The Culprits Behind White Flight

[Anonymous]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/opinion/white-flight.html

"Not surprisingly, houses on the suburban side of the border have always been a little more expensive than their city counterparts. Using data on 100 border neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s, I find that this cross-border housing price gap grew by a few percentage points — to a 7 percent suburban housing price premium from a 5 percent premium — as black migrants flowed into the city, even though new black arrivals lived miles away. Households in these areas were motivated by concerns about how a changing local electorate would affect property taxes and service levels. In fact, for this set of households, what mattered most about the new Southern arrivals crowding into neighborhoods across town was not their race but their lower levels of income.

That doesn’t mean racism wasn’t a motivating factor. For the third of white households near a black enclave in 1940, concerns about new black neighbors was indeed a primary motivation. And those households moved out of the city at a higher rate than others, contributing more than a third to the white exodus. But for the remainder of urban whites, most of whom never interacted with a black family, leaving for the resource-rich suburbs was an economic calculus, one that was accelerated by the steady stream of poor migrants, both white and black, into central cities."

Another interesting hypothesis from Slaughter Of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing. https://www.amazon.com/Slaughter-Cities-Renewal-Ethnic-Cleansing/dp/1587317702/ From the Amazon description:

"Urban renewal was the last gasp attempt of the WASP ruling class to take control of a country that was slipping out of its grasp for demographic reasons. The largely Catholic ethnics were to be driven out of their neighborhoods into the suburbs, where they were to be “Americanized” according to WASP principles. The neighborhoods they left behind were to be turned over to the sharecroppers from the South or turned into futuristic Bauhaus enclaves for the new government elites. Using political tactics like eminent domain and “integration,” the planners made sure that the ethnic neighborhood got transformed into something more congenial to their dreams of social engineering than the actual communities of people they saw as a threat to their control."

[Anonymous]

Your last paragraph just slayed me.

It's just as bigoted as the so called bigots it alleges.

I took a number of courses in urban planning, including history. Many of you are forgetting or ignoring that by the 1950s large stretches of American cities were downright derelict. You talk of closely knit neighborhoods. Fine, they were closely knit. They were often also slums with no sanitation or proper running water or indoor toilets and squalid housing. They were filthy. They were overcrowded. There was practically no investment in American cities between 1920-1945 so when the country emerged from WWII large portions of many American cities, particularly the older east coast cities, were very, very rundown, with ageing housing stock and squalid conditions.

For every old person interviewed in a book or on NPR about how wonderful their childhood ghetto was, there's at least 2-3 others who would be more than happy to talk about how moving to a clean new suburb with detached housing was an amazing experience and represented a huge improvement in their quality of life. Yet they're never interviewed because they don't fit the narrative any more.

Having said that, there were certainly excesses committed by the post-war planning system. Robert Moses' highways did bulldoze their way through perfectly fine and decent neighborhoods. The wishes of poorer, whether white or black, areas were ignored for the sake of building large new infrastructure (mostly highways) that were seen to benefit the entire region (which it did). People were certainly ignored. I won't deny that. And racial based redlining did happen. But it's also dangerous to castigate the planners as bigoted wasps when their crime was to believe in bring about a better and more liveable environment for people and to clean up derelict slums and run down areas. Most of these planners were staunch Democrats and liberals and products of the New Deal and its vision for improving America. Many if not most were not actually WASPs as it is. Many were Jewish (Robert Moses, for example).

[Anonymous]

What isn't mentioned is that people often moved because they got sick of being victims of the savage criminals.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Your last paragraph just slayed me.

It's just as bigoted as the so called bigots it alleges.

I took a number of courses in urban planning, including history. Many of you are forgetting or ignoring that by the 1950s large stretches of American cities were downright derelict. You talk of closely knit neighborhoods. Fine, they were closely knit. They were often also slums with no sanitation or proper running water or indoor toilets and squalid housing. They were filthy. They were overcrowded. There was practically no investment in American cities between 1920-1945 so when the country emerged from WWII large portions of many American cities, particularly the older east coast cities, were very, very rundown, with ageing housing stock and squalid conditions.

