Report: Marin ranks 2nd in racial inequity, down from 1st

Marin is the second most racially disparate county in the state, falling from its prior position at the top of the list, according to the Advancement Project California.

The Los Angeles-based civil rights organization drew attention in 2018 when it released a report that ranked Marin as tops in racial inequity in the state.

The organization is preparing an updated version of that report based on statewide data gathered prior to 2019. Project representatives presented a sneak preview of some of the findings during a First 5 Marin teleconference forum on Wednesday.

“The information is yet to be finalized,” said Chauncee Smith, who oversees the “Race Counts” report, “but right now the figures currently show that Marin has moved down to being the second-most racially disparate county in the state of California.”

Mono County, ranked the third most racially unequal county in 2018, has moved into first place.

The Advancement Project ranks California’s 58 counties on how they performed in seven key areas: democracy, economic opportunity, crime and justice, access to health care, healthy built environments, education and housing. It also ranks the counties on the level of disparity that exists in the categories.

“Marin is also the county with the highest overall performance in the state,” said Leila Forouzan, the project’s manager of research and data analysis. “This is due in part to the fact that Whites in Marin have better than average outcomes, and as they make up the majority of county residents those rates have a larger impact on the overall outcomes for the county.”

On its website, the project places each county — based on its combined performance and disparity levels — on a chart with four quadrants. One quadrant contains counties with both low performance and low disparity; another has counties with low performance and high disparity; another has high performance and low disparity; and the fourth, where Marin is located, has high performance and high disparity.

It was unclear from the project’s analysis whether a county’s overall performance could be high enough to counterbalance the effects of disparity. Project representatives were unavailable to comment.

During the session, additional new results for Marin were presented in the categories of housing, health access, crime and justice, economic opportunity and education.

The new data show that Marin has the second worst racial disparities in the state in the category of economic opportunity, Smith said.

“At the same time,” Smith said, “Marin has the sixth best overall performance in this issue area, meaning that Marin’s economic prosperity benefits some but not all.”

Forouzan also provided Marin results for two of the indicators that the project uses to calculate economic opportunity ratings.

The project ranked Marin as having the highest rate of disparity in the state for the percentage of households earning above a poverty level adjusted for the county’s cost of living. It ranked Marin the seventh highest in disparity for the percentage of county residents employed as officials and managers.

Smith said, “Marin is an extreme outlier in terms of racial equity on the issue of housing quality.”

Housing quality is one of the indicators that determines the project’s overall housing rating.

“Pacific Islander households are 14 times more likely and Latinx households are three times more likely to live in low-quality housing than White households,” Smith said. “At the same time, Marin has a higher-than-average performance. This means that a lower overall percentage of people live in low-quality housing.”

Forouzan also presented new Marin results for two indicators that determine the health access rating.

Marin scored the second best performance and lower-than-average racial disparity for preventable hospitalizations. The project rated Marin as the county with the highest disparity for percentage of residents with health insurance.

“Our data shows that Latinx residents are nearly eight times and Blacks four times as likely to be uninsured in Marin as whites,” Forouzan said. “This could be due to many factors, including being more likely to have jobs that lack health benefits, immigration status and other factors.”

She said Marin has the fourth highest racial disparity regarding proximity to hazardous waste sites, an indicator used to determine the healthy built environments category.

“Marin has lower than average performance on this measure,” Forouzan said, “meaning higher overall exposure to hazardous sites compared to other counties.”

She said the new data also show that in the category of education Marin has high performance and low disparities.

Regarding incarceration percentages, a crime and justice indicator, Forouzan said, “In Marin, Black people experience the worst disparities on this measure by far. They are 60 times more likely to be incarcerated than the group with the lowest rate. Latinx people are 11 times more likely to be incarcerated than the group with the lowest rate.”

She said this is true even though Marin has the fifth lowest incarceration rate among all California counties.

Following the presentation, Supervisor Katie Rice, Public Defender David Sutton, Sausalito Marin City School District Superintendent Itoco Garcia, and Barbar Zarate, the Marin Community Foundation’s director of economic opportunity, talked about various racial equity initiatives underway in Marin.