Whities invade large US cities, minorties despair.

[jayhawk]

Think I am kidding? Read the article.

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 changing racial mix is stirring up quarrels over class and culture. Beloved institutions in traditionally black communities -- minority-owned restaurants, book stores -- are losing the customers who supported them for decades. As neighborhoods grow more multicultural, conflicts over home prices, taxes and education are opening a new chapter in American race relations.

Part of the demographic shift is simple math: So many whites had abandoned cities over the past half-century, there weren't as many left to lose. Whites make up 66% of the general U.S. population, but only about 40% of large cities. Sooner or later, the pendulum was bound to swing back, and that appears to be starting.

The Census data "suggests that white flight from large cities may have bottomed out in the 1990s," says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

For instance, while most of the 50 largest cities continue to see declines in the share of whites, it is at much-reduced rates. In Los Angeles the share of the white population declined only about a half a percentage point between 2000 and 2006, compared to a 7.5-point decline the previous decade. Cities including New York, Fort Worth and Chicago show a similar pattern.

'Natural Decrease'

Demographic readjustments can take decades to play out. But if current trends continue, Washington and Atlanta (both with black majorities) will in the next decade see African-Americans fall below 50% for the first time in about a half-century.

Meantime, in San Francisco, African-American deaths now outnumber births. Once a "natural decrease" such as this begins, it's tough for the population to bounce back, since there are fewer residents left to produce the next generation. "The cycle tends to be self-perpetuating," says Kenneth M. Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire.

There are myriad factors driving the change. In recent years, minority middle-class families, particularly African-Americans, have been moving to the suburbs in greater numbers. At the same time, Hispanic immigrants (who poured into cities from the 1970s through the 1990s) are now increasingly bypassing cities for suburbs and rural areas, seeking jobs on farms and in meat-packing plants.

Cities have spent a decade tidying up parks and converting decaying factories into retail and living space. That has attracted young professionals and empty-nesters, many of them white.

The shift has put the future at odds with the past. New York City's borough of Brooklyn has seen its proportion of whites grow to 36.1% in 2006 from 35.9% in 2000 -- the first increase in white share in about a century.

Hoarding Computers

While the root of neighborhood conflicts is often money or class differences between white-collar and blue-collar workers, it often unfolds along racial lines. About two years ago Public School 84, in a largely Hispanic section of Brooklyn, meetings of the Parent Teacher Association started drawing a more professional, wealthier and whiter group of parents.

Soon, disagreements spilled into the open. Arguments concerned everything from how PTA money was spent, to accusations that some white parents were hoarding computers for their kids.

Even ice cream became a point of contention: In the past year, a group of mostly white parents took issue with a school tradition of selling ice cream to raise money. They felt the school shouldn't be serving sugary foods to kids, but the break with tradition angered many minority parents who felt the sales were an important source of money and that ice cream is a harmless treat.

"It was a gigantic fight," says Brooke Parker, who is white and whose daughter attended the school last year. "If the school is saying 'It's OK to give out ice cream' while at the same time they're holding workshops on how to deal with your kid's Type 2 diabetes, maybe we should rethink the message we're sending."

Relations got testy enough that about 20 kids, most of whom were white, transferred to private schools or other public schools. "I don't think the battleground against gentrification should take place in the schools," says Ms. Parker, who withdrew her own daughter from P.S. 84 as tensions built. "It seemed nothing could get accomplished," she said.

Cries of 'Segregation'

A few months later, a small group of families, most of them white, proposed establishing a new public school, to be located inside the existing P.S. 84. Hundreds of minority parents reacted by putting out a press release calling it de facto segregation. The proposal is "clearly discriminatory," the release said. "Children will suffer the effects of negative stigma as a result of this segregation which will send our City back 120 years!"

"I honestly felt like they didn't want to mix our children with their children," says Virginia Reyes, vice president of the PTA at P.S. 84 who has two foster children at the school. "It upset me a lot."

A spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Education says, "We obviously would not and could not open segregated schools." The department says the new school didn't get the go-ahead because it didn't have broad enough community support.

Backers of the new school couldn't be reached.

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.

There's a century's worth of history behind the ebb and flow of whites and minorities in urban America. Rural blacks began flocking to cities more than a century ago, lured by factory jobs. After World War II, whites headed for the suburbs as the great postwar building boom got rolling, while African-American families stayed in the cities, partly because they were often denied access to home loans that whites could get. In the 1970s Hispanic immigrants surged into cities, chasing service jobs and further diluting the share of whites. By the 1980s, as cities hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs, blacks and whites both left -- but whites at a higher rate.

Cities Get a Makeover

Today, cities are refashioning themselves as trendy centers devoid of suburban ills like strip malls and long commutes. In Atlanta, which has among the longest commute times of any U.S. city, the white population rose by 26,000 between 2000 and 2006, while the black population decreased by 8,900. Overall the white proportion has increased to 35% in 2006 from 31% in 2000.

In other cities, whites are still leaving, but more blacks are moving out. Boston lost about 6,000 black residents between 2000 and 2006, but only about 3,000 whites. In 2006, whites accounted for 50.2% of the city's population, up from 49.5% in 2000. That's the first increase in roughly a century.

