white flight reversed

the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about "The End of White Flight" (i.e. the white gentrification of American cities).

Decades of white flight transformed America's cities. That era is drawing to a close.

In Washington, a historically black church is trying to attract white members to survive. Atlanta's next mayoral race is expected to feature the first competitive white candidate since the 1980s. San Francisco has lost so many African-Americans that Mayor Gavin Newsom created an "African-American Out-Migration Task Force and Advisory Committee" to help retain black residents.

"The city is experiencing growth, yet we're losing African-American families disproportionately," Mr. Newsom says. When that happens, "we lose part of our soul."

For much of the 20th century, the proportion of whites shrank in most U.S. cities. In recent years the decline has slowed considerably -- and in some significant cases has reversed. Between 2000 and 2006, eight of the 50 largest cities, including Boston, Seattle and San Francisco, saw the proportion of whites increase, according to Census figures. The previous decade, only three cities saw increases.

The article goes on to discuss many aspects of this reversal, including some truly disgusting behavior on the part of white parents in Brooklyn, who objected to their school selling ice cream as a fundraiser and tried to get the school district to open a new school in the same area so they could have their way with it.

Elsewhere in Brooklyn, in a majority African-American section of the borough, Councilwoman Letitia James says a handful of predominantly white parents last year asked her if some of their local tax money could be steered to schools in a nearby neighborhood. The parents wanted their kids in schools with a more diverse racial mix, Ms. James says, rather than the majority-black schools in her district.

The parents felt "tax dollars should follow the children, and not the school," Ms. James says. She denied their request.

Segregation, anyone?

The sad thing is that this gentrification could be a good thing for everyone involved if it weren't conducted as a classic Jacobsian destruction of diversity, coupled with clear racial geographical discrimination.

So WWJJD? Dumb question. The better question is, what should we do, we who live in these cities directly affected? It's a hard question for me to answer, because I now live in Oakland. When I lived in San Francisco, the destruction of its diversity affected me directly. But now that I live in the semi-suburban, and heavily black, heavily diverse, extension, the destruction of diversity in San Francisco benefits Oakland to a certain extent.

That is to say, working and middle-class blacks driven out of SF by the cost of living may end up in Oakland, where it's cheaper to live, dropping their job skills and, if they're business owners, employment opportunities here. Upper middle class blacks potentially driven out of SF by the destruction of the black community there could bring job skills, employment opps, and cash and investment capital to Oakland.

I don't know if this is in fact what has happened here. Oakland's downtown has been seeing a enormous condo-building boom and gentrification of its street-level businesses in the past couple of years. The condos will not sell; none of them opened before the housing market busted. But maybe they'll be converted to rentals, who knows? I guess if I end up staying in Oakland long-term, I'll find out.

Comments

[Moses Jones]

In terms of diversity, diversity in investment funds has an obvious logic. However, when I hear people note the merits of diversity in a people sense, I rarely ever hear it said as more than "... great diversity ..."

My question is what specifically does "diversity" do to help provide jobs, better education, greater life opportunities, and a more cohesive community? If it doesn't do these types of things, then what exactly does it do to make things better?

How is Group A better off living in and amongsts Groups B, C, and D?

[claire]

Moses, diversity in people does exactly the same thing as diversity in investment funds. It's not just racial diversity, either: it's diversity of class, age group, employment sector, income, skills, interests, etc.

You diversify your portfolio on the positive side to maximize earning potential across several sectors. On the negative side you do it to buffer yourself against the recession or collapse of a particular industry.

Having a diversity of people in a neighborhood means that the economy and culture of that neighborhood is drawing from many sources. In monoculture neighborhoods, where everyone works in the same industries, when an industry collapses, everyone is out of work, can't support local businesses, and the neighborhood just dies.

Likewise, if everyone works in the same industry and the industry is thriving (like during the dot com boom in San Francisco,) they can price out people who work in services and small businesses. Those service and small business folks will then not be able to live in the neighborhoods in which they keep their businesses; many of those businesses will leave. Then the amenities of the neighborhood go down, and the thriving people will start fleeing the neighborhood as well. Neighborhood dies. (In the Bay Area during the dot com boom, there were stories of teachers and nurses who couldn't find any affordable place to live and were living out of their cars for months on end ... even though they were employed. How does that benefit anyone?)

If everyone is culturally the same, they all buy the same products and services, and they make up a limited market; only so many Asian groceries are needing in an Asian enclave. In culturally diverse neighborhoods, neighbors take on practices and buying patterns from neighbors from different cultures, and the types of businesses the neighborhood can support multiply. It's almost infinite, in fact.

And if the types of businesses and organizations in a neighborhood are diverse, it means that people will be out on the street for more of the day (and night,) which makes the neighborhood more interesting, and safer (because there are more eyes on the street.) These are better neighborhoods for families.

Likewise, school districts that are diverse lead to better education. Parents of higher-income classes have higher expectations of the schools and will often lead the PTAs and school boards into setting higher standards. But children growing up among diversity in their classrooms and on their streets will have a much greater experience of people from different classes and cultures than American schoolchildren often do. This makes them less provincial, and broadens their minds to the type of critical and lateral thinking needed in the new global economy. (Or did you think that children brought up in monocultures adapt more easily to "foreign" business practices than children brought up in diverse neighborhoods?)

I could go on, but it's been said better elsewhere. Read Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities.