We all know white flight - after WWII, increasingly wealthy whites fled urban areas (and the minorities and immigrants that they had to live with) in favor of suburbs and exurbs. Now, the reverse seems to be happening - wealthy whites seem to be returning to cities, gentrifying neighborhoods and displacing the minorities and immigrants that live there by necessity rather than choice.
It seems to me that the rich whites aren’t really “going urban,” though - they want to have the same suburban experience, complete with Big Box stores, minivans and SUV’s, single-family dwellings rather than high-density housing. This is rapidly changing the urban landscape, in my opinion, for the worse.
Near the famous Cabrini Green housing project (think “Good Times”) in Chicago, there’s a new development of townhouses that’s basically set up to look like a fake suburban street, complete with “courts” and “yards.” Of course, these dwellings are for rich whites, as each unit goes for close to or over a million dollars. Within driving distance, every major big box store is available in an area that used to used for much higher-density living and shopping spaces. This almost perfectly embodies the trend, in my book - they want to return to the city, but they want to turn it into a suburb instead of embracing urban living (high density housing, public transportation, more effective use of space in general).
Not enough stupid rich people to fall down that rat hole. It will work on a small scale but there will always be wealthy people who want to live in a large city. But I think anyone living in high-rise with a view of the lake won’t have any worries about a decline in value.
I’d agree that Seattle is moving towards lots of townhouses and relatively upscale small condominiums and such. Perhaps it’s due to gas prices and perhaps just a rebound from suburbanism (or both.)
But why would it be a bad thing? Society is a fluid thing. Certainly it might push welfare and low-rent homes out of certain areas of the city, but there’s nothing intrinsically bad about that; supermarkets and convenience stores will move right along with them as will bus lines. It might add five to ten minutes bus ride to work, and it might cut off five to ten minutes of the ride. Part of being poor is not having as many choices in life.
If anything, getting more people into a smaller area is good as it saves the surrounding forest/farm/natural land from people moving in for that much longer, and I can tell you now that having all your natural landscape disappear from your country plain off sucks.
I think that you are looking at a bunch of separate trends and assuming that they are caused by whites returning to the city.
The trend towards big box national retailers isn’t related to white or black. I live in NE DC which is predominantly African American. Most of my neighbors here are in favor of attracting big box retailers to the Ward. Also in the case of a lot of those neighborhoods, its not like the big box retailers are displacing local retailers. For the most part, there wasn’t a lot of local retail. Most people were stuck buying there groceries from the corner store. Those with cars would drive into the suburbs and do their shopping there.
As for driving SUVs, I don’t know whats its like in Chicago, but a good portion of my African American neighbors also drive SUVs. I would say that the proportion of SUVs here is the same as in the suburbs. Are you telling me that they are tearing down high occupancy buildings that were used for residential and commercial uses and simply putting in a big box store with a parking lot? Are they simply tearing down a bunch of small stores and building a big box store albeit one in a city format, i.e. with no parking lot?
I think that white people are moving in to the city, and that there is a trend to big box stores not just in urban markets but also in suburban markets as well. I don’t think that they are connected.
Whether gentrification is a bad thing depends on which side you sympathize with. It’s easy to paint either side as the bad guy. The beauregarding, greedy, self-centered yuppies who only care about property values and living in a “hip” section of town. On the other side, you’ve got the downwardly mobile, gutter-dwelling, crime-loving old-timers who don’t care about keeping their yards nice or doing anything to uplift the community. While I don’t think these characterizations are absolutely false, I also think good intentions lie on both sides. Revitalization of dying neighborhoods is unequivocally a Good Thing. So is preserving racial and socioeconomic diversity and neighborhood character.
For a (somewhat biased) glimpse into gentrification, I recommend the PBS documentary “Flag Wars”–which follows the residents of a gentrifying neighborhood in Columbus, OH. It’s not an objective piece, but neither the newcomers or the old-timers really come out looking good. Still, the film doesn’t sugarcoat the downsides of gentrification. It’s not just raised property values that can be a problem.
