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KAREN BARTA: 60 in Rochester and in the Twin Cities, skies are mostly sunny and at 67. That's news from Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Karen Barta.

GARY EICHTEN: Thank you, Karen. Six minutes now past 12 o'clock. Welcome back to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary Eichten. Programming on Minnesota Public Radio is supported by Valleyfair family amusement park, where season passes are now available. It's entertainment for the whole family.

A while back, a study came out that said the Twin Cities metropolitan area was one of the most segregated areas in the United States. A more recent study seemed to suggest otherwise. But no matter how high or low the Twin Cities may rank, there clearly are pockets of poverty in the Twin Cities, and a group of citizens has been meeting to discuss just how that segregation affects people's lives and opportunities. And today, we're going to take a closer look at what those citizens found out, what they've been talking about.

First, a little more about the discussion groups themselves. They were organized by a coalition of organizations, including the Minnesota Public Radio Civic Journalism Initiative. The coalition, called the Community Circle Collaborative Coalition, in turn, formed about 50 small groups, or circles to discuss the effects of segregation. Last night, they all got together at Macalester College in Saint Paul for their final meeting. Today, we've been joined by two of last night's moderators, George Latimer and Vivian Jenkins Nelsen.

George Latimer is the longtime former mayor of Saint Paul, former top assistant at the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. He is now a Professor of Urban Studies at Macalester College.

Vivian Jenkins Nelsen is the president and CEO of INTER-RACE, an organization based at Augsburg College in Minneapolis.

We'd also invite you to join our conversation today. Let me give you the number to call if you'd like to call in with a question or comment. Our subject today, the effects of segregation in the Twin Cities area. 227-6000 is the Twin City number, 227-6000. If you're calling from outside the Twin Cities, you can reach us toll free at 1-800-242-2828. 227-6000 or 1-800-242-2828.

George, Vivian, Thank you for coming in today.

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: Thanks for having us.

GARY EICHTEN: Appreciate it.

One of the things that the circle discussions were meant to promote is civil dialogue. Was the discussion last night pretty civil, well, restrained and polite?

GEORGE LATIMER: The first half of the evening was moderated by Vivian. It was very civil. The second half, when I took over the duties of moderation, everything fell apart.

GARY EICHTEN: Went right down.

GEORGE LATIMER: Uncivil.

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: See, I just threatened them in the first half.

GARY EICHTEN: But really, can-- is it your sense that people, if they come to these things with an open mind, they can talk about some pretty controversial issues and not get mad at each other and start pointing fingers, naming names?

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: Well, this group certainly was able to do that, but you have to also understand that they had been in conversation in people's homes for some weeks before that, so there was already a familiarity with these topics. And also, I think some of the contentiousness really was absorbed, really, by the fact that people had worked together.

GEORGE LATIMER: There was an additional factor. The chapel, Weyerhaeuser Chapel at Macalester, was virtually full. It was not a small turnout. It was a big turnout. But the man at the end of the program, his name was Heegaard from Edina, made a really good point. And that is it's true that there were differences and some of them were marked. But on the other hand, for people to turn out and engage around this subject shows an interest and openness and a concern about racial and economic segregation that does exist in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, as it does all over the country, which probably is a little more keen of a concern than perhaps is held by the public at large.

So a little bit of the singing to the choir is--

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: In the church.

GEORGE LATIMER: --part of the problem. Yeah. In the church, as well, right?

GARY EICHTEN: Well, I think it's fair to say the Twin Cities still maintain a reputation around the country as a fairly open, liberal kind of place. How bad is the problem of segregation here?

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: I think it's very significant. And I think part of what we were struggling with last night was not only how to frame that, how did we get here? But also people have been working on solutions. And they are so complex. They require so many levels of attention by so many different sources that I think it's almost baffling. As several people said, I just don't know how we move out of this.

GARY EICHTEN: Yeah.

GEORGE LATIMER: I do think it's important. The most painful part of all, this is the most important thing to grapple with. And that is there continues to be a persistent, shared myth in this country and in the Twin Cities that the patterns of segregation were chosen by people. They were not.

There is no segregation in America that wasn't the result of conscious decisions made by people who owned property, and after that, by people in power and politics. So the segregated patterns of the public housing in the downtown of the city of Chicago, the segregation of public housing in North Minneapolis, is just as planned and a result of intentions by usually the white power authorities during the period that formed our cities. It's true all over America, and that no one wants to grapple with it, but it's true. We got to deal with it.

And folks didn't choose to live only among poor people or only among people of color. And the fact is that-- and it's not-- and nobody wants to hear this. But the fact is that in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the level of isolation of poor people, the level of isolation and segregation of people of color is more extreme than it's ever been in history. It is not getting better. It is getting worse. Those are the sad facts.