For every old person interviewed in a book or on NPR about how wonderful their childhood ghetto was, there's at least 2-3 others who would be more than happy to talk about how moving to a clean new suburb with detached housing was an amazing experience and represented a huge improvement in their quality of life. Yet they're never interviewed because they don't fit the narrative any more.

Having said that, there were certainly excesses committed by the post-war planning system. Robert Moses' highways did bulldoze their way through perfectly fine and decent neighborhoods. The wishes of poorer, whether white or black, areas were ignored for the sake of building large new infrastructure (mostly highways) that were seen to benefit the entire region (which it did). People were certainly ignored. I won't deny that. And racial based redlining did happen. But it's also dangerous to castigate the planners as bigoted wasps when their crime was to believe in bring about a better and more liveable environment for people and to clean up derelict slums and run down areas. Most of these planners were staunch Democrats and liberals and products of the New Deal and its vision for improving America. Many if not most were not actually WASPs as it is. Many were Jewish (Robert Moses, for example).

This.

Urban planning is a fascinating subject. I had planned on majoring in UP in college until my father talked some sense into me. Maybe we should pay our urban planners more so we don't repeat the same mistakes again!

Also, DC was largely spared from the wrath of Moses. https://ggwash.org/view/5677/washingtons-unbuilt-highways

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Your last paragraph just slayed me.

It's just as bigoted as the so called bigots it alleges.

I took a number of courses in urban planning, including history. Many of you are forgetting or ignoring that by the 1950s large stretches of American cities were downright derelict. You talk of closely knit neighborhoods. Fine, they were closely knit. They were often also slums with no sanitation or proper running water or indoor toilets and squalid housing. They were filthy. They were overcrowded. There was practically no investment in American cities between 1920-1945 so when the country emerged from WWII large portions of many American cities, particularly the older east coast cities, were very, very rundown, with ageing housing stock and squalid conditions.

For every old person interviewed in a book or on NPR about how wonderful their childhood ghetto was, there's at least 2-3 others who would be more than happy to talk about how moving to a clean new suburb with detached housing was an amazing experience and represented a huge improvement in their quality of life. Yet they're never interviewed because they don't fit the narrative any more.

Having said that, there were certainly excesses committed by the post-war planning system. Robert Moses' highways did bulldoze their way through perfectly fine and decent neighborhoods. The wishes of poorer, whether white or black, areas were ignored for the sake of building large new infrastructure (mostly highways) that were seen to benefit the entire region (which it did). People were certainly ignored. I won't deny that. And racial based redlining did happen. But it's also dangerous to castigate the planners as bigoted wasps when their crime was to believe in bring about a better and more liveable environment for people and to clean up derelict slums and run down areas. Most of these planners were staunch Democrats and liberals and products of the New Deal and its vision for improving America. Many if not most were not actually WASPs as it is. Many were Jewish (Robert Moses, for example).

You completely deny that racism had an impact. And then go on to blame the liberals and Jews? I'm done with this forum.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Your last paragraph just slayed me.

It's just as bigoted as the so called bigots it alleges.

I took a number of courses in urban planning, including history. Many of you are forgetting or ignoring that by the 1950s large stretches of American cities were downright derelict. You talk of closely knit neighborhoods. Fine, they were closely knit. They were often also slums with no sanitation or proper running water or indoor toilets and squalid housing. They were filthy. They were overcrowded. There was practically no investment in American cities between 1920-1945 so when the country emerged from WWII large portions of many American cities, particularly the older east coast cities, were very, very rundown, with ageing housing stock and squalid conditions.

