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Originally Posted by neuhickman79
wburg is right, actually. I forgot about the community bilaws that kept blacks out of Arden Park for a time. But, people here do not continue the cycle of white flight. In the Midwest, much of where you live is based on race. I remember hearing story after story from people I knew in Milwaukee who said they moved from 12th to 24th to 47th to 79th 120th to the suburbs. Their family progression was to get out of the "inner city" as they call it and move to the more white-dominated suburbs. ALMOST EVERY SINGLE SUBURB OF MILWAUKEE has a white population of over 90%!!!! You would be hard pressed to find one or 2 suburbs in Sacramento with over 90% white population.
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It wasn't just Arden Park, neuhickman, it was EVERY suburb except for the central city: East Sacramento, Land Park, North Sacramento. They weren't just community bylaws either: they carried the force of state law. These racial exclusion covenants were still in effect until about 1965 in the state of California (a court case threw them out in 1964, Californians voted them back in via proposition in 1965, but the proposition was found unconstitutional and thrown out.) The only exceptions were individual whites who acted as a "proxy" buying property for nonwhite friends and then illegally transferring the deed.
In addition to racial exclusion covenants, a policy of the Federal Housing Administration called "redlining" based eligibility for FHA loans (and, by proxy, loans from other lenders, who used FHA's guidelines) largely on neighborhood ethnic makeup. There were four categories: blue, green, yellow and red. White areas were blue, working-class white areas were green, ethnic neighborhoods (non-black) were yellow, and neighborhoods with a black population were red. Red areas were the highest risk category, and loans were pretty much unattainable. This meant that getting a home improvement loan or new construction loan was just about impossible in an older neighborhood, and contributed greatly to the physical deterioration of these neighborhoods. Redlining was official FHA policy until the early 1970s.
As a result, the central city had large Latino, African-American and Asian populations by the 1950s. Many of the European-American neighborhoods of the central city moved out into the suburbs (Italians into East Sacramento, Portuguese into the Pocket and Land Park, etc.) as the central city became more of a nonwhite area. Part of why downtown is less obviously nonwhite than many "inner city" areas today is because those neighborhoods were demolished during the redevelopment of the 1950s/60s. In fact, you can read more about it in
<shameless_plug>my new book.</shameless_plug>
You are correct in that folks in the western United States have integrated their neighborhoods far more quickly than in the midwest: I'm from Chicago originally, and racial lines in Chicagoland are far more sharply drawn than they are here. But to assume that it didn't happen here is incorrect. We're just learning to get over it, for the most part, more quickly than in the Midwest. Explaining how it affects life in California now, as econgrad points out, is probably something to discuss in another thread.
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Great cities think about the legacies they leave behind...Cities that don't, get left behind!
I pretty much see mostly if not all white people in Midtown and Downtown, day and night...am I missing something? I know I believe in a color blind society, but I can tell that Sacramento's so called inner city is pretty light skinned. Are you implying that South Sacramento or North Sacramento are our urban areas where this "white flight" occurred?
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