White flight? Suburbs lose young whites to cities

[RU OX Alum]

Originally Posted by DrPhil

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

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.

[knight_shadow]

Originally Posted by RU OX Alum

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.

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

[RU OX Alum]

Originally Posted by knight_shadow

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

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.

[DrPhil]

Originally Posted by RU OX Alum

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.

The same negative of gentrification applies there.

[DrPhil]

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

[thetygerlily]

Originally Posted by RU OX Alum

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.

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 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.

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

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

[DaemonSeid]

Originally Posted by RU OX Alum

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.

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.

[DrPhil]

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.

[33girl]

Originally Posted by DrPhil

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.

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.

[sigtau305]

Originally Posted by DrPhil

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.

My Urban Geography Professor had a discussion about this. Gentrification is a regularly most talked about topic at Cleveland State's College of Urban Affairs where i'm taking my classes at.

[RU OX Alum]

Originally Posted by masssa

Why were the homes vacant in the first place? Why didn't the niggers maintain those properties?

The private developers gentrify the hood which is actually a good thing. Whites move in and the neighborhood improves back to the condition it was before the whites left.

The downside is the niggers then then move into subsidized housing in another middle class neighborhood that they will eventually destroy.

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.

[dreamseeker]

The niggers destroy everything they touch.

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

[indygphib]

Originally Posted by masssa

The problem with factories is they are ususally on the other side of the tracks near the nigger neighborhoods. As a result people with money don't want to live there.

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