Now, you can-- those things can be documented just by looking at census tracts. But if you don't come to grips with that harsh reality and the educational, economic, and social consequences of that kind of segregation and isolation, then you're never going to come up with solutions. But that's the hardest part of all. And I'll bet you, the people listening on this program right now, probably more than half of them, would not only disagree with what I'm saying, but would probably even be offended because we all feel a certain amount of moral-- that we are responsible for what our society is.

GARY EICHTEN: Isn't there some element of choice here, though? We don't have the kind of official, legally sanctioned segregation laws that were prevalent in the South, the Jim Crow laws.

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: But let me just share something with you. We searched our title. We live in the old Willard Homewood area, which we have to look at-- as George says, we have to look at historically how we got here. This was the ghetto for Jewish people in this town. And then we just followed them, that is, people of color afterwards. And now immigrants are following in the same pattern in the same community.

You have to look at that and say, why is it now, after 50, 60 years, that the same pattern of where poor people live is happening, even though it's different poor people? And we were searching our title on our house and we found as late as the '60s in the title work what are called restrictive covenants, where you couldn't sell this property to an Indian person or a Black person. And these kinds of things were going on when I moved to Minnesota.

GEORGE LATIMER: And the Supreme Court didn't strike down restrictive covenants until 1947 in the case of, I think it was Kramer, the Kramer case in 1947, which the Supreme Court finally struck down restrictive covenants on a private level.

It is not to say, Gary, that every day today, people are not going out there purposely to segregate poor people and people of color away from the rest of the society on a conscious, everyday effort. But the fact is, we cannot ignore our history. We are the product of our history, and the patterns are there historically because we consciously want them to be.

And to move beyond the issue of race, Mount Sinai Hospital was created in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after the Second World War, primarily because Jews could not perform surgery in the hospitals of Minneapolis. So that's part of another kind of history of discrimination that is not as powerful and as long standing as the segregation of race. And disproportionately, people of color are disproportionately poor. And so the economic and racial isolation becomes compounded.

GARY EICHTEN: What's the problem with-- I mean, you're going to have a certain number of people who are poor are-- in various races and so on. What's the problem with having different, the same kind of people living in the same place as opposed to dispersing them throughout a metropolitan area?

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: Well, there are problems both ways. And we've tried to we've tried to fix some of this in ways that haven't worked by dispersing people sort of Willy nilly all over, and then they find that they have no social institutions, no social interaction, no safety, if you will.

But getting back to your question, what's wrong, what's the problem with having everybody the same, living in the same place? Well, what we've seen is services are delivered differently. What we've seen is that people often are just-- they and their children are really frozen in a place where they have no contact. And I think the isolation part that George raises really has the long term effects in how you work, where you work, if you work. All these kinds of issues come to bear if you've been isolated from other people.

GEORGE LATIMER: Think about jobs. I remember the first job I ever had as an adult. I was 18 years old. On my 18th birthday, my father walked me down to Local 187, the Laborers Union in Schenectady, New York, and they put me on the job that day, and I got a union card that day.

The simple fact is that it's because my father knew the business agent for the union. It's not unethical. I thank God for it. I paid my way through college as a result of working in construction. It wasn't like there was a conspiracy there. But the fact is, we know that things like jobs, educational opportunity, social interaction, all of that comes about through having an opportunity to have a network. My father didn't use the word network, but he got me the job, right?

Now, did I have to work? Sure, I had to work. But the fact is if you have all poor people together, the likelihood of any one of them having a job or a connection for a job-- and everything gets compounded in education and occupations and everything else.

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: Let me share a small story with you.

GARY EICHTEN: Sure.

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: When we moved to Nebraska, to Omaha, my brother wanted to get a job. He's a lot older than I am. I actually quite a bit younger than he is, but anyway-- no, I'm just kidding. But anyway, it wasn't that long ago. It's in my memory that in a neighborhood in North Omaha, there was a grocery store. He wanted to be a bag boy.

We came out of the South. We couldn't see any differences. There weren't any signs that said, like they did in the South, don't come here, don't drink there. Don't you can't live there. So he went to apply to be a bag boy at the grocery store near us. Well, they told him, colored boys can't do this. And in order for my brother to get the job, my dad had to organize all these other pastors. And he was new to town, and we had to march up and down in front of the store to get a job.

And so when George talks about this, the access to work has really been around color and class lines. And they have a long shadow. They cast a long shadow, and we're still dealing with them.

GARY EICHTEN: I do think there-- is not a perception, though, that among a large number of people, this is all ancient history, what you're talking about here, this has all been taken care of. You're talking about the '40s. You're talking about the '60s, and we're now close to the 21st century here.

