The White City (2009)

newgeography.com

9 points·rbranson··5 comments

The article would be better title "the not black city", as it goes on to use the African American population as the demographic for the cities 'whiteness'.

The article goes on to use Portland as "America's ultimate White City". However, looking at demographics, it is 78.6% white (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland,_Oregon#Demographics) compared to the average of 75.0% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...). This isn't nearly as striking as the 6.0% vs 12.8% African American demographic in the article.

Agreed. Some of the cities shown that had low black percentages also had higher-than-average percentages of asians or hispanics. Overall, I'd say it's a combination of wealth factors, education/intelligence factors, and behavioral/cultural factors -- not any single one thing.

A much simpler explanation would be - people that are wealthy enough to choose where they would like to live are predominantly not African-American.

It seems they hand-picked all of their "progressive" cities, and pointed out excluding "tier one" cities. I too could pick my "progressive" cities to isolate a particular statistic.

They also managed to hand-wave "progressive city" into "diverse city". Once they did that, it would have been nice if they compared the sum of black and immigrant populations as a somewhat more reasonable measure of diversity. Even better, they could have done some income level or cost of living analysis to see how much that explains the statistics.

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