The White City

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A long article taken from a blog that argues that the 'progressive' cities (Seattle, Portland, Denver, etc.) so favorably mentioned in the media, and by 'progressives' themselves, are merely examples of a nationwide pattern of white flight.

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This blog is the highest-level media source that even addresses this obvious phenomenon.

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This article was largely, well, stupid.

Sure, Denver is only 10% black, a whole 2.5% less than the national average. Give me a break! 1 out of 10 people are black, and 1/3 are Hispanic, that seems far more diverse than Scandinavia.

Another city, Austin, 35% Hispanic and 5.5% Asian. Very diverse if you ask me. Again, 8% black does not mean the black community has no presence. There are still a lot relative to some places in this country.

As for Minneapolis, Wikipedia says the city itself is 17% black.

Essentially, this article is total BS

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For a very good reason: White-black integration has always remained the most intractable, and, as previously mentioned, the presence of blacks is the primary factor concerning white flight on the local scale, and, arguably, on the national scale as well.

The question in the article simply posed why cities held as examples of 21st century urban design, particularly by progressives, are among the least black in the US, yet, somehow, have managed to avoid the stigma surrounding majority white suburbs in the Midwest with similar amenities, or equally well-maintained and sparsely-black cities like SLC or Boise. Indeed, an article in Time Magazine went so far as to describe places like Boise (but not Portland) "Whitevilles."

An interesting fact: Cities like San Francisco and Portland had higher percentages, and likely, even raw numbers, of blacks when they were controlled by traditional ethnic Democratic machines.

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Didn't we have this same discussion when the article first came out? It sounds very familiar.

I don't know. This article is a year old, and I didn't post in 2009. It may have been.

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Ok, but I think Storebought is trying to make some point about why progressive whites are secretly racist.

No I'm not, like I would believe anything so simplistic.

I am curious that suburban white flight, a social phenomenon that is well investigated both academically and by the popular media for decades, always assumed that it stemmed entirely from racist conservative whites' refusal to live anywhere near the presence of blacks, as though no other motivation could be found.

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A logical extension of this argument is that white residents of South Boston are more comfortable with minorities that white residents of San Francisco, because they live in a city with a higher percentage of African-Americans, and are quietly more admirable on race relations in spite of their more complicated politics on other issues. LOL.

Yeah really.
If anything this author is just proving his own inner racist assumptions.  I mean god forbid we actually consider diversity to include people other than white or black.......

San Francisco had a higher population of black residents when it was governed as though it were South Boston. It is a demonstrable fact; there is no sense in denying it. The same is true for Austin and Portland.

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DC has those things because it is 55% black and not the 70%+ it was before 1990. With the possible exception of the free condoms and the improved transportation system, the rest of those progressive hallmarks are of small concern to the long time residents of the city, many of whom now live in Maryland.

Not that one needs white progressives to have any of those things. New Orleans, except for a brief moment during the Truman-Eisenhower years, was a majority black city and it was, and is, very strongly socially liberal, even after its transition from an all-white Democratic government to a (mostly) black one.

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I am curious that suburban white flight, a social phenomenon that is well investigated both academically and by the popular media for decades, always assumed that it stemmed entirely from racist conservative whites' refusal to live anywhere near the presence of blacks, as though no other motivation could be found.

The leap here is that progressive cities like Seattle, Portland, and Austin are populated by people who "white fled" from more diverse areas. That's unproven, and problematic for many reasons. One, it ignores all aspects of diversity other than white-black, as has been stated. Two, it implies that white progressives who moved to those cities did so because they didn't want to be near minorities, which they don't even make an effort to prove. My experience among progressives in Boston is that they moved here from less diverse places, at least measured by the white-black axis this article assumes: western New York, suburbia up and down the northeast corridor, everywhere else in New England (particularly Maine), rural areas in the northeast.

Not to play diversity bingo, but I grew up in an N.J. suburb that was middle class, a mix of Jewish, non-Jewish Caucasian, and Asian, right next to a poorer city with a very different demographic mix. I moved to one of those 80+% Democratic "cool cities" where, guess what, my neighborhood is significantly more diverse economically and ethnically than where I grew up. My next-door neighbors on one side are Haitian (one floor) and Brazilian (the other), we're gay, our other neighbors are working-class white, our tenants are recent college graduates. That's been stable for the last 10-12 years, except for the tenants. This experience could be had in similar neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Chicago, D.C., Oakland.

If we assume that the young college-educated white progressives some Republicans love to hate are to be considered racist because they gravitate toward cities with a small African-American population, remember that most of them grew up in suburbs which were similarly non-diverse, and as young people, are likely to move to places that are economically dynamic--not those which are stagnant, and which also tend to have suffered the most from middle-class flight of all racial backgrounds. If you wanted a job in the media or tech industry right out of college, you can't move to Cleveland and expect to find what you want.