GEORGE LATIMER: Well, you're right. Most people do think that that's ancient history. And that's why I said at the opening of the program, I expect it to offend at least 50% of the listeners of the program, didn't want to hear what I was going to say. And I know that people continue to say that. I repeat that history does matter.

Now, once the history sets in these patterns of where people live and then it gets compounded, there are other forces then come at work that appear to be neutral, but against an unneutral background it plays itself out. For example, land cost, zoning, and the rest, clearly harder to build affordable housing in the suburbs. All of those tend to grow over time, and people who can afford it tend to move into areas that they can reach. People cannot afford it, therefore, tend to have fewer and fewer choices. So it's kind of a cycle that continues.

We do know and it's true-- in the book that has never been refuted that I know of called The American Apartheid, written by a man named Massey and a woman named Denton, talks about this in cities all over America. And we know that what we used to think of as well, there are people who choose to be together in white Italian neighborhoods or Irish neighborhoods or Polish neighborhoods. The fact is, never in our history was there ever that kind of concentration equal to the concentration around the issue of color and race, and that continues.

GARY EICHTEN: Any suggestions from the people who participated in these discussions as to what should be done about this, at least in the short run?

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: Well, they have a document, which, by the way, if the listeners are interested in, it's certainly available, of just scores of ways to begin to address some of these issues short and long term. And so, I mean, I don't know where you want us to start on this. There are so many.

GEORGE LATIMER: One of the outcomes is a process outcome, Gary, if I could mention it because I thought it was very pointed. There was a woman from the northern suburbs who made the point at the end of the program that all future dialogues that occur should have what they have, which is a central city community and a suburban community in that kind of exchange. The man from Edina and a man from Minnetonka supported that idea, because too often you're talking to people within one neighborhood.

What distinguishes Minneapolis and Saint Paul-- and we were told this by Martha McCoy, who is the-- involved in the national work--

KAREN BARTA: She's the director of the study circles nationally, yes.

GEORGE LATIMER: Yeah. Thank you. What she pointed out to us is that we are the only community in America right now who are undertaking this difficult conversation on a regional basis. The reason that's important is that the patterns of economic growth and opportunity are definitely regional. We know that over the next 15 years, more than a quarter of a million jobs will be produced. But we also know that 90% of those will be produced away from where the isolated poor and people of color are, and therefore the solutions that these groups, these neighborhood groups, church groups, and the rest who met last night at McAlester talked about may have currency over the next 15 years if we really get talking about making exchanges and opening up the doors and windows and giving folks real opportunity for mobility and jobs and choices for housing.

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: And one of the things that was very interesting to me is that the recognition of these folks, because they are resourced by the study circles with by the organization with research. And so forth and so on, so people aren't just sort of talking out of pooled ignorance, and they're also given a variety of views of ways to look at this, free market, not, whatever. And so they can choose and pick and they've got some really informed stuff to start with, but which I think helps their decision making and their discussion.

But now, having said that, one of the things I think was really true amongst the solutions is the focus on children and the long view, because our diversity in Minnesota is amongst our children. And so there were really some very cogent solutions that were given to trying to solve issues from that viewpoint, especially around schools and the like.

GARY EICHTEN: Well, let's get some listeners involved here. We're talking today about segregation in the Twin City area, specifically the discussion that's been going on organized by the Community Circle Collaborative. And they had a final joint meeting last night, moderated by our two guests today, George Latimer and Vivian Jenkins Nelsen.

If you'd like to join our conversation, give us a call. Twin City area number is 227-6000, 227-6000. Outside the Twin Cities, the number would be 1-800-242-2828. 227-6000 or 1-800-242-2828. Segregation and what to do about it, that's our subject today. Tim, you're first. Go ahead, please.

AUDIENCE: Oh, yeah. Hi. Say, I'm just curious. I grew up in the Projects, and now I live in White Bear Lake. But I'm just wondering, I had to work real hard to get out of the Projects. And I realized that I didn't want to live in the Projects, but it takes money. So I work real hard.

I'm always working. And now I'm raising my family not in the Projects. But the point is today, now, would you just-- are you going to move the poor people out without having to work hard? I know you say you have to work hard.

It's legal for people to live anywhere they want. It's a matter of money. And that's what America is based on, I'm sorry to say. But also, I just remembered, George, you were in the-- you and Bruce Vento came to town a couple of years ago to get a special-- you wanted the Hmong to feel more comfortable in the Projects that they lived in. I don't know what actually some kind of housing arrangements you set them up to be more comfortable in their arrangements at Mount Airy. Do you remember going over there and doing that with Vento?

GEORGE LATIMER: Yes, I do. I remember being at Mount Airy where they've totally remodeled Mount Airy.

