White flight? Suburbs lose young whites to cities
 

White flight? Suburbs lose young whites to cities

WASHINGTON – White flight? In a reversal, America's suburbs are now more likely to be home to minorities, the poor and a rapidly growing older population as many younger, educated whites move to cities for jobs and shorter commutes.

An analysis of 2000-2008 census data by the Brookings Institution highlights the demographic "tipping points" seen in the past decade and the looming problems in the 100 largest metropolitan areas, which represent two-thirds of the U.S. population.

The findings could offer an important road map as political parties, including the tea party movement, seek to win support in suburban battlegrounds in the fall elections and beyond. In 2008, Barack Obama carried a substantial share of the suburbs, partly with the help of minorities and immigrants.

The analysis being released Sunday provides the freshest detail on the nation's growing race and age divide, which is now feeding tensions in Arizona over its new immigration law.

Ten states, led by Arizona, surpass the nation in a "cultural generation gap" in which the senior populations are disproportionately white and children are mostly minority.

This gap is pronounced in suburbs of fast-growing areas in the Southwest, including those in Florida, California, Nevada, and Texas.

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I haven't really noticed this trend in my area (many of our suburbs are growing at a faster rate than the principal cities). Interesting read, though.

I moved from suburban American and will NEVER move back!

I've lived in suburbs my entire life (minus 2 years). I didn't realize what I was missing until I got to college, though. Since I've graduated, I've been inching my way closer to "urban living."

It's more difficult in Texas, though, because of our "car culture." That, along with the size of the cities/metro areas is probably the reason that I've noticed a reverse trend.

It is called gentrification. It is both good and bad.

Hi to the Five! Me too!!

Yeah...Dallas is a great example...you just could never get rid of your car!
Exactly. We all know the good. The bad is that poor people get run out of their homes. I hope they get to have new developments that are up to code instead of living in some of the squalor I've seen in Baltimore.

I'm a city girl...too boring anywhere else!:D

How is it bad? Please explain, I'm not being a smart ass. I really don't see how how renovating and rebuilding-up parts of town that were lying vacant is a bad thing. I mean, if gangs don't even hang out there because something fell on one of them (urban myth, but who knows, they were unoccupied for years) then it is absolute blight. Nothing but an empty building. That's just plain sad. Why shouldn't they (the old buildings, I mean) be turned into cool new apartments or restaurants or cool office buildings or retail stores maybe on the ground level or maybe some dance clubs or something?? Just leaving it bombed out just leaves it bombed out.

And even if you don't live in a bigger city, it makes sense to at least have a town/urban center no matter how small/big it is near by so you can easily get to stuff/find other people in an emergency.

Hi to the Five! Me too!!

Yea, that's the area I live in. Both Dallas and Fort Worth are trying their hardest to revitalize the downtown/midtown/uptown areas and provide public transportation, but the midcities and (some) suburbs don't want to go along. As long as there's no way to connect the 2 major cities, I think people (that can afford it) will continue to rush to the suburbs.

Building up these areas = higher costs = out of reach for many "lower class" citizens = them getting driven out of their homes/areas

The cheaper housing developments will be further from the city center if the goal is gentrification.

A couple we're best friends with lives in downtown Dallas in a complex across from the hotel where Nobu is located. Last time we went to visit, there was so much more to do down there. The Dallas Opera and Symphony had recently opened as well as that cool new theater. We saw "South Pacific" on New Year's Day. The Opera is really modern and beautiful inside. They did a great job. If there was better public transportation, things would be more ideal, but that's the way of the South!

Thanks, knight_shadow. :)

And here's the layperson source for those who are unfamiliar with the generations-long issue of "gentrification" around the world and in America (and "white flight" and "tipping point," for that matter): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification

There are no whites in my neighborhood, but they always jog through it. I wonder where they come from?

But I'm talking about for areas that are completely uninhabited, other than the start up cost, how is it bad?