I don’t know what the solutions are, because all the problems are also advantages. Increasing property values squeezes out the poor, but it also provides a boon for local schools and families who decide they want to earn a profit on their homes. Building big box stores in downtown centers creates congestion, but it also creates jobs. And as ugly as a strip mall is, it’s better than a boarded-up warehouse and gutted housing projects. Ensuring some amount of affordable housing is a solution, but since it’s limited by definition, that means it’s not going to accomodate everyone who wants it.
Well “reverse white flight” is certainly happening in Atlanta. However, the urban developments we’re seeing here tend to be more high-density than what the OP describes. We’ve had a lot of high-rise condos going up, and those are filling with young professionals. Older neighborhoods intown are gentrifying, and vacant lots in these areas tend to be filled with townhomes or subdivided into smaller lots for single-family homes. We do have big-box stores moving intown, as the OP describes, but generally in the context of development with some density.
Atlanta proper (within the city limits - not talking about the suburbs) is growing rapidly. At the same time, lot of working class black residents are heading out into suburban areas-- often forced out by rising property taxes. There’s a lot of speculation that the city of Atlanta may be majority white within a few years:
I figure anything that leads to higher density and less sprawl is a good thing, racial politics notwithstanding. Maybe Atlanta will be able to support a decent mass transit system if enough people move in. I don’t really care what color they are. At least maybe people won’t be spending so much time in cars if they move closer in.
Yeah, what I’m seeing in Atlanta is not defined as much by “white people moving in, black people moving out,” as it is by “wealthy or professional people moving in, poor and working class people moving out.” A lot of the newly-arriving professionals are black (though apparently, a majority of the new arrivals are not).
The area around Cabrini-Green is the exception though, isn’t it? Up here on the North side of Chicago, single family homes and duplexes are being bought up left and right, torn down, and a six or twelve unit building goes up in its place. Same in Evanston, where I last lived.
Cabrini-Green is being razed, at last, thank God, because it didn’t work. Putting together a whole bunch of low or no income drug addled hookers and gang bangers in with a bunch of low or no income families led to a new generation of low or no income drug addled hookers and gang bangers - with the occasional doctor or lawyer, god knows how.
Mixed income is the new experiment. Will it work any better? I don’t know. But segregation didn’t, and that’s why the huge, ugly, run-down and dysfunctional apartment buildings of Cabrini-Green (and the Robert Taylor homes) are being torn down.
This is to be expected, blacks are a minority in the United States–that explicitly means that there are less of them. Blacks are only 13% of the U.S. population, and while they’ve made a huge impact on our society culturally, and have traditional areas of the country where they represent a large portion of a region or city–the simple statistical truth is they are still a numerical minority (with no signs that will ever change.)
Yeah, and it’s not just poor blacks moving out of Atlanta. Poor and working class white people are moving out, too. I’m thinking particularly of the Cabbagetown neighborhood, a collection of tiny ramshackle houses surrounding the old Fulton Bag Mill. The neighborhood used to be comprised of poor hill folk (white) who had moved to Atlanta to work the mill. But now the mill has been converted to lofts, and the hill folk are mostly gone, replaced by professionals who have somehow managed to gentrify even shotgun shacks. There’s a trendy Southwestern restaurant on the corner.
Which brings me to another point. More striking to me than the racial change in Atlanta is the cultural change. Many, perhaps most, of the new arrivals are (gasp!) Yankees! I meet countless transplants from Michigan, Ohio and New York. The people moving out of the city are mostly natives. The result is that the city is losing its Southern identity. One way I’ve marked this is by the gradual disappearance of fried fish places, beloved by locals, but apparently shunned by newcomers. Two near me have been gutted and reconfigured: one as a pizza place, the other a bagel store.