AUDIENCE: So they're comfortable to stay there, segregated? Is that what you're--

GEORGE LATIMER: No. My belief is that people who live in public housing should experience some decent, safe place to live.

AUDIENCE: It was wonderful when I lived there.

GEORGE LATIMER: It was a beautiful-- it was really beautiful. I don't know if you've been back there, but it's been well run. Saint Paul is the best run public housing system in the whole country, has been among the best for 35 years.

AUDIENCE: Right. But did you want those people-- do you want those people to stay there? Or do you want them to move? Now, you're--

GEORGE LATIMER: No, it's not a matter of what I want those people to do. I want a society in which opportunities for people to make real choices to improve themselves through work and living where they want to live can occur. That's really what I want.

And as far as public housing is concerned, as you know, the original dream of public housing was to give folks like you an opportunity to first have a place to stay and then to improve your lot and to move beyond as you have. That's the ideal. Unfortunately, in too many parts of the country, it has tended not to be a platform from which people can move, but rather a place where people are kind of stuck.

So I'm glad that you're a good example of what public housing was supposed to have been about. No, I'm not in favor-- and by the way, my views really ought to be secondary to what everybody assembled we're talking about last night. What they were talking about in money, the point you made, was made very powerfully by the-- do you remember the gentleman's name--

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: Absolutely. I can't remember his name, no.

GEORGE LATIMER: --from Minnetonka. He said that money will, in fact, break down the barriers. I don't agree totally with that somewhat Marxist approach. But I do agree with you, the caller, who says that if you work hard and you save your money, you then are going to have more choices.

And I think that's true of people who are Black or white or people of color in this country. The fact is we have plenty of evidence that even with money, people of color tend to run into more barriers. You read stories about great authors who returned to their home to be celebrated. And they have wealth, and they have everything else.

But they still have the color of their skin, and the cabbie still won't pick them up if they want to go uptown and there in downtown in Manhattan. So we have plenty of evidence of the discrimination persisting. But the simple fact is economic opportunity finally will be the key to help people like you and me and people of color and people who are now isolated poor.

GARY EICHTEN: Back to the phones. Alan is on the line from Minneapolis. Go ahead, sir.

AUDIENCE: Thank you. First, I'd like to say those were wonderful questions. I wish I could say the same about the answers. But I'm sorry that I missed the session last night because I'm sure at least on the part of the moderators, we would have heard a diversity of opinion ranging from at least capital A to small a.

Two specific questions. Ms. Jenkins noted earlier that there were restrictive covenants enforced until the 1960s. Yet Mr. Latimer then said the Supreme Court struck them down in 1947. Does that mean that people for at least 15 years were violating the law?

GEORGE LATIMER: It's hard to believe, isn't it?

AUDIENCE: It is.

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: Yes, they were. And yes, that's a great question.

AUDIENCE: The restrictive covenants could have been written into the mortgage. That doesn't mean they were in any way enforced. How were they enforced if the Supreme Court said they were illegal?

Well, here's my other question. You were talking about that you can see these problems that you're identifying just by looking at census data. And I certainly don't know what the answer, and I think it is a problem. But I have a question about the cause. And I think it can be identified by looking at that same census data.

The Twin Cities, particularly Minneapolis, over the last 10, 15, maybe two decades, has had a massive in-migration of Blacks for any number of reasons. But there has been that case, I think, in Minneapolis, the population of African-Americans has more than doubled in that period. So people who are middle class, who have a stable home life, who have a job, a career, extended families don't just pick up and move across country.

There has been a natural self-selection of poor, poverty-living African-Americans who have moved here. How can we be surprised that there are concentrations of poor Blacks who are living in Minneapolis, and I think to some extent Saint Paul, when they have made a decision, that cohort of people has made a decision to move here?

GARY EICHTEN: Vivian?

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: Well, first of all, let me just back up for a minute and say this. Yes, people have been-- your first issue about have people been illegally segregating around rentals and buying homes? Yes, they have. Now we have lots of data about that in Minnesota and lots of testing that has gone on and continues to go on in that regard.

Let me move to your next question, which is to make the assumption that people move only if they're rootless, homeless, have no jobs. I mean, the fastest moving group of people around are executives with their families who move from one good job to the next and move on an average of often three times in five years. Now, having said that, I don't want to beg the question, which is about the in-migration of which you've heard an awful lot about people of color here to the Twin Cities.

That is certainly true. But what is also not shown often in media reports is the significant number of people of color who move here as people of means, people with education, and who are making significant contributions to both these communities.

GARY EICHTEN: Now where do they-- the middle class, upper middle class Black person, where do they end up living, as a rule? In these little pockets of poverty? Or do they end up in a middle class suburb like a white person would?

