From The “No Shit Sherlock” Files

What passes for local “media” comes out of Fort Wayne and like most smaller cities, the “news” types in Fort Wayne are desperate to be seen as “serious journalists” by the larger city cousins. Since the only way to be a “serious journalist” in the years since the glorious ascension of Saint George Floyd of the Fentanyl, pbuh, is to complain about racism, the local media does so on a regular basis. Often it is not overt but instead is seen in a wanton disregard of the obvious racial angle in a story. Like this one:

In Allen County, we have A Tale of Two Zip Codes.

For years, 46765, the zip code for Leo-Cedarville has been the zip code for the lowest poverty rate in the state, a poverty rate that’s less than one percent.

At the other end of the scale, 46803, near downtown, has consistently been the zip code with the highest poverty rate in the state at nearly 50%. This article sourced UnitedStatesZipCodes.org that bases its conclusions on the U.S. Census. The census was also consulted.

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Allen County is home to Fort Wayne and outlying communities, including one of the largest Amish settlements in the country. Fort Wayne has a fair amount of crime but it is really concentrated in the southeast part of the city. While most of the areas outside of downtown are nice residential or shopping areas, the south-east section of the city looks a lot like Detroit. You will not be shocked when I tell you that the zip code with the highest poverty rate in the state of Indiana (46803) just happens to be in….the southeast of Fort Wayne…

The opposite end of the spectrum is Leo-Cedarville, a very nice suburb northeast of the city….

The school system is considered highly desirable for parents so housing costs are quite high. The local high school is the kind of place where you can drive by and see a large crowd turning out for a tennis match. The story from WANE is fairly lengthy but really is summed up in a few paragraphs….

Meanwhile, Leo seems to have found “the magic,” says Leo’s Town manager Tena Woenker.

Since taking over as town manager, she believes the residents have a loyalty to one another that’s crucial to its success in this municipality of about 5,300 where 96 % of the population is white.

Woenker described Leo, located in a small pocket in the county’s northeastern corner, as a commuter city with limited highway access or transportation hubs that would draw industry.

“Our focus is on our schools and parks,” Woenker said.

46803 is one of three zip codes in Allen County that is “majority minority,” with a greater African American population than any other ethnicity. The other two are 46806 and 46816, both just south of 46803 and both with a higher poverty rate than the state average which is 12.6%.

In 46803, about 45% of the population is Black and 39%, white, according to the data.

That really explains it all. Allen County is only around 11% black and Fort Wayne is about 15% black, but most of those blacks are concentrated in the three zip codes mentioned: 46803, 46806 and 46816. When the local news reports on a shooting or murder, it is newsworthy if they happen outside of those three zip codes.

Leo-Cedarville on the other hand is overwhelmingly White and as of 2010 had a black population of 0.1%. The high school Facebook page is full of pictures of smiling young White kids, the only blacks I saw were in some sports pics. Of course even at a very White school like Leo High School, there are some black kids and they behave pretty much like they do everywhere else.

This shows the out-of-school suspension rates across different races/ethnicities at this school compared to the state average. 

It really isn’t complicated. Neighborhoods with lots of blacks are going to have high rates of poverty and crime as a result of lower average IQs, impulse control issues and generally slothfulness. Neighborhoods with low percentages of blacks and mestizos are generally going to have lower rates of poverty and crime. There are exceptions in places like Appalachia but those areas also are mostly remote and rural with far smaller populations in general. In short…

With all else being equal, economics is downstream from demographics.

Leo-Cedarville is just a short, maybe 15 minute, drive from southeast Fort Wayne but the two areas are world’s apart because of demographics. There isn’t a “solution” to the problem of disparate poverty because no matter what you do or how you reshuffle the people, the results will be driven by demographics. Swap the populations of these two zip codes and in a few years you will have a thriving community with solid schools in the 46803 zip code and regular shootings and robberies with failing schools in Leo-Cedarville.

That doesn’t stop the local press from trying to find excuses like “systemic racism”. The story quotes an “expert” named Rachel Blakeman….

Rachel Blakeman, director of Purdue Fort Wayne’s Community Research Institute and an expert on our local economy, says Allen County is the “most representative” county in the state and “remarkably diverse.”…

…“We know historical practices have concentrated poverty over decades,” Blakeman said. Poverty is not the same as income, but the two are related.

