Lots of white flight was caused by the massive urban crime wave that lasted from the 1960s to the 1990s.
The main reason we term the situation "white" flight is that the whites could afford to move out of the city, and most blacks could not. If the majority of blacks had as much money as whites, they would have moved away too.
It's telling that when this crime wave ended, whites started to move back to the cities, even though the racial composition of the cities they were moving back to was less white than it was when they left. If they left in the first place because of racial diversity, they would not have moved back -- but they did move back, and are continuing to do so.
"White Flight" is a bit of a misnomer as people that could afford to leave cities did leave cities (including non-white people) for a variety of reasons. One reason is that through the 1930's (depression) and 1940's (WW2) very little new housing was built and the housing inside of cities was beginning to age with minimal investment in upkeep. Costs were still very high, like they are today in many cities. But by the 1950's we were able to expand out of cities because of the automobile and new house construction was more affordable due to advances in materials and methods. So people began to leave cities because you got more space, your own yard, and an automobile and the costs were the same or cheaper than living in a cramped apartment in the city.
The second reason for people leaving cities was because of a sharp increase in crime, especially violent crime. The political leaning of the 1960's and 1970's were to be very soft on crime and that era is marked by a stark rise in crime. People that can afford it will not live in a high crime area - go figure! They move to an area that is nicer and the politics of those areas tend to be protective in that they don't want the same political policy that allowed crime to soar.
This of course starts a chain reaction where there are better living conditions and lower crime outside the city and the city begins to rapidly lose its tax base. The entrenched politicians are more concerned with having power than managing a city and the city rots. So they scapegoat people for being "racist: because they didn't want to live in a crime infested, cramped, hellhole when there were viable alternatives. The market speaks.
The main reason people left cities was because of better living conditions in suburbs and the rising tide of high crime in cities. That's it.
IDK, I googled about it and found this. Sounds to me far too reductionistic given "white flight" coincides with rising crime. And the opposite ("gentrification") coincides with lowering crime.
> Boustan, who made the Great Migration and white flight the subject of her 2016 book Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets, cautions that few whites who moved from cities to suburbs in the decades after World War II “left personal accounts, and they may not have been able to articulate exactly why they moved.” She concludes that “only a portion of white flight can be traced back to the now-classic dynamic of racial turnover.” Other motivators included a wish to reside in less densely populated communities and concerns about tax burdens and public services. Ascribing white flight solely to racism is “reductive,” says Charles Marohn, founder of the nonprofit Strong Towns. As Marohn writes, “for an individual or a family whose home is losing value, when another home on the outskirts of town—one that just happens to be newer, more spacious, and served by better schools—is gaining value, it’s very logical to make that move given the opportunity.”
TLDR;
> The contention that white racism caused white flight, which then caused disinvestment, is suspiciously tidy.
White flight wasn't only because of fear of blacks. That was an issue, but suburbs were in style and offered other benefits. Most people left for other reasons if they could. This is that couldn't afford to leave were poor. Often enough they were black as well.
Remember even a tiny minority acting in a bad direction can make the whole that way. Don't descend too far into racism to explain a complex situation.
The "white flight" mostly happened with the riots in the 60's. At least in the mid-West.
I think it's fair to say that race caused the riots, but to say that racism caused people to move is just silly. I don't care if black or white people are setting fire in my neighborhood, if I can move somewhere safer, I will.
White flight refers to white residents (and usually with it, investment) leaving racially-mixed American cities for the racially homogeneous suburbs en-masse during the civil rights movement and the race-riots that occurred in major cities toward the end of that era.
"My family fled a decaying crime filled city to the suburbs."
Your family fled the huge crime wave committed by blacks in the cities in the 60s-70s. If blacks had not been brought over to the US in the first place, your family would not have to flee.
That's why it was called 'white flight' - it was whites fleeing rampant black crime.
traditional white flight (1970's style) mostly ended in the early 2000's when traffic got bad enough and baby boomers started to age out of power. It's an outdated term in most cities I think.
That's a pretty generous interpretation of white flight. You leave out the redlining and segregation that were huge factors in white flight and subsequently reverse white flight and gentrification.
White flight was unadulterated racism. It wasn’t because the black family that moved down the street started being violent. It’s because whites did not want to live on the same street as them.
Of course caucasians would be a victim of ~90% of interracial crime, those are the general population demographics in most places that are not urban in the US.
White Flight is what we were taught in school but really. White folks didn't move out of the city to get away from blacks, we moved out to get away from the dirty treeless city, shitty schools, lack of land, and overcrowding.
Also, suburban sprawl has happened everywhere from Africa, China, Australia, Brazil, Mexico. Even black folk don't want to live in the city. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_flight
However, some historians have challenged the phrase "white flight" as a misnomer whose use should be reconsidered. In her study of Chicago's West Side during the post-war era, historian Amanda Seligman argues that the phrase misleadingly suggests that whites immediately departed when blacks moved into the neighborhood, when in fact, many whites defended their space with violence, intimidation, or legal tactics.
The business practices of redlining, mortgage discrimination, and racially restrictive covenants contributed to the overcrowding and physical deterioration of areas where minorities chose to congregate. Such conditions are considered to have contributed to the emigration of other populations. The limited facilities for banking and insurance, due to a perceived lack of profitability, and other social services, and extra fees meant to hedge against perceived profit issues increased their cost to residents in predominantly non-white suburbs and city neighborhoods. According to the environmental geographer Laura Pulido, the historical processes of suburbanization and urban decentralization contribute to contemporary environmental racism.