The "cool progressives" aren't moving to Appalachia or the Dakotas, either. Are they afraid of white people?

I will reply to the bolded parts since they don't reflect personal experience, which is inarguable. But I will add my own personal experience: Three of the four people I knew in middle/high school who have since moved to Portland would have voted for David Duke in the 1991 LA governor's election if they were old enough. The two that moved to Seattle, OTOH, were standard liberal-minded whites.

Again, for the third time, white-black interaction was the one focused on because of the intractability of integrating  native-born, southern-descended black Americans. Not wealthy, professionally educated modern-day Asian immigrants, or Jews (who were discriminated against in housing and recreation, but not in employment), or Hispanics, who come in any race and can escape racial baggage unless they are identifiably Mestizo or Afro-Caribbean or can't master English.

And the argument the author of the paper noted was that white progressives move to progressive cities for the same reason that white conservatives, or even white non-politicals, moved from inner-cities in the Midwest to all-white suburbs or to sunbelt cities -- namely, to improve their own quality of life, however they defined it. Except that white progressives can do so without the demagoguery.

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That argument strikes me as circular: why is there middle class flight from these places now? Industrial decline doesn't fully explain it, since the progressive cities faced a similar industrial decline at the same time but aren't saddle with the same physical and demographic legacy that the old industrial cities do. Or the curious fact that cities that don't face terminal economic decline, but aren't identified as progressive, don't have a higher cachet, even when they better integrate their older populations, for ex. Columbus OH.

What I would like know is this: How can cities St Louis and Cleveland, let alone a Birmingham AL or a Jackson MS should develop, given that both have white-collar and professional employment, high- and street-culture, amenities like public transportation and sidewalks, yet aren't 'progressive', and don't have a means to evacuate their underclass?

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Ok, but I think Storebought is trying to make some point about why progressive whites are secretly racist.

No I'm not, like I would believe anything so simplistic.

I am curious that suburban white flight, a social phenomenon that is well investigated both academically and by the popular media for decades, always assumed that it stemmed entirely from racist conservative whites' refusal to live anywhere near the presence of blacks, as though no other motivation could be found.

So you deny the existence of white flight? Because the racial motivation of white flight rather obviously flows from how white flight is defined. Note that it is not argued that the rise of suburbs arises entirely from racist conservative whites' refusal to live near blacks. There could be other reasons for whites to move to the suburbs, such as the better socio economic status and more comfortable living quarters associated with the suburbs. But this ties back again into racism, because racism results in blacks being regarded as lower socio economic status. The point is that it is not just that whites who fled blacks are individually racist or conservative, but that the system, implicitly supported by all the individuals in it but not able to be changed by any particular individual, assign blacks a lower socio economic status. This of course remains true today. Crime is a part of it, but it's also a large part of the excuse.

At 55% black, DC is still a lot more black than the country as a whole. I mean, it's got both of the elements you are asking for; and it's also got in its suburbs the most prosperous African-American majority county in the nation by median income. Yet I remember in another thread you had nothing but trash to talk about it.

You're argument nearly strikes me as a strawman. How can I deny the existence of white flight? It's been repeatedly observed and I've acknowledged as such before.

But I say that the progressives' solution to that fact is an unsavory as the crude and obvious white flight of the 1960s. It still involves a kind of denial that those people even exist -- either by moving to cities or rural counties that are, in fact, whiter (in the non-Hispanic sense) than the US as a whole, or it means pricing the current residents out of wherever they happen to live currently through bourgeois real estate development. And even then, the latter occurs only in places the progressives deem worthy of development, because of interesting (if dilapidated) architecture or proximity to the refurbished downtown. Just because one happens here doesn't deny that the other isn't concurrent elsewhere.

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But I say that the progressives' solution to that fact is an unsavory as the crude and obvious white flight of the 1960s. It still involves a kind of denial that those people even exist -- either by moving to cities or rural counties that are, in fact, whiter (in the non-Hispanic sense) than the US as a whole, or it means pricing the current residents out of wherever they happen to live currently through bourgeois real estate development. And even then, the latter occurs only in places the progressives deem worthy of development, because of interesting (if dilapidated) architecture or proximity to the refurbished downtown. Just because one happens here doesn't deny that the other isn't concurrent elsewhere.

Progressives' solution to white flight is to attack socio economic inequality generally. Absent explicit racism such as redlining or conscious refusal to live near blacks, it is economic inequality that causes the problems you speak of. It is no accident that blacks made some of their greatest income gains relative to whites during the New Deal era. It is true that even among progressives, not all are economically leftist. Not all believe in equality of result. During the 1990s and 2000s a lot of progressives shifted their focus away from economic issues. This turned out to be a mistake. Progressives are increasingly become populist as the economic suffering continues. Unlike the right, the left will focus on economic outcomes when they do become populist.

