Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

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"White Flight" is a bit of a misnomer as people that could afford to leave cities did leave cities (including non-white people) for a variety of reasons. One reason is that through the 1930's (depression) and 1940's (WW2) very little new housing was built and the housing inside of cities was beginning to age with minimal investment in upkeep. Costs were still very high, like they are today in many cities. But by the 1950's we were able to expand out of cities because of the automobile and new house construction was more affordable due to advances in materials and methods. So people began to leave cities because you got more space, your own yard, and an automobile and the costs were the same or cheaper than living in a cramped apartment in the city.

The second reason for people leaving cities was because of a sharp increase in crime, especially violent crime. The political leaning of the 1960's and 1970's were to be very soft on crime and that era is marked by a stark rise in crime. People that can afford it will not live in a high crime area - go figure! They move to an area that is nicer and the politics of those areas tend to be protective in that they don't want the same political policy that allowed crime to soar.

This of course starts a chain reaction where there are better living conditions and lower crime outside the city and the city begins to rapidly lose its tax base. The entrenched politicians are more concerned with having power than managing a city and the city rots. So they scapegoat people for being "racist: because they didn't want to live in a crime infested, cramped, hellhole when there were viable alternatives. The market speaks.

The main reason people left cities was because of better living conditions in suburbs and the rising tide of high crime in cities. That's it.

you can debate about it being racist or not, but the data shows that white people moved from the cities to the suburbs in southern cities. this is called white flight. a lot of the movement coincided with wins from the civil rights movement — this suggests that it has to do with race. imo it's very much race driven.

regardless, your suburb vs city dichotomy ignores the great migration from the south. rural folks in the south moved to urban areas in the north. it's not suburb vs city. it's rural vs urban. my criticism of this study is about that, it used an example of a city where there's been growth and urban sprawl in the metro area as a whole, but ignored that and only focused on the city of jackson itself. jackson has lost a lot of population for various reasons, but seeing that example in this article about the study set off a critical flag in my brain. it seems like a simplistic look at jackson without examining the metro area as a whole. it might do that and i just didn't read the study.

That's not to say that racism played no role - of course there were racists at the time, and it probably played a role in influencing the decision to move. But without the rising crime rates in the 1960s and 1970s, I don't that wouldn't have been enough to lead to large-scale abandonment of neighborhoods these racists had lived in for generations.

Racism in part but even looking at redlining it isn't how it is portrayed. Redline documents would point out not only where clusters of blacks lived but also Jews, Polish, Italians, Irish, poor whites, etc. And those regions were all difficult to get loans to buy because the homes were often older and the banks were pretty sure that the working and lower class people living in them would not be able to afford upkeep. So they didn't want to lend money to buyers of homes that were likely to decrease in value. There was no Federal guarantee in those days.

Racism played a part too of course but class is often completely ignored in the USA.

One thing I've learned is redlining also meant that if a black, Mexican, or Asian family moved onto your street no one else on the block could get a home loan. Which meant you couldn't refinance, get a second mortgage. And if you sold it would have to be to a cash buyer.

See also block busting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting

It really had little to do with who moved in - although to be sure people certainly wouldn't sell to certain types of people in certain places. Properties were rated by their quality and their potential of being renovated and kept up - that's what red lining actually was. I've read through red lining documents and they mentioned all types of ethnic groups on the side, but the main consideration was the quality of the properties and if the area would sustain or decline due to the ability of current and future owners to renovate the structures.

Many properties in areas that were claimed to be "block busted" by revisionists were of low build quality to begin with were aging out and were unlikely to be revitalized by whoever lived there in the future. As I mentioned, because of the depression and WW2 there were not many new things being built and the existing stock in many of these areas was already low quality to begin with and had gone decades without much investment. Therefore the demand was low for these properties and lower class people were the market for them. So the neighborhood began to change and more crime was brought into these places which only accelerated the plummeting of values.

People act like an area of affluent people living in high quality homes all ran for the hills as soon as a black family moved in and the prices plummeted. No, it was places like the south side of Chicago which were always working class and full of small, cramped living places. Building huge housing project towers in these areas didn't help either, nor did the highway systems that cut through these areas. But people got out because the living conditions sucked compared to what was available in the new suburbs being built. Not to mentioned, jobs were moving out of cities because business could expand to new locations that were safer and not cramped.

Did race play role? Sure. As did class to a greater extent. But the narrative you hear and accepted as fact just doesn't reflect the total reality.

No. Drive through Austin right now on Google Maps. The houses are huge, the streets are gorgeous, and the neighborhood went from majority white to 90+% Black in the span of just 10 years.

My understanding is that a lot of black East Austinites moved out to Manor because of house prices.

The Washington Park subdivision where redlining was eventually shot down was a brand new prosperous subdivision. The black families moving into it were well off.

The first person to integrate that neighborhood was a banking magnate. They bombed his house. Five times. They bombed banks and real estate agents who sold or lent to blacks.

Racial covenants were popularized as the more progressive way to keep neighborhoods segregated because racial violence was so bad.

You're wrong, there was a large financial incentive to abandon neighborhoods once non-whites started living there. The racism caused housing sell-offs, amplified by the crashing home prices. People quickly learned that their home value would plummet when the neighborhood became integrated, so they rushed to be the first ones out; while values where still high. This, of course, exacerbated the problem. Racism is at least a good 70 to 90 percent of the problem.

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