> I was thinking of “the bad old days” of Marion Barry and when Congress took
> over. Anyhow, all of those neighborhoods were west of 14th Street NW.
>
> Whats interesting to me is that one of my neighbors in NE says that crime didn’t
> get really bad until the early to mid 90s.
I wasn’t talking about crime. I was talking about the point where the level of gentrification (“reverse white flight”) passed the level of suburbanization (“white flight”). The level of crime and the amount of movement from city to suburb/suburb to city are quite separate. The highest level of crime in Washington happened in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s (not the early to mid-1990’s) partly for the same reason that the level of crime was highest then in every other American city - the crack epidemic - and partly because level of crime fell everywhere in the U.S. by a huge amount during the 1990’s for reasons that no one quite understands.
The change-over between white flight/reverse white flight, on the other hand, happened in the 1970’s. There had been an influx of blacks into Washington (mostly from the deep South) and an outflux of whites into the suburbs from the late nineteen century till the 1970’s, although the period in which these trends were largest was from the late 1940’s to the early 1970’s. Something like this was happening in most large cities in the U.S. In the mid-1970’s, the proportion of Washington that was black reached its highest level - over 70%. Then in the late 1970’s the proportion began decreasing as whites began moving back into the city and blacks began moving into the suburbs. The proportion that is black is now less than 60%. It’s likely that Washington will once again be majority white sometime between 2020 and 2030.
Lots of those suburban bedroom communities only exist because there was a well supported public mass transit system to serve them.
The house I grew up in, (a half hour train ride from Manhattan) sold last year for $275,000, so it could be torn down and replaced with one that will sell for 3 or 4 times that.
The poor ain’t gonna be able to afford the suburbs!
Exactly! If the less than wealthy can’t live in the city or the easily accessible suburbs what’s left?
Yeah (as msmith537 mentioned) there’s Newark, the airport city, and Elizabeth, the refinery city, but when I was looking for a 1 bedroom apartment in Elizabeth (~10 years ago) they were going for 1,200 to 1,800 a month. I ended up sharing a two bedroom, well three “bedrooms”, a kitchen and a bath with three friends. A communal SRO.
The poor are gonna get squeezed out of those cities too, just like msmith537’s Hoboken.
The shithole cities are simply undervalued real estate with great potential!
The farther you get from Manhattan in NJ the further you need to travel just to get TO the trains that go there. If the only people using that mass transit are the working poor, how long will it be before the less than poor start to see it as just another welfare program for the “greedy” poor?
Thats interestingl. I had no idea that the reverse white flight started in the 70s. I knew that white flight escalated in the 40s. I was going by my childhood memories of the growth of the Virginia Suburbs in the 70s, but I suppose that those were also from people just moving into the area.
I think that you might be right and my neighbor was misremembering. For some reason, he swears that things got worse after 92, but he might be misremembering or thinking about our own neighborhood. Although a quick check on Wikipedia shows Rayful Edmond was arrested in 1989.
Are there any SROs left? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one and I think that I would have seen them.
> I think that you might be right and my neighbor was misremembering. For some
> reason, he swears that things got worse after 92, but he might be
> misremembering or thinking about our own neighborhood. Although a quick
> check on Wikipedia shows Rayful Edmond was arrested in 1989.
For what it’s worth, relying on your neighbor’s memories for basic demographic statistics about your local metropolitan area (and, to be honest, the crime rate and the racial make-up of the area are pretty basic statistics) is not a good idea. There have been many articles in The Washington Post about these trends. Even if you haven’t been regularly reading those articles, you could look up those statistics in books or online.