For every old person interviewed in a book or on NPR about how wonderful their childhood ghetto was, there's at least 2-3 others who would be more than happy to talk about how moving to a clean new suburb with detached housing was an amazing experience and represented a huge improvement in their quality of life. Yet they're never interviewed because they don't fit the narrative any more.

Having said that, there were certainly excesses committed by the post-war planning system. Robert Moses' highways did bulldoze their way through perfectly fine and decent neighborhoods. The wishes of poorer, whether white or black, areas were ignored for the sake of building large new infrastructure (mostly highways) that were seen to benefit the entire region (which it did). People were certainly ignored. I won't deny that. And racial based redlining did happen. But it's also dangerous to castigate the planners as bigoted wasps when their crime was to believe in bring about a better and more liveable environment for people and to clean up derelict slums and run down areas. Most of these planners were staunch Democrats and liberals and products of the New Deal and its vision for improving America. Many if not most were not actually WASPs as it is. Many were Jewish (Robert Moses, for example).

You completely deny that racism had an impact. And then go on to blame the liberals and Jews? I'm done with this forum.

Honey, did you read the post?

Let me quote it:

"People were certainly ignored. I won't deny that. And racial based redlining did happen."

Try not to take the poster out of context, will you? The original post alleges that a WASP ruling class was trying to reassert control. The respondent pointed out that the reality was far more complicated to suggest a wasp ruling class trying to control the masses. And he or she is right. Much of the move to the suburbs was driven by people looking for a better quality environment, trading cramped apartments and rownhouses in increasingly aging neighborhoods in polluted cities for cleaner and more spacious and new environments. Much of the urban clearances was because the original areas were slums. We forget that millions of Americans actually lived in conditions we would consider horrific today. Planners genuinely believed that new public highrises and midrises would be a big improvement, spurred on by the developments coming out of social housing in Europe. And yes, it is true, most of these planners and social workers were liberals and progressives and strongly driven by the New Deal philosophy. And yes, many were Jewish. That does not imply a Jewish conspiracy, but only to show that the picture of an evil Wasp hegemony playing political or social games is not only incorrect but unfair and deliberately provocative.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Your last paragraph just slayed me.

It's just as bigoted as the so called bigots it alleges.

I took a number of courses in urban planning, including history. Many of you are forgetting or ignoring that by the 1950s large stretches of American cities were downright derelict. You talk of closely knit neighborhoods. Fine, they were closely knit. They were often also slums with no sanitation or proper running water or indoor toilets and squalid housing. They were filthy. They were overcrowded. There was practically no investment in American cities between 1920-1945 so when the country emerged from WWII large portions of many American cities, particularly the older east coast cities, were very, very rundown, with ageing housing stock and squalid conditions.

Having said that, there were certainly excesses committed by the post-war planning system. Robert Moses' highways did bulldoze their way through perfectly fine and decent neighborhoods. The wishes of poorer, whether white or black, areas were ignored for the sake of building large new infrastructure (mostly highways) that were seen to benefit the entire region (which it did). People were certainly ignored. I won't deny that. And racial based redlining did happen. But it's also dangerous to castigate the planners as bigoted wasps when their crime was to believe in bring about a better and more liveable environment for people and to clean up derelict slums and run down areas. Most of these planners were staunch Democrats and liberals and products of the New Deal and its vision for improving America. Many if not most were not actually WASPs as it is. Many were Jewish (Robert Moses, for example).

[/quote

Parts of this reminds me of a simple Sociology section in one chapter of one of my college texts: Take every wealthy urban neighborhood and then find the most poor/crime ridden. They are always geographically the furthest apart. This isn't an accent. It's systemic and deliberate. Racial inequity runs through almost every vein of this county's history. It's practically impossible to completely eradicate.

[Anonymous]

I came to this country with no concept of racism because everyone looked the same in my home country. My parents bought a nice home in PG county. I remember one time I went out to the basketball court in the summer, it was already dark so I was alone. A homeowner who lived close to the home came out and yelled "come on, it's after 9". I then became aware that people in the homes surrounding the court could hear the noise in this otherwise quiet neighborhood and went home. I realized then why no one played basketball at night even though the court had bright lights.

