I strongly suggest you get a knowledgeable critique of whatever Black neighborhood you are considering. How does it rank in terms of crime, gang violence, and schools (if pertinent)? Cities are socially complex places, and it’s not a one size fits all situation. Many Black neighborhoods are really nice but some, like “The Back of the Yards” neighborhood here in Chicago, are very hazardous.
I don’t know about city neighborhoods; I haven’t lived in a city since I was a college student and I wasn’t, then, figuring on staying very long.
But my experience with moving to small town and rural neighborhoods is: find a place you’re interested in. Then, before signing anything, go talk to the actual neighbors. Neighborhoods vary, and no amount of studying demographics is going to answer the question about a particular street or block.
Make sure you don’t go around greeting people “Hey, Homie”.
A decade or two ago, my mom got tired of not knowing any of her (ethnically diverse) neighbors, so one day, she went door to door with flyers inviting everyone to a front-porch party. They’ve become a longstanding tradition, and now, everyone does know each other.
I’m glad someone said this first. Some neighborhoods in the St. Louis metroplex are EXTREMELY dangerous, although that can be said of any big city, including mine, and as with mine, sometimes it’s not obvious where those areas are. Things can really change, literally from block to block.
p.s. In my area, this also includes majority-white and majority-Hispanic areas that are not places where people live if they can find anything safer.
I’m sorry you chose this particular bit of scary information to portray STL–yes, there are overflows in low-lying/floodplain areas, but the vast majority of places in the City do not have these dangers
Note that much of North St Louis was ravaged by the May tornado, so that area doesn’t have a lot of housing options, and the school district is closing many of the schools with small student bodies.
I grew up in the Normandy area (the suburbs around the University of Missouri-St. Louis) and my parents were literally the last white people on the block - they stayed until my mother died and my father retired and downsized. I’m pretty familiar with the changes that took place since the era when that part of the area was virtually lily-white.
It’s an area that has remained pretty mixed racially. The city of Normandy is 70% Black, 18% white; Pasadena Hills is 65% Black, 27% white; Bel-Ridge is 79% Black, 11% white. Ferguson, one of the more populous suburbs is 72% Black, 22% white. A little further to the south, University City, which borders Washington University, is 48% white and 36% Black. A little to the west, St. Ann is 54% white and 29% Black.
So there are a large number of racially mixed neighborhoods, despite the best efforts of some real estate agents to push people toward ethnically segregated areas.
I grew up in a racially balanced neighborhood in Indianapolis. This wasn’t quite inner-city but it was well inside the city proper, far from the suburbs (actually in almost the geographic center of the city and county).
I once thought about it a little and realized that the parallel east/west street south of mine was almost totally black folks, and the E/W street just to the north of mine was pretty much totally whites. The street I lived on, right between those two, was almost exactly 50/50 white and black (at this time there were almost no Hispanics or Asians in Indpls; you and everybody you knew was either black, or white.)
It was interesting to me to live right on the border of where a “black neighborhood” and a “white neighborhood” met. So my public schools were like that too although there was enough white flight going on that these schools were 60 - 80% black and didn’t have as large a white component as the catchment neighborhoods did.
Man, I’ve always felt so privileged to go to schools like that and to be around and interacting with black folk my whole life. It’s weird now in San Francisco which is thought of as such a liberal, tolerant, accepting city, where the only racially troubled situations that are still simmering seem to always involve Asians or Whites (sometimes Latinos) bitching about or being racist to black people. I think lots of folks here have been around peace, love, and hippie culture their whole lives but never been around black folks and they still don’t know what to think of them.
ETA: Just for fun, the neighborhood in Indy was just a couple blocks north of where Kurt Vonnegut grew up. He went to the elementary school just south of mine and we went to the same (storied!) high school. The Vonnegut area must have been totally white when he was growing up in the 20’s and 30’s; it’s completely black now.