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  #21  
Old Posted Feb 16, 2018, 2:49 PM
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Originally Posted by ThePhun1 View Post
Yes and no.

Some blacks were driven away by other people, especially Latinos, because of fear or annoyance. I wouldn't say that's all that different.
If that’s the case, then yes that is similar.

If they are leaving because traditional black urban neighborhoods have been decimated economically to the point where there is no opportunity, OR (in the opposite case) because gentrification has made these neighborhoods too expensive, then those are very different phenomena.
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  #22  
Old Posted Feb 16, 2018, 5:41 PM
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years ago I moved from a predominantly white to a predominantly Asian community. Does that count?
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  #23  
Old Posted Feb 16, 2018, 6:47 PM
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I kinda "white flighted" when I moved in with my wife who managed to find the whitest neighborhood in all of Texas. It's so white out there...that there are fanny packs and craft fares everywhere. My old neighborhood had virtually everyone from everywhere but starting price for a house was over half a million...so that was out.
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  #24  
Old Posted Feb 16, 2018, 6:58 PM
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Originally Posted by glowrock View Post
It seems most everyone here is forgetting about one of the most visible causes of white flight during the mid to late 1960's, that being the infamous race riots that occurred in quite a number of cities from coast to coast. While it wasn't the underlying cause itself, per say, the riots were a direct result
By 1968, most whites with any desire to leave the city had left. Actually, "flight" was more the cause of the riots than the reverse. The exodus of whites left behind the impoverished black ghettos that erupted on the death of MLK or the beating of Rodney King etc.
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  #25  
Old Posted Feb 16, 2018, 7:09 PM
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Originally Posted by JManc View Post
I kinda "white flighted" when I moved in with my wife who managed to find the whitest neighborhood in all of Texas. It's so white out there...that there are fanny packs and craft fares everywhere. My old neighborhood had virtually everyone from everywhere but starting price for a house was over half a million...so that was out.
Aren't you a man from NY? You've been right to move to TX IMHO.

Millionaire women in NY seem utterly boring. It's been appalling in reports here.

Excuse my French, but this is how I would summarize it. They spend thousands of dollars at Gucci and Chanel, every damn day, just to kill boredom.
Do they want their stinky pussy licked? Hell, no. Just no. They'll only get their sorry butts smacked much too hard, by dominant sadists.

J'en ai plus qu'assez des riches qui nous la jouent supérieur. Ça devient intolérable.
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  #26  
Old Posted Feb 16, 2018, 7:23 PM
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My family were classic "white flighters" and so were all the neighbors in the 'hood where I grew up that was newly built in 1949.

Everyone there moved there for about the same set of reasons: The breadwinner having been in the military or a defense industry during the war and housing construction having virtually ceased for the first half of the decade of the 1940s, 4 years after the war (or 6 or 10 years in other cases), these families, most of whom had been living in rental or temporary housing, had kids born shortly after the war ended and "dad" came home. They needed more space and they had finally managed to save up a down payment to buy a house.

But forced "integration" of an overwhelming number of poor African American kids from their separate and distinctly unequal school systems, often accompanied by "bussing" of kids around the city to equalize racial demographics, was threatening turmoil in city schools across the country. Meanwhile, just outside the city were all these newly built, modern suburban neighborhoods being developed and offering an escape from the turmoil. Integration was not an issue in the suburbs because there weren't historically segregated systems to blend--there was a single high school in my community of Silver Spring, MD that predated the war and was still functioning. And it's true, few black people could afford a new suburban home anyway (by this point, legal convenants barring sales to blacks and/or Jews in some neighborhoods had largely been invalidated by the courts) and developers would subtly discourage them. We did have a few other minorities like Asians in the "hood" though.

So like all the neighbors, my family moved to a newly built/purchased home in the 'burbs from a rented apartment in the city and I attended a newly built school (primary and secondary) and the suburban school system (Montgomery County) built and built to accommodate all the newcomers.