This was the early 90s.

By the time I left the neighborhood around 2000, it had become predominantly black. They could not turn off the lights at the courts for safety reasons, so they put up a very tall chain link fence and began locking it every night. At least for me, that's one of the reasons I would not go back to a neighborhood like that, because I think it's important to be respectful to others, even though it would have been convenient for me to reason "don't buy a lot near a basketball court if you don't want to hear bouncing balls". It's such a small thing but signifies a broader problem. This was not the inner city, but a suburban development with big open meadow-like spaces, jogging trails, little creeks, and now a basketball court that looks like it was plucked right out of downtown DC.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Your last paragraph just slayed me.

It's just as bigoted as the so called bigots it alleges.

I took a number of courses in urban planning, including history. Many of you are forgetting or ignoring that by the 1950s large stretches of American cities were downright derelict. You talk of closely knit neighborhoods. Fine, they were closely knit. They were often also slums with no sanitation or proper running water or indoor toilets and squalid housing. They were filthy. They were overcrowded. There was practically no investment in American cities between 1920-1945 so when the country emerged from WWII large portions of many American cities, particularly the older east coast cities, were very, very rundown, with ageing housing stock and squalid conditions.

Having said that, there were certainly excesses committed by the post-war planning system. Robert Moses' highways did bulldoze their way through perfectly fine and decent neighborhoods. The wishes of poorer, whether white or black, areas were ignored for the sake of building large new infrastructure (mostly highways) that were seen to benefit the entire region (which it did). People were certainly ignored. I won't deny that. And racial based redlining did happen. But it's also dangerous to castigate the planners as bigoted wasps when their crime was to believe in bring about a better and more liveable environment for people and to clean up derelict slums and run down areas. Most of these planners were staunch Democrats and liberals and products of the New Deal and its vision for improving America. Many if not most were not actually WASPs as it is. Many were Jewish (Robert Moses, for example).

Parts of this reminds me of a simple Sociology section in one chapter of one of my college texts: Take every wealthy urban neighborhood and then find the most poor/crime ridden. They are always geographically the furthest apart. This isn't an accent. It's systemic and deliberate. Racial inequity runs through almost every vein of this county's history. It's practically impossible to completely eradicate.

That text book is not worth the paper its printed on. Correlation does not equate causation. Of course it's not an accident that wealthy parts are far from poor/crime-ridden parts, because people with means do not want to be situated close to crime. Why do you think Uncle Phil lived in Bel Air and not Compton?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/opinion/white-flight.html

"Not surprisingly, houses on the suburban side of the border have always been a little more expensive than their city counterparts. Using data on 100 border neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s, I find that this cross-border housing price gap grew by a few percentage points — to a 7 percent suburban housing price premium from a 5 percent premium — as black migrants flowed into the city, even though new black arrivals lived miles away. Households in these areas were motivated by concerns about how a changing local electorate would affect property taxes and service levels. In fact, for this set of households, what mattered most about the new Southern arrivals crowding into neighborhoods across town was not their race but their lower levels of income.

That doesn’t mean racism wasn’t a motivating factor. For the third of white households near a black enclave in 1940, concerns about new black neighbors was indeed a primary motivation. And those households moved out of the city at a higher rate than others, contributing more than a third to the white exodus. But for the remainder of urban whites, most of whom never interacted with a black family, leaving for the resource-rich suburbs was an economic calculus, one that was accelerated by the steady stream of poor migrants, both white and black, into central cities."