White flight in the US also wasn't about people leaving the city centers for the suburbs; it was about people leaving suburbs for other suburbs.
The postwar flight to more distant suburbs was due to WW2 veterans suddenly having way more wealth than they had pre-WW2 (i.e. during the Great Depression) and deciding they wanted an upgrade from living in a cramped, dirty, noisy city, with the meteoric rise of the automobile and marketing campaigns by developers helping out a lot as well. This flight was almost exclusively white, but it wasn't motivated by a desire to get away from black people, andd the only reason black people didn't join them was because of systematic racism gatekeeping them out of the new developments. Restrictive deed covenants imposed by developers, banks refusing to do businesses with people whose addresses are in black communities (most commonly known as redlining), and just plain old institutional poverty kept black people out of something that all Americans wanted to participate in.
Also keep in mind that suburbs weren't nonexistent pre-WW2 either; these old suburbs were transit-oriented and are now referred to as "streetcar suburbs". Pretty much every city in the US has a number of inner suburbs, just outside the central business district, that consist of single-family homes on an oblong grid of streets with alleyways and the occasional arterial (which originally contained a streetcar line) dividing the neighborhood (if anyone reading this has no idea what I'm talking about, let me know and I'll post Google Maps links). What was different about postwar suburbs is that they were much farther away from the city center and were car-centric in their design.
White flight was a later phenomenon that resulted from the civil rights movement dismantling a lot of racist institutions, causing white people to freak out and leave the suburbs they moved to following WW2 for other suburbs. Restrictive deed covenants and redlining were banned, black people finally being able to both move into any neighborhood and access mortgages, so of course they moved out to the suburbs. And then the white people fled. This is why much of the original postwar suburbs are now considered "the ghetto" (for example, Wynnewood was built as Dallas's version of Levittown, the whitest postwar suburb you could imagine, but is now majority black and Hispanic, and the name of the larger part of town it's located in, Oak Cliff, is almost used as a slur by racist white people). Black people moved in, racist white people moved out. Exploitative race-baiting real-estate agents even deliberately encouraged this phenomenon to buy low and sell high, a practice known as "block busting", which is now also banned. The agents would buy up a house in a white neighborhood and both sell it to a black person and send agents provocateur to talk to all the existing residents and stoke fears of black people moving in en masse. They would even hire black people to push baby carriages throughout the neighborhood! And so all the white people would sell their houses and move away ASAP, and because they decided they wanted to get out right now, they sold cheap. And the block busters bought up the houses and turned around and sold them at exorbitant prices to black people wanting to move to the suburbs for the first time. In Chicago, for example, block busting was so widespread that which suburbs were considered "white" and which suburbs were considered "black" would change every few months, as people would play racial musical chairs to a beat set by unethical salesmen.
Interestingly enough, many cities are now at a point where things have settled into a new mix: inner-ring suburbs are often very diverse, while the exurbs are extremely white. As PoC move farther out, white people build entirely new neighborhoods even farther out. My own experience in Dallas is that as the exurbs grow even farther and farther away from the city, more and more neighborhoods in the inner suburbs are becoming Chinatowns and Koreatowns (and as someone who lives in the inner suburbs and has diverse taste in food, I welcome this phenomenon).
Your summary misses an important point: I don't think you can totally discount the effect of "white flight" and the late 20th century perception of cities as being crime ridden places to avoid. The article references this indirectly as growth of car-centric suburbs, shrinking urban population, and the city's 1970s fiscal problems (caused in part by the loss of tax base from suburbanization).
Your explanation of crime in endogenously black neighborhoods is reasonable, but it only explains why crime existed in the first place, not why it increased so much in the 1960s through the early 1990s.
The endogenously black neighborhoods did not experience erosion of the tax base due to white flight, because there were few, if any, whites living there in the first place. So, why did crime increase dramatically in the endogenously black neighborhoods during the time period we are talking about? Whatever the reason is, why wouldn't it be the same reason crime increased in the areas subject to white flight?
I find it very unlikely that the endogenously black neighborhoods experienced an increase in crime for one reason, and the nearby white flight neighborhoods experienced an increase in crime for a totally different reason (such as erosion of the tax base after white people left). Obviously the erosion of the tax base made things worse, but unless that caused all of the increase in crime, something else was going on.
If you are going to argue that crime increases after white flight were a self-fulfilling prophecy and would not have occurred without white flight, that's a pretty extraordinary claim.
Yeah, this is what I was going to post in response.
It's not "race-baiting" to accurately acknowledge that white flight happened. Demographic trends show white people moving back to the cities, leaving minorities without a sure place to live or a rooted community to belong to, usually because of the connection of class and mobility.
That's not what "white flight" refers to. While the 1940s-1950s move to the suburbs consisted almost entirely of white people due to systematic racial discrimination preventing POC from moving, that is not "white flight".
The phrase "white flight" refers to a 1970s phenomenon where white people repeatedly moved from one suburb to another (often in circular patterns) in order to avoid POC after desegregation and civil rights legislation made suburbs accessible to POC for the first time. This was exacerbated by real estate agents engaging in a race-baiting, unscrupulous practice called "block busting".
The main reason we term the situation "white" flight is that the whites could afford to move out of the city, and most blacks could not. If the majority of blacks had as much money as whites, they would have moved away too.
It's telling that when this crime wave ended, whites started to move back to the cities, even though the racial composition of the cities they were moving back to was less white than it was when they left. If they left in the first place because of racial diversity, they would not have moved back -- but they did move back, and are continuing to do so.
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