In the 1960s the issue of "white flight" first came to the national attention. Whites were leaving what were perceived as failing cities, like New York and Washington, DC and flocking to the suburbs. Neighborhoods were found to "tip" when the number of black residents hit a certain percentage. In a vicious cycle, the presence of a sizable minority of blacks caused home values to drop which accelerated white flight. The causes of white flight were often oversimplified as white "racism" but this was always an inadequate and inaccurate explanation . Whites left their neighborhoods because the schools were perceived (and in reality often were) in decline, crime increased, and the general quality of life decreased once the tipping point was approached.
(We now know from recent sociological work that an additional important factor was the significant decrease in trust that occurs when a neighborhood's homogeneity decreases. As well, people, not surprisingly, tend to want to live where other people who are like them live.)
The reasons for the decline of neighborhoods once they reached the tipping point are undoubtedly complex and I am not going to attempt an explication here. The important point is that liberal whites as well as illiberal whites all took part in "white flight" in equal numbers and once neighborhoods approached the tipping point, their fate was sealed. Such neighborhoods were on a pathway to decreased services, increased crime, falling property values, and failing schools.
White flight has not been an issue for quite some time. Our cities have made a come back as desirable places to live and the extreme segregation of neighborhoods is no longer a source of hand wringing buy the elites (who, of course, almost always live where the wealthy white people live.)
Liberals, always quick to find racism in the utterances of conservatives, have done an interesting job of self selection in terms of their desired places to live. Aaron M. Renn has a thought provoking article available discussing "progressive" cities. [HT: Steve Sailer]
Among the media, academia and within planning circles, there’s a generally standing answer to the question of what cities are the best, the most progressive and best role models for small and mid-sized cities. The standard list includes Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, and Denver. In particular, Portland is held up as a paradigm, with its urban growth boundary, extensive transit system, excellent cycling culture, and a pro-density policy. These cities are frequently contrasted with those of the Rust Belt and South, which are found wanting, often even by locals, as “cool” urban places.
But look closely at these exemplars and a curious fact emerges. If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles you will find that the “progressive” cities aren’t red or blue, but another color entirely: white.
In fact, not one of these “progressive” cities even reaches the national average for African American percentage population in its core county. Perhaps not progressiveness but whiteness is the defining characteristic of the group.
His conclusions are interesting:
The relative lack of diversity in places like Portland raises some tough questions the perennially PC urban boosters might not want to answer. For example, how can a city define itself as diverse or progressive while lacking in African Americans, the traditional sine qua non of diversity, and often in immigrants as well?
Imagine a large corporation with a workforce whose African American percentage far lagged its industry peers, sans any apparent concern, and without a credible action plan to remediate it. Would such a corporation be viewed as a progressive firm and employer? The answer is obvious. Yet the same situation in major cities yields a different answer. Curious.
In fact, lack of ethnic diversity may have much to do with what allows these places to be “progressive”. It's easy to have Scandinavian policies if you have Scandinavian demographics. Minneapolis-St. Paul, of course, is notable in its Scandinavian heritage; Seattle and Portland received much of their initial migrants from the northern tier of America, which has always been heavily Germanic and Scandinavian.
In comparison to the great cities of the Rust Belt, the Northeast, California and Texas, these cities have relatively homogenous populations. Lack of diversity in culture makes it far easier to implement “progressive” policies that cater to populations with similar values; much the same can be seen in such celebrated urban model cultures in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Their relative wealth also leads to a natural adoption of the default strategy of the upscale suburb: the nicest stuff for the people with the most money. It is much more difficult when you have more racially and economically diverse populations with different needs, interests, and desires to reconcile.
In contrast, the starker part of racial history in America has been one of the defining elements of the history of the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and South. Slavery and Jim Crow led to the Great Migration to the industrial North, which broke the old ethnic machine urban consensus there. Civil rights struggles, fair housing, affirmative action, school integration and busing, riots, red lining, block busting, public housing, the emergence of black political leaders – especially mayors – prompted white flight and the associated disinvestment, leading to the decline of urban schools and neighborhoods.
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That's not to let these other cities off the hook. Most of them have let their urban cores decay. Almost without exception, they have done nothing to engage with their African American populations. If people really believe what they say about diversity being a source of strength, why not act like it? I believe that cities that start taking their African American and other minority communities seriously, seeing them as a pillar of civic growth, will reap big dividends and distinguish themselves in the marketplace.
This trail has been blazed not by the “progressive” paragons but by places like Atlanta, Dallas and Houston. Atlanta, long known as one of America's premier African American cities, has boomed to become the capital of the New South. It should come as no surprise that good for African Americans has meant good for whites too. Similarly, Houston took in tens of thousands of mostly poor and overwhelmingly African American refugees from Hurricane Katrina. Houston, a booming metro and emerging world city, rolled out the welcome mat for them – and for Latinos, Asians and other newcomers. They see these people as possessing talent worth having.
This history and resulting political dynamic could not be more different from what happened in Portland and its “progressive” brethren. These cities have never been black, and may never be predominately Latino. Perhaps they cannot be blamed for this but they certainly should not be self-congratulatory about it or feel superior about the urban policies a lack of diversity has enabled.
It is telling that it is conservative Houston that has welcomed African Americans, Latinos, et al, rather than progressive Austin.
An important aspect of white flight is the deterioration of the educational system when a community "tips." Although he does not directly comment on the effect of white flight on our schools, Tom Friedman notes that the deterioration of our public schools is leaving us with a large part of a generation unable to compete in the global marketplace:
Last summer I attended a talk by Michelle Rhee, the dynamic chancellor of public schools in Washington. Just before the session began, a man came up, introduced himself as Todd Martin and whispered to me that what Rhee was about to speak about — our struggling public schools — was actually a critical, but unspoken, reason for the Great Recession.
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“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. “This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker’s production of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much closer to home. So over a decade, American workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-à-vis their real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally.”
Tom Friedman, as a liberal and progressive voice, does his part to ignore the elephant in the room.
Forty years of academic sociology and pedagogy have done little to explain why our children are failing. Further, the fact that blacks and Hispanics fail in our schools to a disproportionate level, is a disagreeable fact that is almost always explained with an emphasis on the system rather than characteristics of the population who are failing. As a result, our schools have been dumbed down so as to avoid harming the self esteem of children who will soon grow up to be adults who have no idea of how limited and ignorant they are. Our public schools, for a host of reasons ranging from fears that there are too many sub-par teachers, to concerns of being called "racist" for failing minorities, prefer to minimize the demands 0n teachers and students. Further, the inability to remove disruptive students without it becoming a federal case means that only one or two problem children can destroy the learning environment for everyone in the classroom.
The progressive response has traditionally been to blame white racism for the failures of the educational system and for the resulting white flight. It is not surprising but certainly telling that progressives practice white flight par excellence. Perhaps the progressives could learn to handle their own racial attitudes better by studying how conservatives deal with racial issues, ie, by focusing on the individual rather than the identity group.
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