Black Flight

I want to draw your attention to this dissenting account, by William Voegeli at City Journal of the suburbanization that took place from 1950 through 1980 in the United States. The prevailing wisdom is that it was motivated by white racism, full stop. The account relies heavily on the evolution of South Shore where Michelle Obama grew up.

IMO the suburbanization under discussion was multi-factorial of which white racism was one factor among many including housing costs, jobs, crime, drugs, the riots of the 1960s, and other, larger social changes.

Here’s a telling passage. Now there’s actually “black flight” to compare it with:

Indeed, a further reason to doubt that white flight was simply, or even primarily, due to racial prejudice is that “black flight,” a more recent development, is following the same course. Examining a development “crushing South Shore and other once-stable neighborhoods on the city’s South and West Sides”—namely, the “exodus of middle-class African-American families seeking safe neighborhoods and job opportunities”—a 2017 Tribune article quoted Jennifer and Jason Parks, who once lived on the block where Michelle Robinson grew up. The Parks family’s enough-is-enough moment came in 2014, when a 20-year-old man was fatally shot on their street while walking his younger brother to school. “South Shore ranks sixth among the city’s 77 community areas for incidents where one or more people were killed over the past decade,” the Tribune reported.

The dangers that, 50 years ago, caused the Robinsons’ white neighbors to move away are now causing black families to abandon South Shore. “If I was holding on to Chicago and something happened to one of our babies,” Mrs. Parks said, “it would crush me.” Rotella records that the net decline in South Shore’s black population between 2000 and 2014 was 12,790. (Its total population in 2015 was 51,451.) As of 2017, the Parks family was preparing to move into a new house in northern Indiana. There was nothing anomalous about their decision. Last year, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that “[t]he city’s black population has fallen from a peak of 1.2 million in 1980 to fewer than 800,000 now and is predicted to drop to 665,000 by 2030.”

In 1950 South Shore’s population was 79,000, mostly white, largely Jewish. When that population left South Shore, they were largely replaced by blacks. As middle class blacks flee South Shore for the suburbs, who will replace them? My answer: no one. There will be mile after mile of empty buildings or open fields where modest single-family homes used to be.