Another interesting hypothesis from Slaughter Of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing. https://www.amazon.com/Slaughter-Cities-Renewal-Ethnic-Cleansing/dp/1587317702/ From the Amazon description:

"Urban renewal was the last gasp attempt of the WASP ruling class to take control of a country that was slipping out of its grasp for demographic reasons. The largely Catholic ethnics were to be driven out of their neighborhoods into the suburbs, where they were to be “Americanized” according to WASP principles. The neighborhoods they left behind were to be turned over to the sharecroppers from the South or turned into futuristic Bauhaus enclaves for the new government elites. Using political tactics like eminent domain and “integration,” the planners made sure that the ethnic neighborhood got transformed into something more congenial to their dreams of social engineering than the actual communities of people they saw as a threat to their control."

Uh, no. My Catholic immigrant ancestors hightailed it out of the city as fast as they could, on their own dime. Not by force, but because of the squalid conditions of their ethnic ghetto. Once they had money, they moved. Same story on my husband's side of the family. And they settled in suburban areas with many other people of the same ethnicity. They continued to eat pasta on Sundays after church and speak Italian to their children. They just didn't have to contend with bedbugs while doing so. Perhaps they made a calculation about living in the city with POC, but I don't think there was some conspiracy to drive hem out and turn them into WASPS. If there were, I think it failed. Have you watched RHONJ? Not a WASP among them.

Also, I had a few relatives who stayed in their city neighborhoods, which over the years have changed to concentrations of different ethnicities (still Catholic, I think, just not European). They and their children and grandchildren have fared far worse in terms of socioeconomic mobility. Fewer college graduates among them, fewer with high-paying jobs, and they have not enjoyed appreciation of their real estate in the same way my suburban relatives have.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Your last paragraph just slayed me.

It's just as bigoted as the so called bigots it alleges.

I took a number of courses in urban planning, including history. Many of you are forgetting or ignoring that by the 1950s large stretches of American cities were downright derelict. You talk of closely knit neighborhoods. Fine, they were closely knit. They were often also slums with no sanitation or proper running water or indoor toilets and squalid housing. They were filthy. They were overcrowded. There was practically no investment in American cities between 1920-1945 so when the country emerged from WWII large portions of many American cities, particularly the older east coast cities, were very, very rundown, with ageing housing stock and squalid conditions.

For every old person interviewed in a book or on NPR about how wonderful their childhood ghetto was, there's at least 2-3 others who would be more than happy to talk about how moving to a clean new suburb with detached housing was an amazing experience and represented a huge improvement in their quality of life. Yet they're never interviewed because they don't fit the narrative any more.

Having said that, there were certainly excesses committed by the post-war planning system. Robert Moses' highways did bulldoze their way through perfectly fine and decent neighborhoods. The wishes of poorer, whether white or black, areas were ignored for the sake of building large new infrastructure (mostly highways) that were seen to benefit the entire region (which it did). People were certainly ignored. I won't deny that. And racial based redlining did happen. But it's also dangerous to castigate the planners as bigoted wasps when their crime was to believe in bring about a better and more liveable environment for people and to clean up derelict slums and run down areas. Most of these planners were staunch Democrats and liberals and products of the New Deal and its vision for improving America. Many if not most were not actually WASPs as it is. Many were Jewish (Robert Moses, for example).

You completely deny that racism had an impact. And then go on to blame the liberals and Jews? I'm done with this forum.

Honey, did you read the post?

Let me quote it:

"People were certainly ignored. I won't deny that. And racial based redlining did happen."

Try not to take the poster out of context, will you? The original post alleges that a WASP ruling class was trying to reassert control. The respondent pointed out that the reality was far more complicated to suggest a wasp ruling class trying to control the masses. And he or she is right. Much of the move to the suburbs was driven by people looking for a better quality environment, trading cramped apartments and rownhouses in increasingly aging neighborhoods in polluted cities for cleaner and more spacious and new environments. Much of the urban clearances was because the original areas were slums. We forget that millions of Americans actually lived in conditions we would consider horrific today. Planners genuinely believed that new public highrises and midrises would be a big improvement, spurred on by the developments coming out of social housing in Europe. And yes, it is true, most of these planners and social workers were liberals and progressives and strongly driven by the New Deal philosophy. And yes, many were Jewish. That does not imply a Jewish conspiracy, but only to show that the picture of an evil Wasp hegemony playing political or social games is not only incorrect but unfair and deliberately provocative.

