Iowa

Waterloo-Cedar Falls, named worst place for black Americans, works to improve

adminMarch 31, 2024

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A new study from 24/7 Wall Street ranked the worst cities for black Americans, and one Iowa city made the list — at the very top.

While many of the cities on the list were from Illinois (six of 15), Waterloo-Cedar Falls — the only Iowa metro on the list — was named the worst city in the country for black Americans, based on wide gaps in income, unemployment and homeownership along racial divides.

“No U.S. metro area has larger social and economic disparities along racial lines than Waterloo-Cedar Falls, Iowa,” 24/7 Wall Street wrote, adding, “Like many U.S. cities with high economic and social inequality, Waterloo residents have struggled with several major incidents that have sparked racial tension in the area in recent years. In 2012, for example, a white police officer shot and killed a fleeing black suspect, and was later exonerated by a grand jury.”

But the numbers in the report don’t match what Iowa-Nebraska NAACP State Area Conference President Betty Andrews sees when she visits Waterloo.

“I don’t live in Waterloo, but I’m there enough, and we also have an NAACP branch there. We’re not seeing quite these numbers,” Andrews said. “I know that Mayor (Quentin) Hart and a number of dedicated citizens there are working hard on these stats. And not just stats, but the measurements of people’s lives. That’s what it’s about — the quality of people’s lives.”

The study based its rankings of the worst cities for black Americans on eight measures, which included median household income, educational attainment, incarceration rates and other metrics.

Data was taken from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2012-2016 five-year American Community Survey. In some cases, those numbers have changed dramatically. For example, while the five-year survey gives the unemployment rate of black Waterloo-area residents as 23.9 percent, the most recent American Community Survey data (the one-year 2017 survey) lists the black unemployment rate at just 10 percent.

In other areas, progress is slower to come.

The data from 24/7 Wall Street report suggests black Waterloo residents make less than half of that of their white counterparts. The newer data closes that gap a little bit, but the black median household income of about $28,000 is still far less than the white median of about $55,000. There’s been no substantial change in homeownership demographics, either.

The problems aren’t limited to Waterloo, to Iowa, or even to the Midwest. Nationally, socioeconomic measures for black Americans lag behind those for white Americans. While the unemployment rate for black Americans reached an all-time low earlier this year, it’s still several percentage points above the overall rate. Black Americans’ median household income is more than $20,000 less than that of white Americans.

But those gaps have been significantly more pronounced in Waterloo-Cedar Falls.

In 2015, the Register wrote about Waterloo as part of the “Black Iowa” series, detailing the city’s struggle with violence and racial division, and the steps taken to combat such issues.

Since then, Waterloo elected its first African-American mayor, Quentin Hart, and has made strides in closing the racial gap in some of the socioeconomic measures listed in the report.

“Mayor Hart’s election brought in people who believed they could be a part of the process — specifically, the African-American population believed they could be a part of the process,” Andrews said. “I’m certainly not saying it’s perfect, but this is a city there’s new life in.”

“The report saddens me in the sense that we don’t want to be known for such a distinction,” Andrews said. “But it certainly also says we want to make sure we continue to do the work.

“When I do visit and go to Waterloo, I am personally seeing people working in the trenches and doing this work. And I can see that across racial lines as well. It’s not just the African-American community — it’s Waterloo in its entirety. It’s something that people are really committed to.”