I'm thinking specifically of Tobacco Row in Richmond, Va that was a few city blocks of empty nothing just a few years ago and is now one of the best places to live in the area. Seriously. Best being very subjective, but still. They were abonded tobacco warehouses, no one lived there.

We moved to a great spot in the middle of everything but still in a suburb. We have a quarter acre but can get to Seattle or another large-ish city in less than 10 minutes. It's fantastic. I have no intentions to ever live in a downtown city environment- I like my privacy, quiet, and parking. But I also don't want to be in the boonies :D I know this area is kind of unique because Microsoft went off and built its HQ in a non-big city, which completely throws off all normal commuting conventions, and makes us fantastic with urban sprawl. But I wonder if there's something about city vs. suburbs vs. in-betweens... the burbs on the edge.

Bad public transportation also exists up in the northwest. For a supposedly green area, the Seattle metro public transportation is terrible. If you just need to get from Seattle to Seattle, you're golden. If you happen to live along the right bus line, it's great. But for most people who want to commute it doesn't work. I once looked at taking the bus to work- I would've had to take 3 buses, and to go southeast I would've had to go north, south, west, east. It would've taken an hour and a half versus my 35 minutes. No thank you.

I love that this sentence makes it sound like Florida is part of the southwest. Apparently geography was rearranged on me.

They weren't homes. They were tobocco warehouses and ciggarette factories and public baths and cold storage places left over from the industrial revolution through the early 1900s i guess era. If you have big ass buidlings that are no longer in use, and falling further into disrepair, but still have solid foundations and walls (bricks) and supports (hard wood beams) then why not rennovate them instead of just leaving them blank, as it were. It's not like anyone is being forced out. You can't force someone out of an abandoned building. They already abandoned it.

Yet it took forever for that to get approved. People are so short sighted. It makes us look so bad that our cities are like this.

kind of like a reverse midas touch? that's kinda cool.

You're just itching to be banned, aren't you?:rolleyes:

Man, I don't know. Harlem had a renaisance or whatever once but that was before the suburbs, i think the surburbs were described by Karl Marx and Peter Engles in "the Communist Manifesto" when they were talking about mixing up town and country so that you couldn't tell the difference. That is so wrong. I think the subdivisions and supercenters and all that drive through foodstuff is the result. Look at the colors of McDonald's, remind you of anything? It should: the old soviet flag. They're a bunch of commie pinko fry-kids.

The fry-kids don't even have names, they are just fry-kids. just like the nameless faceless workers of socialism.

But seriously, i do think it has more to do with class than with race. YOu can't just say "get rid of the blacks because some black people are trash" because some white people and other races are too, but there will always be trash, I just don't see at all why anyone would choose the suburbs in the first place.

The same negative of gentrification applies there.

So basiaclly, the negative is that it rocks the boat and upsets the status quo and the actual cities become where the rich/er people and poor people will move to the subdivsions? But I don't get how that last part happens, much less is forced. It's not like they evict people in Building A as soon as the rennovate Building B. Is it??

Sometimes.

Have you seriously never heard of the issue of gentrification?

I have heard of it, I just don't understand all of the negatives and what the arguements/reasonings against are.

ETA: I'm pretty sure I'm part of it. I just don't fully understand by statements like "people are being forced out" like literally forced out? As in, "hey your lease is up, some white people from the burbs want to move in so get out or else pay whatever rent" then that is wrong but is that really what is happening?

I remember back in 2005 it was predicted that the suburbs would look like the slums because of the high price of gas. People would rather live closer to their jobs. With gentrification and companies investing in poorer neighborhoods, it seems the fruits of those labor are coming to exist. Heck even where I have my current business. 10 year ago you could have bought the entire block for how much I pay for in mortgage. The good is you rehab a city. the bad is the elements that brought those neighborhoods down have to live somewhere. You are not really solving a problem just shifting it until it is time to shift again.

If the rent for a specific building goes from, say, $500/month to $2,500/month, the residents that were there before are not going to be able to afford it.

