above: percentage of the population that is African-American top: 1990 below: 2000
above: percentage of the population below the poverty line top: 1989 below: 1999
the absoluteness of the line. The 1999 poverty map, at the underpass
But if the policies have gone, some informal red lines do remain; most of them follow the route of post-war transportation projects. The Grove Shafter Freeway is one such red line. Above it, stretching into the hills, the houses remain mainly white-owned. Below, as if in a photographic negative, they are black. In between, at the border, another world occurs. To get to my house just off Martin Luther King Junior Way, you have to pass from the hipster restaurants of Telegraph under the Grove Shafter at 45th. The traffic roars past as you pass the steep banks that lead from the pavement to narrow ledges just underneath the freeway. One night I found John, a frequent resident of the underpass, pushing a trolley up that impossibly sheer slope to where so many make their homes. These are shallow settlements, unobtrusive agglomerations of mattresses and the occasional stove. Some of the faces I have known for two years now, others pass through quickly; like most homelessness in the USA, the residents are temporary. Yet, as quickly as people pass through
the space, certain constancies remain. This space between the red lines is not a harmonious neutrality. Shelter, ad-hoc accumulations of cardboard and canvas, is racially divided. Rather than these divisions marking out the limits of urban space, here the divisions run through the space, dividing up people who live almost on top of each other. Too close to keep apart, fights break out, and everyone is aware of the lack of distance that separates oneself from one’s neighbour; there are many types of internal colonisation and often they are felt most strongly when one is weakest. There are reasons to keep these settlements unobtrusive. The council frequently puts up notices banning illegal camping, and the police erratically come by to move people on. Recently, the area was designated an area of urban blight and the council began cleaning and re-designing the underpass. Mary Douglas famously called dirt ‘matter out of place’. In this case, blight serves the same function. Life on the red line is life lived through the red line, and an uncomfortable reminder of how close we are to things we wish were kept far apart, in time and in space. /
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