• AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast
  • Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia before the first runoff debate begins Monday night.

“Chicago is one of America’s most segregated cities,” Anastasia Kaiser began. Kaiser, a University of Chicago senior, was framing a question for Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia during Monday’s debate at the NBC Tower, the first of three in the mayoral runoff. (A few questions were taken from the audience.) “Why do you think this segregation persists, and what role should public policy play in reducing segregation?”

In a serious attempt to combat racial segregation, and the concentrated poverty that often results from it, both strategies would be used. But Chicago’s mayors have focused on investment and mostly ignored the mobility approach, perhaps because they suspect that the city’s better-off residents are averse to any policy that would result in more poor minorities living in their neighborhoods. As we noted recently, voucher-holders, who are mostly African-American, are routinely discriminated against when they try to move into middle-class neighborhoods, especially on the northwest side, and Mayor Emanuel has cut the budget of the city agency responsible for addressing that discrimination.

It was encouraging that racial segregation got discussed at all, even if it took a student in the audience to bring it up. The subject never arose in debates during the race for mayor four years ago. It’s still not getting nearly as much attention as, say, the crucial urban issue of red-light cameras, but at least segregation’s profile has risen in this campaign from nonexistent to slight. We wrote about segregation and the mayor’s race in early February; candidate William “Dock” Walls condemned segregation in an earlier debate; Chicago Tonight’s Phil Ponce asked a question about it in another debate; the Sun-Times editorialized that addressing segregation “should be high on the agenda” for the next mayor; and now Kaiser has raised it again.