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: Well, I don't have the-- I don't have accurate stats on that. But I do know from looking at the census data that there is a significant cohort of people of color here who have in-migrated. Now what I can tell you is just from what I know.

I live in the central city. I live in the north side. There are people of means and with education who live in my block. I experience them as being scattered all over the Twin Cities.

Now I don't choose to live in a very poor area. The area that I live in the Homewood is very mixed. There are poor people who live. But there is stable housing. It's a nice inner city neighborhood.

GEORGE LATIMER: May I add a further comment on the last questioner's comment about causation, what causes the isolation of the poor? There are other forces at work. Let me give you a basic statistic out of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

The birth rate of African-Americans in Saint Paul is about the same as the white population. The largest growing population is the Southeast Asian, the Hmong population. One out of four of our school kids in Saint Paul are Hmong or Southeast Asian.

In 1980-- if the caller is still on the phone or listening to the radio, in 1980, we had about 5%, 5.5% unemployment rate in Saint Paul, and we had people under the poverty line of around 9.5%. 10 years later, the unemployment rate dropped by two points. So we were virtually maximum, let's say 3.5% unemployment. But the poverty rate has almost doubled. It's gone from 9.5% to almost 17%.

Now what does that tell you? It tells you that more and more people of all colors, more and more people are working and making less money. And it means, for example, out of the quarter of a million jobs that the Metro Council has estimated they are going to be produced in the next 15 years, fully 45% of them will make under $22,000 a year.

What that means is that more and more people are working and yet still being poor. A disproportionate number of those people happen to be also people of color, as they make less money. And the wage flattening has been occurring for 20 years in this country at the bottom level. The spread between the poor and the rich has been widening. And that is no longer debated.

By the way, when Bluestone and Harrison wrote that 20 years or 15 years ago, people said it was a myth. But now I attended a session of labor economists with the Council on Foreign Affairs this past week. No one is even arguing anymore about the fact that there are more and more low paying jobs.

We are arguing about causation. What part of it is driven by technology? What part of it by trade? Foreign trade. And what part of it by the lack of unions to drive wages back up?

But the reality of more and more poor people working and not making enough to live decently is occurring. That compounds it. So people like you and I who make choices are able to really move as we wish. People who don't have money, don't have transportation, don't have choices to make, so they tend to compound in one area of the central city.

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: Can I just-- I think we have to talk about transportation and the role that it plays here in the North and particularly the North vis-a-vis Minnesota. And the fact that the jobs are, as George said earlier, not only currently are now where people can't get to them, unless they own a car, et cetera. But they are developing in places where they will not be able to get to them.

Now one of the things that I'm just baffled by is that we have wondered why we have had such low health rates for infants in this area. We said, well, how did this happen? I mean, we're such a health conscious place. How is it that children of color, babies of color are dying at these alarming rates? We have all these clinics.

Guess what? Syl Jones, who writes in the paper, did a study for the Health Department and found out that people simply couldn't get there. They and their babies were where they could physically not get to where they need to go. And until we really seize this issue-- and people have been working on it now for 20 years, my husband is one of them, on light rail and get this situation solved, we are still looking at people not being where they need to be in order to be able to get the work.

GARY EICHTEN: We're talking today about segregation in the Twin Cities area. And if you'd like to join our conversation, give us a call. 227-6000 is the Twin City area number 227-6000.

Outside the Twin Cities 1-800-242-2828. Our guests today, Vivian Jenkins Nelsen, president and CEO of Inter-Race and former Saint Paul mayor George Latimer, who is, among other things, now a professor of urban studies at Macalester College. Jim, go ahead, please.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. This will be the third straight caller who's, at least in substance, sort of objected to the perspective of your guests. Although I do find it interesting, I will say this in your guests favor, when you had a call in show about the governor's tax credits. There was really an organized call in campaign, and I was the only person who supported, was able to get in.

It certainly is different today, which suggests there may not be as much organized power in favor of your guest's perspective, which may partly justify, I suppose, what they're doing. But the point I would like to make is it's a little hard to win someone over when you suggest that 50% of us at least are basically not going to be on the right side of the issue. I mean, it's sort of patronizing to say that our reaction is going to not be as an enlightened one as theirs. And I think we all have different experiences.

And I think your guests have a natural socially engineering kind of perspective of where they want to use government to make things right. But I would suggest that government and these kind of covenants that existed, legalized segregation, those were what upset things in the beginning. And to think that you can use social engineering to set everything straight, I think, is sort of a problem.

But the other point I'd like to bring is you're facing a real problem in that. And you can look it up in the crime statistics. They don't like to release it. But a lot of the crime, particularly minority crime in the Twin Cities is caused-- some of the most serious crime is caused by people who have over the last couple years immigrated here from Chicago, Gary, and other places.

