of the Hispanic and Latino population. The city’s population overall is 41 percent Hispanic, 39 percent African-American, 16 percent white, and four percent “other.”

A number of factors contribute to current conditions, Simmons said, and leaders and activists can start to ask better questions to get at possible solutions. Some of the questions she suggested were, who are the migrants coming to Hartford, how are they arriving, from where, why, and where are they settling? What are their language issues? Simmons noted that Steven Adamowski, the city’s schools superintendent, recently mentioned at a community meeting that there are 51 language groups represented in the public schools—a very challenging demographic reality that the schools are not currently able to address adequately.

Simmons continued to pose a barrage of questions to the audience: Where is there growth in the labor market? What can be done to support families so they can advance in their work lives? What training exists for them, and who is helped right now by that training? What is the effect so far of 1990s welfare reform policy? How does local- or state-level economic development policy alleviate or exacerbate poverty in the city?

What about the ways the public education system in the city is challenged?, she probed further. How is it developed, in the context of No Child Left Behind and an emphasis on testing? What about racial isolation with respect to educational standards, now that it’s been 20 years since Sheff v. O’Neill? Is there equitable allocation for state educational resources? What support do Hartford students need to excel?

A sea of other concerns surrounds the city, she indicated, including issues around housing, health care access, transportation to and from work, access to and the affordability of child care, incarceration and re-entry to society, and how all these impact the city.

Above all, does anyone outside Hartford care?, Simmons wondered aloud.

She argued that in order to gain a clear picture of how to map a course for the future, there is a need to recognize the sources for social change, including the importance of social movements and recent political developments. “We need to know our history and the current status of community organizing,” Simmons said, as well as gaining a clear picture of the influence of the corporate sector on the community. How do recent arrivals create institutions to meet their needs?, she asked. How do the labor movement and local labor organizations impact the community? Has unionization helped? What has been the labor movement’s influence on local politics? Are there coalitions or other organized groups?

The city, she asserted, should strive to get a better grasp as well of the impact of African-American and Latino leaders on the city’s developing political history. What, also, Simmons queried, is the role of parties, especially third political parties, in the urban landscape? What are their achievements? Who is making decisions about Hartford’s future?, she mused; is it open, or closed? Is it coordinated, or ad-hoc?

In keeping with a major portion of her presentation, Simmons ended on a question, one among many she is considering: How will we achieve meaningful social change and reform in the city, lifting the standard of living, and enabling our families to thrive?

Part two tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Community building, Demographics, Discussion, Education, Events, Hartford, Housing, Planning and design, Quality of life, Studies and reports, Think tanks, Urban Compass, Urban design.