Again, none of this is any reason why white progressive choose to move to already wealthy places like Seattle and not to cities that could stand the capital investment, like the non-sunbelt Southern cities or practically any in the Midwest not named "Chicago." Or that progressive urban development entails a causal or at least coincidental decline of the populations that have made those older places strong candidates for white flight.

As for the New Deal improvement of black income levels: Yes, it occurred during the heyday of semiskilled employment, one which will never occur again. Especially not in the progressive cities, since the manufacturing apparatus is dismantled and that improving the dysfunctional public education system present in practically every US city that condemns every child passing through to illiteracy, doesn't stand as a concern for urban progressives.

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Again, none of this is any reason why white progressive choose to move to already wealthy places like Seattle and not to cities that could stand the capital investment

Can we identify exactly who you are talking about? What is the presumption that progressives naturally bring capital to the table? Primarily they bring human capital in the form of their skills and educations, not financial assets, because we are talking about people just starting out in their careers. Unless they are willing to be entrepreneurs, and many aren't, moving themselves to a place without opportunity for them to practice their professions would only deplete their individual human capital with no benefit to the local economy.

That sounds like a copout. These people bring with them the same wealth-producing capabilities that educated, or even simply hard-working, but less liberal whites do when they move to cities like Phoenix and Dallas, except, in the latter case, those whites are incapable of disguising their self-interest with moral superiority (no "dense walkable cities", etc.)

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But I contend that cities are able to make their own industries given the capabilities of their populations. There are only a few occupations in the US that absolutely constrain your choice of residence (investment bankers or accountants must live in the New York metro or San Francisco; congressional staffers must live in DC or an inner-lying suburb, ex.). But what exactly does Austin provide that simply cannot be found in, say, Indianapolis? Most of the people moving to Austin aren't employed by Dell or Whole Foods or even the state university. Why is Philadelphia, an ancient city with a fully-developed economy, so unattractive to the white progressives who would normally flock to such a place, unlike Boston?

I think that all of this skirts about some deeply obvious issue that was mentioned in passing by Torie and Verily: No one wants to live in a city where there is a high probability of being mugged or murdered, and most muggers and murderers in inner cities are black. And even this stands as just one issue in this whole movement.

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But I contend that cities are able to make their own industries given the capabilities of their populations. There are only a few occupations in the US that absolutely constrain your choice of residence (investment bankers or accountants must live in the New York metro or San Francisco; congressional staffers must live in DC or an inner-lying suburb, ex.). But what exactly does Austin provide that simply cannot be found in, say, Indianapolis? Most of the people moving to Austin aren't employed by Dell or Whole Foods or even the state university. Why is Philadelphia, an ancient city with a fully-developed economy, so unattractive to the white progressives who would normally flock to such a place, unlike Boston?

Philadelphia does have a ton of white progressives. It just has lots of other people, too.

What does Austin have that Cleveland doesn't? Media industries, software, high tech.  

And that progressive population is, given its location, population, and age, tiny compared to its peer cities (excepting NYC, as its economy is significantly larger), even though Philly's economy is broader and better developed.

Cleveland has many, many problems. But considering the opinions expressed on this thread, and elsewhere, I don't see any real means of addressing them: (1) It has amenities, but not necessarily the ones progressives like (2) Its economy has shed practically all of its old manufacturing sector, yet it cannot attract new residents with the industries it retains (3) it has a first class research university, but its graduates flee as rapidly as the older generation white flighters had (4) It is overloaded with legacy issues -- brownfields, surplus housing stock owners cannot or will not renovate, concentrated poverty stemming from old zoning, unshakeable media image ("Mistake by the lake").

Except for the environmental cleanup (which is necessary for health but doesn't provide employment) and possibly housing renovation, and even that is limited by the taste and judgement of the property developer, progressive policy doesn't seem to address this. Conservative policy, as such, is to abandon places like this in favor of a new sunbelt exurb with fewer legacy issues. Progressive policy is basically the same thing, except the new location happens to be a fogbelt town out West, or a gentrified city back East.

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I've been reading "progressive" as the "stuff white people like" person. Not sure it matters since I haven't yet gotten a handle on what this is about despite contributing too many posts.

That 's actually an interesting issue. Terms are ill-defined because they've never been identified by demographers and subject to a rigorous taxonomy. In short, no one has asked why anyone from an all-white suburb or from some decayed industrial town moved to Denver or to Boston. It was always assumed to be self-evident, the default movement of a white person with a college education or better to a location offering a higher quality of life (which would be?). I have yet to read a single New York Times essay or a Brookings Institute report that even identifies this movement as one worth investigation. Entirely unlike the well-investigated, and deeply loathed, movement of whites without college degrees from similar all white suburbs and decayed industrial towns to the Sunbelt.