The point here is that we didn't flee minorities in the city per se. We fled the turmoil of dismantling the long-standing segregation of city life. And my parents wanted a nice new home of which there were many in the suburbs and almost none that middle class people could afford in the city.
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  #27  
Old Posted Feb 16, 2018, 7:34 PM
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I agree with this and want to add that here was a fear that if a neighborhood had black people in it, it would soon be "red lined" and your property would be unsellable (to coin a term). The federal agencies at the time were several times more racist than they are now. *disclaimer, I work at a federal agency*
Man, it's sad that the racism was justified by economics back in the day. It's so freaking sad that US cities were almost abandoned just because people could't stand to live with another group of people.
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  #28  
Old Posted Feb 16, 2018, 7:48 PM
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But forced "integration" of an overwhelming number of poor African American kids from their separate and distinctly unequal school systems, often accompanied by "bussing" of kids around the city to equalize racial demographics, was threatening turmoil in city schools across the country.
While there certainly was "forced integration", I don't think that was a proximate cause of most white flight, especially in the early years. Large-scale court-ordered integration was more of a 1960's-1980's phenomenon, and was often tied up in courts forever. Some cities are still litigating court-ordered integration.

I think race played a major role in white flight, but it was more that blacks were entering previously all-white neighborhoods and blockbusting realtors hyped the changes, warning white homeowners "don't be the last to sell" or sending a postcard "do you know you have new neighbors", with implications quite clear.

Detroit, blackest major city proper in the U.S., never had any forced busing. There was a 1970's court ruling that mandated integration with suburban municipalities (because by that point it was too late to integrate the city proper), but it was eventually overturned.
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  #29  
Old Posted Feb 16, 2018, 7:50 PM
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Originally Posted by Pedestrian View Post
By 1968, most whites with any desire to leave the city had left. Actually, "flight" was more the cause of the riots than the reverse. The exodus of whites left behind the impoverished black ghettos that erupted on the death of MLK or the beating of Rodney King etc.
I agree with this. The riots were more the result, rather than the cause, of white flight.

Riots occurred in areas already vacated by whites. By 1967, Detroit's fate was sealed. I don't think, if riots never occured, that Detroit would look different today.
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  #30  
Old Posted Feb 16, 2018, 8:12 PM
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The only thing that made white flight possible was the mass production of suburban subdivisions. The imbalance was fed by low-interest loans backed by the federal government, coupled with racist redlining policies. The redlining policies worked in two ways: excluded minorities from migrating to the suburbs alongside whites, and also excluded whites from using the loans to purchase in inner-city neighborhoods.
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  #31  
Old Posted Feb 16, 2018, 9:24 PM
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Originally Posted by glowrock View Post
It seems most everyone here is forgetting about one of the most visible causes of white flight during the mid to late 1960's, that being the infamous race riots that occurred in quite a number of cities from coast to coast. While it wasn't the underlying cause itself, per say, the riots were a direct result of the underlying causes (essentially direct as well as indirect racism), and they essentially brought everything to the forefront in a very visible, violent way.

Thankfully, at least for the most part (yes, I'm generalizing a bit here), that terrible era has been put behind us, finally. Now the biggest issue that remains seems to be the educational achievement levels in urban school districts, and resolving that seems to elude even the most well-intentioned reformers, unfortunately. It's not just throwing money at the schools. Part of it is teacher, support staff and administrator training, part of it is definitely ensuring that urban schools have modern technology available just as suburban schools have, but a HUGE part of it boils down to ensuring students actually give a damn about learning, period. If students don't want to learn, if they don't want to put in the work, no matter how amazing the teachers are, it's simply not going to matter.

Frankly, the divides in our urban public schools are still the biggest problem getting families back into the core cities. Wealthier families pretty much always send their kids to private/parochial schools, while the working class/recent immigrants send their kids to the public schools, creating huge divides, both racially and economically. It's a huge issue, and one I'm not sure can ever truly be adequately resolved.

Aaron (Glowrock)
Obviously, Birmingham's white flight was racial to the core. Once white citizens saw the effects of integration, the wealthier among them took no time in climbing "over the mountain" into suburbs incorporated for the expressed purpose of keeping blacks out. From their founding, cities like Vestavia Hills and Mountain Brook had property taxes so high that blacks wouldn't even thing of moving in until around the 90s.

These days, the city is attracting a lot of millennials as the older residents die out but most of them don't intend to stay. The local business journal has conducted plenty of surveys asking if 20 somethings find living downtown desirable and most say definitely, when asked if they would stay were they to start a family most say hell no.