Oh. Okay, yeah that's messed up, people shouldn't be forced out like that. But who would pay $2,500.00 for the exact same apt. that was only $500.00? How would the landlord even get away with that, that is a 400% increase, were 400% worth of improvements done to the property?

If an area goes from being "nothing" to being "the next big thing," perceptions of what's acceptable will change.

I'll use Uptown Dallas as an example. It started out as "Little Mexico," but as attractions moved closer to the area, it became more desirable. Now, it's home to some of the most expensive real estate in the area.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uptown,_Dallas,_Texas

For Realz? I don't see why people would want to pay $400k for a 900 sq ft condo when they can get a 3,000 sq ft house with a yard and a driveway 20 mins outside town for $200k. Not everybody works downtown and some people want to own actual property, not just a unit in a building. While I prefer city living, I like it on a smaller scale a la Ann Arbor than Manhattan.

Landlords often rehab a building or an apartment to make it acceptable to raise the rent by 5x. They often don't spend enough on a place to warrant that but when you combine it with gentification that's what you get.

I live in a gentrified neighborhood. It's nice, but I'm aware of some of the problems. It makes me really glad that some people are unwilling to sell their smaller homes and I'll be sad if/when they do.

Mine isn't quite gentrified yet.

The people who live in some of the renovated downtown apartments in places like Richmond, VA and Atlanta, GA that have focusd heavily on gentrification in the past 10 years.

There are shitty downtown areas that now have $3,000/month loft apartments that attempt to mirror NYC. Gorgeous apartments surrounded by awesome restaurants--in a relatively crappy downtown area. Apartment and other non-owner living has high resident turnover and almost zero sense of neighborhood and community. That's a breeding ground for greedy landlords/rental agents and crime.

I agree but remember that there are plenty of home owners in the city. :)

25 years ago in Baltimore, white flight was the opposite...whites left the city in droves to move to the suburbs to get better schools better houses and commute in the city. The city was being run down and it supposedly many areas were bad to live in. But when there was talk of the projects being torn down, as many of the blighted areas were being fixed up many started moving back in the city. Many areas where lower income people lived are being fixed up for people who could afford but....most of this progress halted when the housing market crashed.

The same thing is going on in many other cities. There are many areas where years ago were crime ridden and now affluent. And guess what....all the crime has moved out to the 'burbs.

YES...they do....I have seen it happen...there is a federal law that went into effect back in 1997 that states if you all of a sudden find yourself homeless, you do not get 1st dibs to get emergency housing. That's how they managed to get a lot of people out of the prjects that were torn down and not let them move back into an area once new housing went up.

In essence, most of the young whites flying into the cities are the result of parents that left the cities 25 to 30 years ago.


You guys are flying back....LOL

This new white flight from the suburbs is really just what was always called gentrification.

"White flight" (and "capital flight") has always referred to whites leaving the city and "fleeing" to the suburbs to get away from a number of social problems. This includes getting away from racially heterogenous neighborhoods in search of racially homogenous (all white with a "tipping piont" for nonwhites) neighborhoods. Euro-immigrants would move to the city core and live in ghettos (which are racially/ethnically homogenous neighoborhoods) until they were able to get enough social and cultural capital to move from the city, leaving behind minorities.

So, if people don't understand the issue with gentrification, they may want to read about the history of city planning (which includes the city core and the suburbs) and all of the social problems that are correlated.

Or someone buys the whole building and converts it to condos to SELL them for a huge amount of money. Often, people who were renting are not in a position to purchase them.

Yeah, I don't think I would ever classify this as "flight." I would classify it as "hipster doofuses turned parents who think they're being all green and shit by only driving 7 miles to work downtown instead of 37."

It's an issue here, and not exclusively black/white but also young professional (well, semi-professional) whites moving into neighborhoods that are still very heavily Italian/Polish/Slavic/ what-have-you immigrants. I think Pgh is atypical in still having areas like that though.

Ain't nothin' wrong with a good suburb! :)