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Storebought, are you trying to say that the things progressives supposedly like (walkable neighborhoods, good transit) can be found in other cities, or that they're merely an excuse for liking white cities?

People enjoy living in areas with cultures and values similar to their own... Clearly there will be some correlation with race and ethnicity here. Why are black people moving to places like Atlanta instead of Portland or Phoenix?

My laptop is malfunctioning, so I'll have to keep my answer short.

I note that media comparisons are made in ways that favor the white(r) cities. If Portland, say, were being compared to Phoenix, then the criterion of superiority is "dense and walkable". If Portland were compared to Birmingham, then Portland would be "better-educated." If it were compared to poor Cleveland, then the comparison would be the "refreshing natural amenities" that Cleveland lacks. All of these things are true for Portland, within the context, but still misleading.

Your second point would not be an issue, or less of an issue, if the people moving to these sunbelt cities, and not the old East Coast-Pacific Northwest ones, weren't scapegoated for diverse ills such as automobile dependency, water misuse (which would be a factor for the entire eastern seaboard, which has had recorded centuries-long droughts), cultural illiteracy, pandemic obesity, etc. The latter two are especially disingenous since its the rural Southern poor (and Midwestern urban poor) who suffer the worst effects, and not the sunbelt migrants.

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But I say that the progressives' solution to that fact is an unsavory as the crude and obvious white flight of the 1960s. It still involves a kind of denial that those people even exist -- either by moving to cities or rural counties that are, in fact, whiter (in the non-Hispanic sense) than the US as a whole, or it means pricing the current residents out of wherever they happen to live currently through bourgeois real estate development. And even then, the latter occurs only in places the progressives deem worthy of development, because of interesting (if dilapidated) architecture or proximity to the refurbished downtown. Just because one happens here doesn't deny that the other isn't concurrent elsewhere.

Progressives' solution to white flight is to attack socio economic inequality generally. Absent explicit racism such as redlining or conscious refusal to live near blacks, it is economic inequality that causes the problems you speak of. It is no accident that blacks made some of their greatest income gains relative to whites during the New Deal era. It is true that even among progressives, not all are economically leftist. Not all believe in equality of result. During the 1990s and 2000s a lot of progressives shifted their focus away from economic issues. This turned out to be a mistake. Progressives are increasingly become populist as the economic suffering continues. Unlike the right, the left will focus on economic outcomes when they do become populist.

Again, none of this is any reason why white progressive choose to move to already wealthy places like Seattle and not to cities that could stand the capital investment, like the non-sunbelt Southern cities or practically any in the Midwest not named "Chicago." Or that progressive urban development entails a causal or at least coincidental decline of the populations that have made those older places strong candidates for white flight.

As for the New Deal improvement of black income levels: Yes, it occurred during the heyday of semiskilled employment, one which will never occur again. Especially not in the progressive cities, since the manufacturing apparatus is dismantled and that improving the dysfunctional public education system present in practically every US city that condemns every child passing through to illiteracy, doesn't stand as a concern for urban progressives.

Choose to focus on the speck and miss the larger picture if you wish to. If you're really concerned with the revival of declining industrial cities or the elevation of poor populations and black populations, it's not going to happen under the 'free market' neo-liberalism that passes for the status quo these days, nor will it occur inchoate tea partyism.

As opposed to what, exactly, hiring out these generators of white flight for internships at Apple?

By the way, this will be the last post of yours I respond to.

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I haven't read through the whole conversation yet, so forgive me I miss something.

To me the "progressive" group of young adults are largely extremely sheltered.  They come from middle class parents in the suburbs and went to college.  They have never lived in a diverse area and thus might be uncomfortable around areas and people they grew up thinking of as unsavory.  Most suburban raised people think of "the city" as being a little seedy and that usually translated into being around black people is a little seedy.  Really white people are afraid of black people and "progressives" tend to be really white.  It's not really racism as much as it is just ignorance and lack of exposure to other American cultures.  The new progressive cities provide an echo chamber of sorts for people to pat each other on the back for being such good people.  But it keeps them away from the less desirable areas they donate to.

It's interesting that that the most favored cities by urbanists (Boston, Minneapolis, Seattle) are those
with cultural progenies stemming from New England, which never had many blacks to begin with.

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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It's interesting that that the most favored cities by urbanists (Boston, Minneapolis, Seattle) are those
with cultural progenies stemming from New England, which never had many blacks to begin with.

Boston is currently one-quarter black. Minneapolis is 18% black and its Congressional rep is Keith Ellison. This is a higher percentage minority population than the vast majority of communities where white people live.

The northern European look/feel was most strongly present today those cities were pioneered by the old yankees, not that they haven't gained any more recent cultural contributions since.

The persistent black American migrations from the old South bypassed them, so these places still retain a yankee-ish culture.

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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.

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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.

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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.