And what it comes across as being is saying that that evidently isn't changing, although it may be easing to some extent. But the idea is that that such people would come in and they tend to go into the poverty areas. And what's the alternative? The alternative is they're going to be spread out among the Twin Cities more.

And for a thoughtful person, obviously, that's not a real appealing, I guess, plan. So I think the problem part of this is that you can't view people as just kind of cogs in the system. That somehow the people that are committing more crimes-- and a lot of people in poverty, they have to see themselves as active agents.

And they can't just be passively moved around from one area to another. And I think that's what I object most to your perspective is the idea that somehow people are more passive than they really are. And the first caller illustrates that people are not passive.

GARY EICHTEN: Thank you, Jim.

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

GARY EICHTEN: OK.

GEORGE LATIMER: May I comment? I thank the caller because I think that he made two or three points that really are shared by an awful lot of people. First of all, I think it's a real mistake to assume that the people gathered last night and have been meeting in church basements and neighborhood groups all talked about shipping people around. That really wasn't the single conclusion.

What they did seem to conclude is that we have to produce better community schools and better opportunities for people to make choices. That we should have an opportunity to place some more housing where work is. There is nobody that I know of who thinks or who wants to simply have a huge outmigration of people from where they live to somewhere else. So there's got to be a double, at least a two-pronged approach.

One is this is what the folks were saying. One is that we've got to invest in support systems, including peer parenting and all kinds of outreaches from churches and schools and the rest that were part of it as well right where people now live. And the second is to offer more opportunity to follow jobs and to get jobs where they're going, which is outside the central city, and to have housing nearby there that's also affordable.

The numbers we're talking about are not beyond our reach to be able to produce some opportunity of that kind. We're not anywhere near at the point where any one community is going to have to bear a terrible burden. The alternative is just to ignore the problem.

Now as to the crime issue, I think we do all of ourselves a real disservice if we mix together the issue of kids and the opportunity for them to have a decent life, and hardened criminals who are committing crimes and ought to be treated with a full extent and force of the law, as far as I'm concerned. And most Minnesotans, I think, agree. And the idea of mixing together the criminal with all poor people is just not one that I'm prepared to accept in any way, shape, or form.

GARY EICHTEN: But isn't there-- I mean, there certainly is a perception, a perceived link between low-income poor people and an increase in the crime rate. Now whether it's true or not, there certainly is that perception. And in fact, I suppose in a way you could draw the inference well.

Many of these areas of concentrated poverty, the crime rate is quite a bit higher. And it would be elsewhere. And that seems to bear evidence to some kind of a link. That's not to say all poor people are criminals or anything of the sort. But there's a greater incidence. How do you break that perceived link?

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: Well, apparently, we're not doing very well at breaking that link because it's clear that people still have that sort of common wisdom and really see what we're talking about as the incomers-- although I keep saying the census data tells us a different story, that all the people who are coming in are coming in from Chicago, Gary, and are troubled people.

And I think that's something that I hold the media accountable for, really. I mean, they in large part created this lens that we're looking through. And I don't see anybody else, any other institution being able to really correct the information as well as the media.

Now, having put that squarely on your shoulders and not mine, I want to just say this about that, which is to say that as we're looking at in-migration and crime statistics, all the rest of it, the fact is crime is going down. And we never seem to get that message across. And we work closely with a number of groups who are working on violence in the Twin City area. And so I look at the statistics all the time. I can't really tell you what better to do about changing this perception.

GARY EICHTEN: Let's assume for a moment I have worked hard, built myself a real nice home out in a suburban area. Got a little land, finally got some space. And then somebody comes along and says it's your civic duty to agree because we've decided we're going to put up an apartment complex down the road here.

How should I react to that? Should I be happy about that? Because there are a lot of people who will tell me, Gary, your property values are going right down the tubes.

You might end up with some real bad actors living in that apartment building. Why, heck, you could have stayed right where you were. What was the point of working so hard and finally getting to your dream home?

GEORGE LATIMER: Gary, you're doing a great job of characterizing the position. I think you're right. I have a couple of very strong feelings about the politics of this.

Number one, bashing suburbs or people who have chosen to live where they wish to live is pointless. I just don't accept the proposition that everyone who's choosing to live in a suburb is somehow tainted, and everybody who's living in a central city is not. That's foolishness. I think you should be able to live better and earn a better life. That's what our system is built on. And I'm not proposing to replace it with anything else.

So it's not a matter of good people and bad people. What it is a matter is that from the standpoint of our economy, where we have growing numbers of young people who are not going to be able to fill the jobs that we're definitely going to be producing. That's not good for any of us.