I completely agree with Glowrock, schools are the biggest impediment in turning the tide.
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  #32  
Old Posted Feb 17, 2018, 12:33 AM
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My parents did. My Grandparents (RIP) where old fashion. My grandpa came to this country with $7 in his pocket, and worked in Port Newark. Back when it was really good (mob owned). The good old days. Say what you want, they kept the neighborhoods safe. Once enough income was established, they just bought properties to build their wealth, so better to be close to the city.

But to answer the OP's question, the answer is white people.

In NJ/NY, Jewish, Irish, and Italians participated in it.

Irvington NJ for example use to be an awsome place. Same with some parts of Newark. The flight occurred, and the places went to shit, especially after the riots.

The South Bronx for example, use to be a solid working class neighborhood. But again, the flight occurred, and it went downhill.

Fortunately, in 2018, its up and coming, and will be the next major boom spot. Lots of permit activity going on for the South Bronx. Newark is also up and coming.
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  #33  
Old Posted Feb 20, 2018, 12:18 AM
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A lot of pre-1970 Black neighborhoods were Jewish neighborhoods before 1950 - i.e. Brownsville, Roxbury, Lawndale, the east side of Cleveland etc.
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  #34  
Old Posted Feb 20, 2018, 12:31 AM
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On Italian American white flight in NYC:

Quote:
After World War II, buoyed by GI benefits, and highly favorable, racially discriminatory, federal mortgage policies, New York Italian Americans moved out to parts of Long Island, Westchester County, Connecticut and New Jersey where Italian communities had already been established by early twentieth-century Ellis Island immigrants.

This diaspora was only part of the story, however. For Italian New York, participation in what became known as "white flight" took a different course than it did for other ethnic groups like the Jews and the Irish: Italians colonized the more "suburban" sections of the city's outer boroughs (Staten Island, the "better" parts of Bay Ridge in southwest Brooklyn, Howard Beach in Queens), and they created a new Little Italy in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst, where thousands of post-World War II immigrants from Italy helped shift the character of what had previously been a largely Jewish neighborhood. All this was happening while blacks and Puerto Ricans were pouring into these same outer boroughs (some from Manhattan, most from the South and the Caribbean), settling in less desirable neighborhoods that often abutted the Italian ones.
- p. 122 here: https://books.google.ca/books?id=0D0...merica&f=false
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  #35  
Old Posted Feb 20, 2018, 9:29 AM
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Originally Posted by glowrock View Post
Now the biggest issue that remains seems to be the educational achievement levels in urban school districts, and resolving that seems to elude even the most well-intentioned reformers, unfortunately. It's not just throwing money at the schools. Part of it is teacher, support staff and administrator training, part of it is definitely ensuring that urban schools have modern technology available just as suburban schools have, but a HUGE part of it boils down to ensuring students actually give a damn about learning, period. If students don't want to learn, if they don't want to put in the work, no matter how amazing the teachers are, it's simply not going to matter.
Your last sentence finally hits close to the mark, but it’s also the parents that matter. The single biggest determinant of educational standards in a school is the educational achievement of the students’ parents.

You could literally switch out the students between New Trier (on the North Shore) and the average city of Chicago public school for a school year, and the academic results would pretty much reverse themselves. The fact that one has its own Olympic swimming pool and a fancier computer lab is almost irrelevant.
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  #36  
Old Posted Feb 20, 2018, 2:07 PM
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Your last sentence finally hits close to the mark, but it’s also the parents that matter. The single biggest determinant of educational standards in a school is the educational achievement of the students’ parents.

You could literally switch out the students between New Trier (on the North Shore) and the average city of Chicago public school for a school year, and the academic results would pretty much reverse themselves. The fact that one has its own Olympic swimming pool and a fancier computer lab is almost irrelevant.
Absolutely, 10023. There's no question about that, and when I wrote that comment about students not wanting to learn (or really having the capability to do so), of course it has much to do with the parents and their upbringing abilities/educational achievement.

As I said, it's a very complicated situation. In addition, it's also true that students who otherwise aren't necessarily trending towards higher achievement can learn much better learning habits from being around students who are high achievers, so when economically/socially/educationally advantaged parents in a neighborhood all tend to put their kids in private schools as opposed to public schools, that leaves relatively few potential high achievers in the public schools for students to learn good habits from, continuing the downward spiral. Unfortunately, there's only so much that teachers, staff and administration can do about this.

