White Flight Reverses Direction

Over the past decade to fifteen years, urban living has been widely promoted as the new ideal, displacing the detached house with the white picket fence as the ideal for many young professionals, and most major cities, from New York City to Des Moines, have begun to promote the advantages of living in the places where everything is hot and happening, and this has process has been accelerated by the housing boom that made it easier to purchase a home in the city. In addition, the promotion of mixed-income developments, wherein dense low-income housing projects were replaced with communities with far fewer units affordable to low-income households, has played a major role as well.

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting story in Saturday about the increasing proportion of whites in many major American cities, after several decades in which “white flight” to the suburbs, then exurbs, had turned center cities into bastions of both endemic poverty and minority (usually Black) political power. Surprisingly, the word “gentrification” appears only once in the article, despite the fact that the process known by that name is at the heart of why these cities are becoming more white.

With the long-term trend towards high gas prices and the sheer amount of housing stock that is being created in major cities, the whitening trend is one that’s unlikely to abate anytime soon. And as this trend accelerates, African-Americans are likely to lose the major base of political power that they have held in the post-Civil Rights era, the big cities. This power may shift to wealthy black suburbs, as seen in Prince George’s County, Maryland. However, what seems more likely is a diffusion of that power.

It seems that finally, developers have recognized the advantages of putting housing where people work, and of creating mixed-use developments that are attractive to higher income people, who tend not to be people of color. And perhaps what we are witnessing here is that America is reverting to the patterns that generally occur across the globe, wherein poorer people live on the outskirts, while the wealthier classes reside in the cities.