Uh, all due respect to Ms. Blakeman, expert though she claims to be, but it isn’t “historical practices” but simple biological realism. Likewise, Leo-Cedarville isn’t “magic”, it is just a nice location populated by Whites. Saying that doesn’t get one a bullshit job as a “director of Purdue Fort Wayne’s Community Research Institute” so instead it is more profitable to blame “historical practices”. Never fear, Blakeman has found the solution: throw money at the problem.

There are two ways to reverse the poverty in 46803, according to Blakeman.

Employ strategies that improve residents’ lives or get new people to move in, risking gentrification.

She doesn’t say it but she basically admits that one solution to the woes of southeastern Fort Wayne would be to have “new people move in” and as she mentions “gentrification”, a slur for “White people moving back into cities White people built”, she all but admits that demographics are a problem. The other “solution”? Improving residents’ lives and in the context of blacks that always assumes the way you accomplish that is with money. The story suggests one of the ways to improve residents’ lives…..

Sheila Curry Campbell, a former county councilwoman whose district included 46803, is at the forefront of the battle to reverse 46803’s fate. She blames the persistent poverty on disinvestment.

“No one wants to put any money into that space,” Curry Campbell told WANE. “In the state, if you go to the census and you pull those census tracts – you can pull any – 46803 has the worst numbers. Infant mortality, cancer, household income, you name it. Unfortunately, it’s number one.”

Curry Campbell and her church, Pilgrim Baptist at 1331 Gay St., created the Pilgrim Progress Community Development Center to fight back.

“We have been a pillar in the community.” she said. The church, founded 105 years ago, holds monthly conversations, offering seminars on suicide, CPR, AED training, summer job programs, yoga, cooking.

“We just asked the city of Fort Wayne for $100,000 for a grassroots equity commission,” for the Pilgrim Progress Community Development Corporation which will tackle five quality of life issues. 

A cool hunnerd grand for a church based “community development program” that bills itself as a “grassroot equity commission”? That is a lot of big words but what does it mean and what are these five “quality of life” issues? It is a little tricky to decipher. The article talks about “weatherization”, I guess if you weatherize your house sufficiently it might help stop stray bullets from penetrating the home but if you search for “Pilgrim Progress Community Development Corporation”, one of the first results points to this:

The PBC (Pilgrim Baptist Church) Green Team has an….interesting…mission. While located at and apparently sponsored by Pilgrim Baptist Church in Fort Wayne, it has a mission completely devoid of anything remotely Christian.

What do we do?

We are committed to building a more just and equitable world, one where all choices are heard and respected regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, or physical ability. We recognize that a diverse and inclusive movement is critical to solving the climate crisis. And that to build this winning coalition, we must ensure that those directly impacted, particularly those who have been excluded in the past, are at the center of the movement for change. While the climate crisis, marginalized groups represent frontline communities, who experience harmful climate impacts first and worst. To live our values of a truly sustainable future for all, we must commit to understanding and undoing the historical injustices which contribute to this reality and, in our solutions, address systemic inequities.

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According to that word salad , what is this outfit going to do to “improve residents’ lives”? Their “vision” is “To support local communities in their transition to clean energy and Decarbonization projects.” They do talk a bit about children centers [sic] and community health clinics but mostly they are concerned with “environmental justice” and “climate change”. Those may be laudable goals (spoiler, they aren’t) but how exactly does that improve the lives of residents in that zip code that is marked by poverty and violent crime? It doesn’t. So why the focus on those vague concepts instead of concrete improvements?

The answer is simple: the audience for those sort of urban community activist groups is never the local community that they claim to serve. Their audience are the corporations and non-profits that fund them. One of the truths I have discovered over the years, something I have talked about before, is that while smart Asians and Whites go into medicine or engineering, clever blacks have discovered that going into some sort of community activism is a way to make a nice income while not actually being required to produce anything. That hundred grand they are asking for? You might as well light it on fire for all the good it will do for the black impoverished community in Fort Wayne.

In the real world, everyone know what the problem is in southeast Fort Wayne and everyone knows that there isn’t a politically viable way to fix it so instead they talk about nonsense like “climate justice” and opening a grocery store to alleviate the “food desert”, a made-up term to blame a lack of grocery stores in an area on racism rather than the real reason, the locals robbing stores blind.

There isn’t a magical formula. Leo-Cedarville is a nice suburb because it is almost entirely populated by Whites and southeast Fort Wayne is a shithole because it is full of blacks, mestizos and various Muslim immigrant groups. You don’t need an “expert on the local economy” to understand that, just two eyes and some basic pattern recognition.