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).
"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", a largely racist reaction to the civil rights movement involving increased protests and riots in cities
I think you have cause and effect reversed here. The original "pull" trigger was the automobile becoming affordable to the middle classes, making suburban living possible and leading to many leaving cities. The racist bit here is that many of these suburbs had covenants prohibiting non-whites.
The "push" factor came when poorer (non-white) people started moving into these vacated, now cheaper inner city properties. This in turn led more whites to leave, but here too the push wasn't just racism, but also concerns about falling property values, rising crime, etc.
Also, FWIW, as a non-American I found the SF of 2019 positively scary. Homeless camps in the Tenderloin, mentally ill people raving about murder on Market St, etc -- you don't see this kind of thing in equivalently wealthy European or Asian cities.
You are incorrect. White flight [1] is a well understood phenomenon that had far more impact than automotive marketing and propaganda on the growth of suburbs.
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.
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.
There was a huge migration of white people out of the city in the 1960s once they started bussing students between neighborhoods to improve diversity. In the following years, several suburbs have experienced similar 'white flight'. This might be changing, but it has a long way to go.
Regarding crime, I recently saw a map that showed a horrific level of lead poisoning in the urban Cleveland area children , most likely due to old housing stock.
I think the point is that white Americans fled the suburbs in the 70s in order to avoid paying urban taxes and living in racially diverse areas, while still using urban services and relying on the economic activity in urban centers. This led directly to urban decay; i.e. the New York budget crisis of the 70s.
To be perfectly honest a lot of peoples perceptions about cities back then was highly rooted in race. It was a time when white people literally sold their homes and moved if a black person moved in on the street, or they even threw stones at black people they saw walking around who in their head they villified, or worse. Anytime someone has an anecdote where they have some adversion to the city, especially back then, I can't help but imagine a lot of that has to do with racial biases rather than lived experiences and actual perspective on how much crime is really happening.
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.
"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.
I can't, because every American city I can think of experienced redlining and white flight, which led to the loss of population, business, and investment.
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.
That's not to say that racism played no role - of course there were racists at the time, and it probably played a role in influencing the decision to move. But without the rising crime rates in the 1960s and 1970s, I don't that wouldn't have been enough to lead to large-scale abandonment of neighborhoods these racists had lived in for generations.
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.
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