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Integration failed.

No. The problem is an adversarial, frequently criminal, subculture in the underclass. This is rooted in illegitimacy, too many fatherless children, and long term welfare dependency. The problem has been exacerbated as the black middle class, now the substantial majority of the black population, has moved up and out. The really festering areas are dominated by the left-behinds, by now the product of three or four generations of inbred failure which rapidly became the excuse, the expectation and the norm for the underclass.

Several things have to happen. The black middle class needs to stop rationalizing and excusing dysfunction. Most of the feral "youths" roaming the streets have near relatives -- uncles, cousins, brothers -- who got a job, and left the mean street behind. We are way past the point at which white people can preach to this crowd, but the black community needs to start demanding more of its own. And the black leadership needs to change; when the sober histories of this era are eventually written, there will be a special level of contempt reserved for the army of race hucksters who stepped to the front after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

Here in DC, the big centralized housing projects, one by one, are being closed. Low income housing needs to be dispersed, and is being dispersed. If that means the suburban jurisdictions have to shoulder part of the load, so be it; the suburbs are where the service sector job growth is to be found, so the suburbs are where lower income people need to be living if we expect them to work. And disastrous inner city schools have to be fixed. School choice will do that, over time, and in the long run I think we will win that battle.

Integration has not failed. It is the un-integrated left behind population that constitutes the problem.

Before the suburban cowboys descend to insist that they should not be expected to be part of the solution: the catastrophe of the underclass and the decline of the cities are linked, and both are largely, though not entirely, the result of LBJ and the Great Society. The modern suburbs are artifacts of questionable social policy: we subsidized the extension of infrastructure and utilized eminent domain to build the roads, all to enable middle class flight. We systematically destroyed traditional neighborhoods and herded the poor into large scale resettlement projects, dumped in areas where the local political opposition was weakest, and then wondered why these so often turned toxic. Many of the suburbs effectively closed themselves to affordable housing through restrictions on density, multi-family housing and occupancy rules that prevent poor families from doubling or tripling up to move to a better area. (Some of this happens illegally, to be sure.) The schools were wrecked as a matter of misguided social policy. And long term dependency was a deliberate policy choice as well.

Bad policy created this problem. Good policy is needed to correct it.

"...Low income housing needs to be dispersed, and is being dispersed...."

But that means spreading out the ghetto into the vast middle class, and that results in the spread of crime, litter, intimidation, and violence into those previously safe areas.

I do not want my child going near that.

I want her to live.