The White City

[muon2]

Austin and Denver are only 50% white non hispanic so yeah...... And yes the Northwest has a lot of white people, but is this surprising? They are far away from the south so they were the least impacted by the great migration (and this is true of most of the west including California, which is only 6% black in contrast to the conventional wisdom that California has a large black population), and they are farther away from the southern border so they were less impacted by latino immigration (but that is changing rapidly). And since they don't have a very large city (Seattle is large, but doesn't compare to NYC, LA, Chicago, SF, Dallas, Houston etc), they weren't impacted that much by other immigration either.

It's interesting that SF wasn't chosen as one of the cities since it's pretty much the definition of a progressive city. I guess discussing a place as ethnically diverse and yet progressive as SF would have detracted from the "point" they were trying to make.

San Francisco and Austin are 6% Black, less than San Diego's 7%.

Austin has a large latino population and SF has a large asian population. Or can it only be white vs black?

I would have expected more Blacks in SD tbh, due to the large military presence.

Your thoughts mirror mine when reading the article. It's clear that to the author diversity only is measured by African Americans in a city. His graphs are only about black populations. In his concluding paragraph, he finally makes reference to Latinos.

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Here, his bias is clear because the facts about Latinos in some of his example cities is wrong. Denver and Austin have large Latino populations, and could easily be predominately Latino in the future. It seems that the author does not want to recognize this, and instead sees the situation only in black and white - where anyone not black is white.

[muon2]

Wow, a day and a half goes by and I miss three pages of posts. However, I'd like to hop back to comments on my post from page 1.

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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.

I would have far less problem with the article if the author clearly framed the question in terms of the white-black composition of the cities in question. My beef is his extension of the problem to one of diversity which encompasses a number of different ethnic groups. I pointed out the Hispanic population as one in particular.

The phenomenon of "White Flight" traditionally has been White vs Black mostly. Hispanics are a bit harder to pin down since there is almost no real White Flight from White Hispanics but somewhat a good amount due to Native American Hispanics. Asian "White Flight" is probably likely only in areas with good amounts of Hmong or Khmer populations I suppose.

Actually I have seen a number of areas have white non-Hispanics move out in response to increasing numbers of Hispanics. However, unlike the city-based white flight from black neighborhoods, what I see is suburbs that transition in response to Latino population influx. White suburbanites leave disproportionately when faced with the ethnic change in their town.

On one point I would agree with storebought in regards to the intractable problem of white-black integration. The tract-level Census data clearly show that in the northern rust-belt cities, a higher percentage of whites remain in Latino-majority neighborhoods than in black-majority neighborhoods. That seems to be true in transitioning suburbs as well, but there is less data over time to base any solid claim. I take this trend as a positive sign for long-term integration of the Hispanic population compared to the experience with black-white integration.