From the standpoint of society, it is eventually going to affect all of us if we don't address the issue of the isolated people in our midst who are very poor, who are often people of color. We know maybe we ought to have a Midday program celebrating poor people and people of color who are solidly in the middle and upper middle class because we have millions of stories like that all over America and thousands of stories like that all over Minnesota. And I think they're great stories. But the point is, we all had to get started somewhere.

What I'm arguing and what the people who met at Macalester last night concluded, is the way we're moving, the trend lines, the lack of transportation, the lack of access to capital, the lack of access to decent education too frequently, the general cutting back of the commitment to support those kinds of opportunities are going to compound. And our whole state and our region is going to be less livable because of it. I think it's very important that we see that as being shared.

It's not a matter of you doing it for patriotism, but rather from the standpoint of enlightened self-interest. If you want Minnesota in the next 25 years to be as livable as it has been in the past 25 years, we can't just ignore the growing numbers of very poor people.

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: Can I just--

GARY EICHTEN: Sure.

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: --weighed in here? I live in my dream home, and it's in the central city. It's on the north side. And we struggle just as you talked about. Suburban community struggle with apartment buildings that-- well, two blocks down on my street, all of our block clubs have been meeting and congregating and talking about what are the problems that this brings to our neighborhood because of an overconcentration of poor people without services and all the things that they need.

This is an issue for all of us. And the question isn't just throw the poor people out. For us, at least that's not the way in which our blocks talk about, what we can do to support the people who live there.

Our first conversation is around policy. Is this a dumb thing to do to pile up a group of people with no services who are poor and isolate them some more in a huge or in a large apartment block? If it's dumb in the suburbs, I guess it's dumb in our block too.

And so then we try to struggle with, OK, now if we can't change what the policy makers have done, how can we make this a livable situation in our community? What can we do? And the church right across the street has built a wonderful addition that provides for all kinds of recreation and stuff that wasn't there before. So the neighborhood is we couldn't change the policy makers, so we're going after it ourselves so that we can live peaceably with some kind of dumb policy decisions.

GARY EICHTEN: Richard, your question, please.

AUDIENCE: Yes, actually, I'd like to point out an issue and suggest a possible solution. And then I'd be very interested in the comments of the two panelists. The issue is just the nature of prejudice itself and people's attitudes. I think there's a basic problem that will never be addressed by politics or economics, which is that people are very loath to admit that they are prejudiced.

And I've thought about it a lot. And I conclude that probably prejudice, racial or against a religion or anything else, is in fact, and maybe this is shocking, a natural thing. I think from an anthropological perspective, throughout history, we see that wars have been fought on grounds of prejudice, one ethnic group against another.

From a biological perspective, there's been a good deal of research on the idea of the fight or flight instinct and how adrenaline causes people to get into a defensive mode. And that this interacts with that anthropological perspective. So I think the problem is that people wouldn't want to admit that prejudice is natural. I think it is a natural thing.

And if more people would be willing to admit that and start from the square of "I admit that there's a tendency in me to be prejudiced. And so now I'm going to do something about that. I'm going to watch my thinking and watch my acts, my actions. And I'm going to do whatever I can from-- you can call it a spiritual perspective or a psychological perspective to counteract that in myself." So I want to suggest that there has to be something on the personal level, which is way more fundamental than any economic or political program.

GARY EICHTEN: OK. Comments.

GEORGE LATIMER: I think that's very, very thoughtful. And last night, we began by a couple of people talking about some teachers had exhibited some discriminatory conduct. And then they went to students. I said to them, I said, I've been listening closely. Then you really think that it's pretty pervasive.

It's not one group or one class. That we all share in this. And there was almost universal agreement. And the caller has hit on exactly that point. I think whether it's natural or anthropologically or what, the fact is we tend to like people who look and act like us. We tend to distrust people who don't look and act just like us.

And that's the way we act. And then my attitude about that with the caller is, yes, we all should pray to change our views. But along the way, since I'd like to concentrate on behavior and what we do rather than just pray for the day that we're all free of prejudice, but rather build public policy and systems which will acknowledge that reality, and as this caller said, moving to change it and moving to give opportunities for people, notwithstanding the prejudice that many of us feel.

GARY EICHTEN: Vivian?

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: Well, I think that the caller was right on target in terms of the personal responsibility issue. And it's been written about for many, many years that scapegoating is a tendency that we have when things go wrong, to look for the person who is different. Now that's not just about race. And the research is in, as George talks, about affiliation. We like to affiliate with people who are like us most often.

Now I think we have a tendency to blame others. I certainly do. I blame my husband when anything goes wrong in the house. But the thing about it is that I think that's a natural tendency.