Southern cooking restaurants (which the outlanders call “soul food”) are also slowly vanishing from the scene. Two near me have closed recently.
Much of this post is, I think, an oversimplification and a little too rigid on the white-vs-other. An an example, I am a 3rd generation white American who was forced out of my mixed-race neighborhood in the city of Chicago due to my rent tripling when my lease came up for renewal - which is how I wound up in Gary, Indiana. Quite a few white people have been displaced by “reverse white flight” when neighborhoods gentrified but our incomes did not.
Again, an oversimplification. There is NO racial requirement that one be white in order to buy one of these units, which is implied by your paragraph. One does, however, have to have quite a bit of money. Certainly, wealthy people are statistically far more likely to be white than of some other ethnic group but any wealthy person of any racial group is able to buy into these new developments.
As for Cabrini and other projects such as Ida Wells - they were pestilential hell-holes that, whatever their intention, warehoused poor minorities in situations that resulted in continuing poverty and crime. I’ve worked for employers that would automatically reject any job applicant, no matter how qualified, who had the “wrong” address on their resumes. That was wrong, flat out wrong. I’m not happy with the “solution” that has replaced these things, either, but the prior situation should not have been allowed to continue as long as it did. From the beginning there was the question of where the displaced poor would go, and it has still not be adequately solved.
The problem in the Chicago area is not that people are being moved to another part of the city 5 or 10 minutes away by bus - they are, in some cases (like mine) winding up outside the city altogether. I went from living 10 miles from work to living 45 miles from work. Fortunately, I was able to continue to use mass transit although I now have to drive to the train station instead of walking. I could not find a city neighborhood where I could afford to live that wasn’t over-run with crime and unacceptable to me. Virtually everyone at my former employer (I was laid off in November) at my level or slightly above were living in the suburbs and commuting 30+ miles to work, the sole exception being someone who bought a condo 25 years ago and paid off the mortgage. The only people living in the city were upper management with mid to high six figure incomes. The rest of us had lived in Chicago at one time, but had to move due to the squeeze on housing affordable to the middle class.
A lot of working class/poor people are being pushed into the suburbs where cars are necessary to get around.
This is funny. One of my best friends moved to Chicago from New York because of the cheap rents there. Wealth is all relative.
I currently live in one of the fastest gentrifying neighborhoods in the nation, Bedford Stuyvesant Brooklyn. Five years ago, I lived five blocks from where I live now, in a storage unit paying $ 250 a month. I pay 10 times that now for a three bedroom Duplex. Wealth is all relative.
No matter what happens wherever I go, I will probably be a gentrifier, simply because I cannot afford to move into the already gentrified neighborhoods. I can’t really afford what I pay now, but I like my apartment, so I keep it.
New buildings are going up all over Brooklyn. It’s insane the number of new apartments for both sale and rental that are popping up. If you are poor you cannot live within a mile of Manhattan anymore. That’s a simple reality. 2 bedrooms in Manhattan are $ 3000 now, and the real estate market is still growing.
I don’t know what to do about it, but I want a place to live, and I want to be a ‘bureaugarde yuppie’ because I would like to be able to walk to nice restaurants and not have any trip out of my house be a major trek. What can be done?
I’m a bit worried about the economic state here in the US, but I’m not really sure how to change any of it.
Gentrification isn’t anything new. In some American cities, it started thirty years ago. I don’t know of any city where it consists of building houses and yards of the size they are in the suburbs. It’s people who might otherwise be living in the suburbs moving into the middle of the city and occupying renovated buildings with the same population density as before. Suburbanization (of which “white flight” was a part) began at least in the late nineteenth century with railroad suburbs. It ramped up after World War II as it became easy to commute by car. Gentrification began about thirty years later as some well-off people noticed that the housing costs had dropped so much in the middle of the cities (because most well-off people had moved to the suburbs) that it was now a real bargain to move back into the middle of the city.