Sorry, but that is the equivalent of "I can't be racist, I have a black uncle". You're still a racist.

[Anonymous]

Why does there have to be a "culprit". White people, just like any other people in the USA are free to live where ever they want. Each person makes their own individual choice about where they want to live, it isn't like all the white people got together and said "Hey we don't want to live in XXX neighborhood anymore, let's let the blacks have it".

[Anonymous]

Are you joking? actually that is exactly what happened- a bunch of white people (not to the entire race , most of whom are not racist) did get together and decide "coloreds over there, whites over here" and whites who rebelled against this social order faced negative consequences.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Your last paragraph just slayed me.

It's just as bigoted as the so called bigots it alleges.

I took a number of courses in urban planning, including history. Many of you are forgetting or ignoring that by the 1950s large stretches of American cities were downright derelict. You talk of closely knit neighborhoods. Fine, they were closely knit. They were often also slums with no sanitation or proper running water or indoor toilets and squalid housing. They were filthy. They were overcrowded. There was practically no investment in American cities between 1920-1945 so when the country emerged from WWII large portions of many American cities, particularly the older east coast cities, were very, very rundown, with ageing housing stock and squalid conditions.

For every old person interviewed in a book or on NPR about how wonderful their childhood ghetto was, there's at least 2-3 others who would be more than happy to talk about how moving to a clean new suburb with detached housing was an amazing experience and represented a huge improvement in their quality of life. Yet they're never interviewed because they don't fit the narrative any more.

Having said that, there were certainly excesses committed by the post-war planning system. Robert Moses' highways did bulldoze their way through perfectly fine and decent neighborhoods. The wishes of poorer, whether white or black, areas were ignored for the sake of building large new infrastructure (mostly highways) that were seen to benefit the entire region (which it did). People were certainly ignored. I won't deny that. And racial based redlining did happen. But it's also dangerous to castigate the planners as bigoted wasps when their crime was to believe in bring about a better and more liveable environment for people and to clean up derelict slums and run down areas. Most of these planners were staunch Democrats and liberals and products of the New Deal and its vision for improving America. Many if not most were not actually WASPs as it is. Many were Jewish (Robert Moses, for example).

You completely deny that racism had an impact. And then go on to blame the liberals and Jews? I'm done with this forum.

Honey, did you read the post?

Let me quote it:

"People were certainly ignored. I won't deny that. And racial based redlining did happen."

Try not to take the poster out of context, will you? The original post alleges that a WASP ruling class was trying to reassert control. The respondent pointed out that the reality was far more complicated to suggest a wasp ruling class trying to control the masses. And he or she is right. Much of the move to the suburbs was driven by people looking for a better quality environment, trading cramped apartments and rownhouses in increasingly aging neighborhoods in polluted cities for cleaner and more spacious and new environments. Much of the urban clearances was because the original areas were slums. We forget that millions of Americans actually lived in conditions we would consider horrific today. Planners genuinely believed that new public highrises and midrises would be a big improvement, spurred on by the developments coming out of social housing in Europe. And yes, it is true, most of these planners and social workers were liberals and progressives and strongly driven by the New Deal philosophy. And yes, many were Jewish. That does not imply a Jewish conspiracy, but only to show that the picture of an evil Wasp hegemony playing political or social games is not only incorrect but unfair and deliberately provocative.

Sorry, but that is the equivalent of "I can't be racist, I have a black uncle". You're still a racist.

Np- you are an idiot. Like really. Please educate yourself.

[Anonymous]

I can't read the Times anymore. Political crap posing as journalism.