The White City

[Verily]

The ugly truth is that it is about crime rates.

Not *quite* right as a few highly diverse cities like San Diego and El Paso have lower crime rates than Seattle or Portland. But it is a good proxy for urban social integration, which has to do with race but is not the same as it.

[Verily]

So NYC isn't a progressive city?

Not really.  Among white voters living in Manhattan below 96th street and a few trendy outer borough neighborhoods, yes.  But once you get to the outer boroughs, the long-term resident white voters are pretty conservative.  Portland and Austin didn't elect someone like Giuliani.

See, that's the thing. They would elect someone like Giuliani, only he'd be running as a Democrat. The difference is that the Democratic primary is controlled by unions and racial interests in NYC, not that the politicians are more conservative. The white vote overall in NYC was around 65% Obama, which is comparable to the white vote in Austin or Portland and certainly not conservative.

There are plenty of "un-hip" areas in the outer boroughs that are mostly white and strongly Democratic: Forest Hills, Astoria, Bay Ridge, Riverdale, etc. And the liberal white areas outvote the conservative ones, so it doesn't matter how the conservative areas vote unless they can get liberal whites on board--which was really how Giuliani and Bloomberg won (see maps of Manhattan and inner Brooklyn).

[Verily]

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.