And I want the first caller, I think, I found that perturbing, his call, is that I don't think George meant at all to suggest that people are dopey and half of them are going to be on the wrong side of the race issue. I think that's a human, a human issue that we're talking about. And that was said over and over again last night.

GARY EICHTEN: If it's true that we like to be around people like ourselves and prefer to affiliate with people who have common interests and so on and so forth, how is it, on the one hand, you can accommodate that desire, and on the other hand meet these broader social goals, which seem to suggest that, well, yeah, maybe you'd like to live next to George over here. But actually, you ought to live next to Harold because Harold needs an opportunity to move into your neighborhood?

GEORGE LATIMER: I think it's a line between public policy and private choice. We ought to have public policy, in my judgment, which affords opportunity for people to fulfill their potential. I think that's what being an American is about. It's what being a Minnesotan is about.

The policies now in place and the status quo isolates too many people and really makes it awfully hard for me to hope that they're going to have an even shot and a level playing field. If they have a level playing field, and if they have an even shot, and we have real opportunity to live and work, then people will make choices. And indeed, they often will identify with people they want to.

I would not want a world that was homogeneous, and everyone went to the same church. And everyone went to the same movie and all the rest. "Vive la difference." I believe in that.

But what's happening now is we are having private choices supported by public policy. That is to say, I can choose to live where I want, and I get an interest deduction on my home. But we don't have a public policy that gives the same opportunity to someone who isn't there yet.

And I think it's very dangerous where we are right now on both the issue of poverty and the issue of race. And I wouldn't separate the two. I think we need to open more and more opportunity for the future.

And I don't disagree with what you said earlier that where more and more poor people are, if there's less hope in their life, they're more liable to act in criminal ways. And that there is a correlation there. I don't duck from that. But the way that we approach it is to give more and more opportunity. Be clear and stern with people who have done wrong, but give real opportunity, particularly for kids, to do better for themselves.

GARY EICHTEN: We are unfortunately just about out of time, but I want to get one more caller on if we can. John, last word from you, please.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, real quick. To go on to your other caller, as a young man, by the age of 21, I lived in 18 different communities and a number of them were rural who had no minorities to speak of. And every time every place I walked in to town, I found that there were people who were doing things that to me that sounds like racism if they were done to people of different color or of Jewish background.

And I'm trying to say that it is a structural thing that's going on. It's not per se color bound. And once we understand that structure, maybe there's a lot of white people that have been through the same mill. And I consider myself smelling like an outsider till the day I die with some of the stuff I went through.

And my children have been in this community. They've grown up here. They will blend to a point. I'm white, blue eyed, and blonde when I was younger. And I think it's a structural thing. And I think they're going to look for the first person down the road that's different.

GARY EICHTEN: Thanks, John.

AUDIENCE: You bet.

GARY EICHTEN: Quick comment from you folks before we take off here.

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: Well, I'd like to say just very quickly, I agree with George that people need choices. They also need to be able to have experiences so that they can make choices. And if you've never experienced what it's like to live next door to me or a person like me, you're not making an informed choice.

And that's why the segregation piece is so important is that you might live next door to me and say, well, shoot. I want to go out and live with people like myself. But at least you've had some way to make an informed choice.

And I want to also say, too, that I think-- I just want to say quickly that Minnesotans are really terrific people, and they really are very bright people. And they're very concerned people. And I think we're going to lead the nation on really bringing some real solutions to these very knotty problems.

GARY EICHTEN: And what happens with the recommendations or the ideas that came up? Anything? Just gathers dust now or--

GEORGE LATIMER: No, I think they're going to really try to expand the conversation beyond the choir and get suburbs and local communities in the central city talking better.

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSEN: Also, the appropriate places, people, policymakers, groups get the reports.

GARY EICHTEN: Thanks so much for coming in today. Appreciate it. Our guests today, George Latimer, former Saint Paul mayor, now a professor of urban studies at Macalester College, Vivian Jenkins Nelsen, president and CEO of Inter-Race. They were the moderators last night of a final meeting of a group of citizens who've been holding discussions on the issue of segregation group, conversations put together by the Community Circle Collaborative.

That does it for our Midday program today. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for calling in, those of you who made the effort. We'll be rebroadcasting this program at 9:00 tonight. On Monday, our series on the civil rights movement continues.

PERRY FINELLI: I'm Perry Finelli. On the next All Things Considered, mass in Latin, it brings a certain style of worship, centuries of musical heritage, and a lot of controversy. All Things Considered, weekdays at 3:00 on KNOW FM 91.1.

GARY EICHTEN: You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio. For the afternoon, it might hit 85 yet today. Clear tonight with a low in the 50s, tomorrow sunny with a high near 80.