The White City

[Storebought]

I know it's anecdotal, but my best friend from high school had parents who were "really white people" from PA. They listened to NPR, attended Congregationalist churches, ate only the blandest of dinners, etc. Most of all, they hated the racism of Louisiana and longed for the peace and racial equality of, you guessed it, suburban Pittsburgh, the whitest metro of the nation. They never realized the irony of it.

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You're just making sh**t up.

I said Pittsburgh metro, not the city.

[Beet]

Lol, first of all, moving from one mostly non black area to another mostly non black area for economic reasons is not white flight. I'm afraid it hurts you that your fellow co-conservative whites historically flew away from blacks for explicitly racist reasons, and not just economic ones.

That's another definitional thing. Moving from Detroit and Philadelphia to Atlanta and Phoenix isn't what is commonly considered white flight. Lots of African-Americans have left the north for the Sunbelt since the 1970s, too. White flight is leaving a city for a suburb or a suburb for an exurb within the same metro area. Moving from Detroit to Livingston County, or Philadelphia to Chester County, would be closer to w.f.

Yes, because if you are white and stay in the same town your whole life, which is a predominantly white town, is that white flight? If you move across the street in this town, is that white flight? If you move across the town to a more upscale part, is that white flight? If you move to another town like it another state that is also predominantly white, is that white flight? Does it make your racist? Of course not. I'm not sure what Storebought is trying to do, he seems to deny that progressive liberals are racist ("I would never believe somethign that simplistic") and that white flight does not exist. But he seems to also imply that white flight is something progressive liberals do. Implication: white flight is not racist. That is the only logically consistent conclusion from the multiple positions he's taken.

The problem with this is that the phenomenon of white flight is clearly racially motivated. Otherwise, why would it be called white flight? To take race out of the white flight phenomena is effectively to deny it altogether, even if you claim it is not. This really should not be something that is so hard to accept.

[Storebought]

I think Storebought is conflating different things. People moving from Detroit to Atlanta or Houston does not make it white flight. As pointed out already, many blacks are themselves making that move. Why these cities are "looked down" upon as compared to "progressive" cities is because these cities have become examples of sprawl gone wrong. Cities like Portland, Denver and Austin have taken steps to ensure their cities don't sprawl out like the ones I mentioned. You may disagree with their city planning, but how does that make them racist?

Have you determined exactly how these places limit sprawl? In the case of Portland, through increasing residential housing price by creating a housing scarcity, and not merely subdividing lots and increasing the population of rental units. As for Austin, both Houston and Dallas have more thorough rail transit systems than it, but its reputation is still higher than either w.r.t. constraining growth.

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And the priorities of the progressives seem to have higher priority than those of blacks, or just poorer or even middle class citizens in general, in some of these cities. The most striking difference between blacks and progressives is (1) the neglect the public school system, the one institution that could, theoretically, lift at least some of these people out of poverty (2) the importance of environmental ordinances -- while good for health, green belts and bike paths do not provide employment.

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That is demonstrably not true. Even a cursory google search finds the black migration outward was planned from the 1970s. If you don't like this source, then choose another.

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This is precisly the impetus towards "sprawl" that the progressive cities are attempting to halt, if not reverse.

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No, that's standard issue gentrification, which as even Wikipedia notes, has decidedly racial overtones (or anti-poor, which in most contexts is nearly the same thing). Do you suspect that residential developers in the second or third wealthiest metro area will allow a ghetto to occupy prime property on the warm side of the Bay? Not in Chicago, not in Oakland.

[Storebought]

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Most residents of such a town fight vociferously to keep it that way or move out if they couldn't.

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Who does anything so silly?

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Sure it is. Except, the move isn't usually to an 'upscale' part of town (which are often exclusively white outside of the Northeast or CA), just one less populated by the urban poor. It takes place so often there is no need to comment on it.

Gentrification moves the population of the urban poor, or urban middle class, out, so it's this phenomenon in reverse.

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Residents from the declining midwestern towns moved from nearly all white suburbs to nearly all white suburbs of TX and GA, and carried their bigotry with them.

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Of course, as if you could reduce anything progressives do to a slogan. If you must reduce it, then a good proxy would be "I can't be racist (or anti-black) because I moved from a place that has no races (blacks) to a place that has many races (and few blacks)." This is simplistic enough.

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Not through anything as crude as stuffing "Get Out Before It's Too Late" flyers in mailboxes. But the effect of the urban renewal, and of the economic revitalization focused nearly completely on providing the amenities of an upper class (in SF, Manhattan, DC, etc.), or development that completely misses most of the traditional middle classes, effects a black evacuation.

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The entire phenomenon of suburbanization from the 1940s was considered to be at base an example of federally mandated white flight. I say that, in the decades before the 1970s, white flight certainly was a strong factor. But white flight wasn't the only one: selective urban renewal that demolished black tenements, the placement of coming interstate highway system, redlining and zoning of utilities and sewage treatment facilities near the new ghettoes, etc. But all of these were considered progressive in the era, since the focus of down redevelopment was to transport suburbanites back to downtown as expeditiously as possible.

In the South, besides those things, the primary factors for white flight came after the 70s, particularly with school desegregation and the rise of black mayorships in the traditional cities.

But I maintain that reducing the trend towards suburbanization as a consequence of simple racism past the 80s is dishonest. Really, when would a family of five prefer to live in a rotting two bedroom tenament than a new tract house in a suburb? Even white parents who tolerated desegregation didn't want to subsequently bus their child across town to enforce it. These choices came irrespective of the
demograpics, since blacks who could own a home readily did so ... from their side of the red line.

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I'd contend that the phenomenon of gentrification -- building a wealthy conclave with the sole purpose to raise nearby rents and drive away current tenants -- is clearly class-based, and, coincidentally, racially motivated. It's a reverse blockbusting.