I'm not even sure there IS a possible solution to this enormous problem. It might be a problem that is simply unable to be overcome, which of course means that the urban renewal that is and has been occurring at such a rapid pace for the last two decades or so in our core urban areas is bound to slow to a rapid crawl at some point in the relatively near future, as our cities simply cannot grow based entirely on singles and couples without children. Thriving urban areas require families with children as an integral piece of the overall environment.

Thoughts?

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  #37  
Old Posted Feb 20, 2018, 2:50 PM
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Not that it would ever actually gain traction, but I almost think that the only answer would be if boarding school was much more popular in the US, and scholarships existed for lower income kids.

That would create a mix of kids from different backgrounds. The parents would still matter (telephones, email and FaceTime exist, after all), but the nature of the home environment would be irrelevant. The dangers and distractions present in some neighborhoods would be negated - kids from the suburbs and the inner city of Chicago would both be somewhere in, say, rural Wisconsin. And with school uniforms, you’d eliminate the most visible signs of different socioeconomic status between students.

Maybe the only way to help kids from bad neighborhoods with unfit or uneducated parents is to take them out of those neighborhoods and away from those parents?
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  #38  
Old Posted Feb 20, 2018, 3:06 PM
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I'm not even sure there IS a possible solution to this enormous problem. It might be a problem that is simply unable to be overcome, which of course means that the urban renewal that is and has been occurring at such a rapid pace for the last two decades or so in our core urban areas is bound to slow to a rapid crawl at some point in the relatively near future, as our cities simply cannot grow based entirely on singles and couples without children. Thriving urban areas require families with children as an integral piece of the overall environment.
i'm trying to help out with that last part.

my family is a bog-standard upper middle class generic white american family and we're staying put in the city and sending our kids to the local CPS elementary school instead of decamping to the burbs.

what made that decision easier for us is that our local CPS elementary school here in lincoln square is actually really good. the reason? the neighborhood has a critical mass of bog-standard upper middle class generic white american families who demand educational achievement from their children.

without the parental expectation that a child succeeds in school, the chances of success for a given student are radically reduced.

so when an area of the city becomes whiter and wealthier, and then reaches a tipping point where enough wealthier white people feel comfortable sending their kids to the local CPS elementary school, voila!, test results skyrocket and all of a sudden zillow rates the school as a 7 out of 10 instead of a 2 out of 10 and things just snowball from there.
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Last edited by Steely Dan; Feb 20, 2018 at 6:32 PM.
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  #39  
Old Posted Feb 20, 2018, 7:31 PM
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You were still seriously considering a move to the suburbs though, and since you'd be considered an extreme urbanist I find that alarming.
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  #40  
Old Posted Feb 20, 2018, 7:37 PM
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You were still seriously considering a move to the suburbs though
of course we were.

bog-standard upper middle class generic white american families are bombarded with the cultural message that the only acceptable way to raise bog-standard upper middle class generic white children is in a 100% SFH suburban community where every family has their own yard, and every household has roughly the same income, and the barriers to entry keep "those people" out.

that messaging can be a pretty powerful force to overcome. not so much for me, but for my wife, who is less than 1/4 the urbanist that i am. had she married a different man and started a family, she'd very likely be living out in the burbs right now.

also, i know you don't have kids yet, but if/when you do, you might be surprised by how much you start re-prioritizing your life. i'm not being dramatic when i say "children change EVERYTHING". it's such an awesome and monumental responsibility to raise another human being that it can cause all kinds of self-doubt. falling back on how you were raised (provided you had an enjoyable childhood, and i most definitely did) becomes an alluring and very safe-sounding option because most of us parent how we ourselves were parented when we were young. with the fact that both my wife and i were raised in the kind of lily-white upper middle class suburbia i spoke of above, it becomes a serious temptation of "shit, maybe we should do that too, after all, that's what our parents did".

and then when you see many of your peers doing exactly that as their children reach school age, all kinds of questions start running through your mind. in just the past 3 years i can think of 4 couples in our social circle who were raising their preschool age children in the city, but have now moved out to evanston, glenview, park ridge, and oak park. "are we making the right choice by staying in the city? should we be following our friends' lead?"

it can be hard and a bit scary to do something unorthodox, to break out of the normal pattern.
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"Missing middle" housing can be a great middle ground for many middle class families.

Last edited by Steely Dan; Feb 20, 2018 at 8:56 PM.
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