White flight

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White flight is a demographic trend that has been taking place in many American cities and even regions, especially in the Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western sections of the United States since the 1950s. Due to the economic boom and growth of suburbia in the years after World War II, whites (a term used broadly to describe Americans of European heritage) - many of whom were the children and grandchildren of immigrants - began to move away from inner core cities and to newer suburban communities in order to escape the increasing crime and racial tension that plagued inner cities throughout the country. Prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racist real-estate covenants and other discriminatory practices, non-white people were often not afforded the same opportunities to move away from the cities, even when they may have been economically able to do so. In addition to the United States, many cities in the United Kingdom, including parts of London (such as the Brixton district), have also been affected by white flight, especially after South Asian, West Indian, and African immigrants first began arriving in that country in significant numbers in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these immigrants and subsequent generations continue to live in poverty in areas that have experienced white flight and there have been race riots in several British cities.

The effects of white flight have been devastating for the cities that have been hit by this phenomenon, especially Detroit, Michigan, St. Louis, Missouri, Chicago, Illinois, parts of New York City (especially the Bronx and much of Brooklyn), Cleveland, Ohio, Los Angeles, California, and numerous smaller cities such as Newark, New Jersey. Detroit and St. Louis have lost more than half of their 1950 peak populations due largely to white flight.

As wealthier white residents abandoned the inner city neighborhoods, they ultimately left behind increasingly poor ethnic populations whose neighborhoods rapidly deteriorated, beginning in the 1950s and especially in the 1960s. Jobs and businesses disintegrated along with the neighborhoods and ultimately turned the increasingly poverty-stricken areas into crime-ridden slums with failing and dilapidated public schools. In the United States, these areas are often populated by African Americans and Hispanics. Much of Detroit, the Greater Los Angeles Area (Compton, Inglewood, etc.), large areas of the West and South Sides of Chicago and St. Louis are prime examples of this phenomenon.

Many whites once lived in urban neighborhoods in Los Angeles before departing the city in large numbers after the 1965 Watts Riots (a trend that acutally began before the riots but accelerated after them). Major riots in Detroit in 1967 and during the following year, after the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, contributed to white flight in that city. Now, the city of Detroit is over 80% black whereas a majority of its neighboring suburbs, such as Livonia and Warren, are predominantly white.[1] Similarly, after the Los Angeles Riots of 1992, large numbers of white Californians left Southern California or left the state entirely due to a number of factors, including a fear of crime and violence, and concerns about the growing immigrant population in California, the state that attracts more new immigrants (mainly Latinos, Asians, and Middle Easterners) than any other U.S. state.

White flight continues in some areas to the present day but has taken on a new trend as some of the older suburbs have been experiencing urban decay similar to their parent cities, such as in some of the southern and western suburbs of Chicago adjacent to the city. East St. Louis and many of the neighboring communities on the Illinois side of the St. Louis metropolitan area have also long suffered from urban decay with the decline of the manufacturing industries that had once powered the economies of the region. Other examples include the suburban regions of the San Fernando Valley and the San Gabriel Valley in Southern California, where many working-class Hispanics and lower to upper middle class Asian Americans have moved during the past quarter century. The exodus of white Americans from these particular regions occurred during much of the 1980s and 1990s. In addition, many of the white residents in upper-middle-class suburban communities in Orange County and the Inland Empire in California are currently moving to other regions such as the mountain states of Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming in a form of white flight.[1] In general, the only whites who tend to remain in cities and suburbs affected by white flight are low-income whites (though many low-income whites in East Coast cities have moved to close-in, working-class suburbs or other, more heavily white neighborhoods within the same city) and senior citizens (especially "empty nesters"), who have often lived in a particular community for a very long time. Usually, when these seniors die or move to retirement communities, the process of white flight is complete.

However, the population decline of some Midwestern, Northeastern, and Western cities has either slowed down or even reversed, while other areas remain economically devastated due to seemingly-permanent economic shifts and job losses. The future of this trend remains to be seen.

White flight has also affected education. The landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education ordered the desegregation of schools. American cities affected by white flight also witnessed growing disparities in the quality of education. Thus, to achieve racial balance and equality in schools, the Court subsequently mandated in the 1971 decision of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education controversial school busing to mainly all-white schools in the suburbs. Begininning from the mid 1970s, many minority students - especially African Americans - were transported across long distances from the poorer core cities to the newer affluent suburbs. As Justice William Douglas observed in his dissent in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), "The inner core of Detroit is now rather solidly black; and the blacks, we know, in many instances are likely to be poorer ..." It should be noted that several predominantly poorer white communities also face similar conditions to areas that have experienced white flight. The cities of Buffalo and Niagara Falls in New York serve as prime examples where manufacturing jobs were once dominant but have largely disappeared thus resulting in urban decay.

The opposing social trend of wealthy social groups moving into an inner city area and displacing the existing residents is called gentrification. In Cleveland, as reported on the Jim Lehrer NewsHour on PBS in 2003, several wealthy gay and lesbian couples have purchased and restored homes in the predominantly African American neighborhoods. In other cases, some inner city areas may witness a renaissance as a home for artists, which happens to be the case with the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles. In Montreal many inner city areas have been gentrified by the usual Yuppie couples but also by "empty nesters", that is couples in their late forties or fifties whose children have left their home, giving them an incentive to sell their large house in the suburbs and buy a condo or townhouse in the inner city, close to the better parks, the leisure activities, the cultural attractions and the convenience of the Montreal metro.