Tracking population shifts is an inexact science. Changes in how Census data are tallied makes for imprecise comparisons across decades. Hispanics, for instance, were mostly lumped in with whites until 1980, potentially overstating the white population in earlier decades. Also, losses of African-Americans from cities are often disproportionate to other minorities because unlike, say, Hispanics or Asians, the inflow of black immigrants into the U.S. isn't big enough to offset the loss of African-Americans to the suburbs.

Washington -- where African-Americans have been in the majority for a half-century -- has lost about 80,000 black residents between 1990 and 2006. Whites had been leaving, too, but recently they've started coming back. Between 2000 and 2006, Washington gained 24,000 whites and lost 21,000 blacks. Whites are now 32% of the population, up from 28% in 2000.

Churches Take a Hit

This is a problem for Washington's African-American churches. The past few years, numerous black churches have relocated to suburban Prince George's County, Md., to follow their parishioners. Later this year, Metropolitan Baptist Church (founded by freed slaves during the Lincoln administration) plans to leave town as well.

Some of the remaining black churches are now courting white members. On a recent Sunday, the Rev. John Blanchard, the 64-year-old pastor at Ebenezer United Methodist Church, preached to a thin crowd; several pews were empty. About half his parishioners now live in the suburbs and drive into the city for services. High gasoline prices aren't helping attendance.

So Mr. Blanchard says he's planning to add a white intern to preach with him, in hopes of filling more pews. "You've got to love the one you're with," he says, "but you also need to adjust to the environment you're in."

While his church flounders, the predominantly white Capitol Hill United Methodist Church just down the street is flourishing. There the average attendance on Sundays has doubled to about 120 people the past five years. "Demographics are in our favor. We're attracting the folks that are moving in," says the Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli, 38, who headed the church for five years before recently leaving for a position elsewhere.

In San Francisco, the African-American population has fallen by a third, or about 30,000 people, since 1990, largely due to surging housing costs and redevelopment that destroyed some public housing. Mayor Newsom's African-American Out-Migration Task Force, set up last year, has a two-pronged strategy: keep African-Americans from leaving, and promote affordable housing and cultural institutions like a jazz center to try to lure blacks back. "The greatness of our city and region is in its diversity," Mayor Newsom says.

So far, his efforts have focused on residents of public housing, about half of whom are black. The city is trying to prevent evictions by building new community centers where residents can get job training and help with the rent. The city is also giving residents displaced by redevelopment, many of whom are black, an inside track on affordable-housing units.

From Poor to Poorer

As middle-class African-Americans have left San Francisco, the remaining black population has gone from poor to poorer. In 1990, half of the city's African-American population was very low-income; by 2005, that number swelled to about two-thirds. The number of black-owned businesses fell 25% between 1997 and 2002.

As blacks migrated to San Francisco's suburbs, so too have many social activities centered on the community. The San Francisco Chapter of the National Black MBA Association has started hosting many of its events across the bay in Oakland.

The Western Addition, a historically black neighborhood in San Francisco once home to many jazz clubs, has lost much of that character. Powell's Place, an iconic soul-food restaurant that had been located in or around the neighborhood since the 1970s, has moved to Bayview-Hunters Point. Charles Spencer, who owns a barbershop catering to black men, says he has lost many of his customers and is trying to diversify. His Web site has a picture of a white client to go with three black faces.

'An Act of Faith'

The city has celebrated its traditional black culture by designating a stretch of Fillmore Street the "Fillmore Jazz Preservation District," yet the businesses that defined the era are now gone or dying. Raye Richardson, owner of Marcus Book Stores -- its motto is "Books by and about black people everywhere" -- has been in the Fillmore district since 1946. She remembers the clubs, the black tailor shops and the many black residents who supported her shop. Today, Ms. Richardson says her store is losing money; much of her business comes from mail-order traffic.

"San Francisco has so few blacks now, that it's just an act of faith to stay open," says Ms. Richardson, 88.

Sherri Young, executive director at the African-American Shakespeare Company in San Francisco, is one of the few blacks at her theater company who still lives in San Francisco. "I'm a single woman in my late 30s," Ms. Young says. "Culturally, it's difficult."

Recently, she says, her production of "The Comedy of Errors" drew a mostly white audience. It's the first time that's happened since she founded the company 14 years ago.

Source.

So, cities for years were trying their best to keep whites in the city, and now that they are coming back, the people in the city do not want them. Where I highlighted is typical of the flaky, elitist "champagne socialists" who are now moving back into the city.

[argatoga]

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.

That makes me genuinely feel sad.

[Deviate]

Originally Posted by argatoga

That makes me genuinely feel sad.

As someone who graduated from a predominately black highschool, I can understand why they would want to move their children. That was the only school I've ever been to that had more parking spaces outside reserved for cops than it did handicapped spaces; unfortunately they were always full, too.

[smib]

I went to a racially diverse high school, almost everyone was hugely racist, and a vast majority of people fit their respective racial stereotypes very well. I decided to not really interact with anyone.

[Vector]

Originally Posted by argatoga

That makes me genuinely feel sad.

Give me a break. If it were black parents wanting a more diverse racial mix, you would be applauding.

[argatoga]

Originally Posted by Vector

Give me a break. If it were black parents wanting a more diverse racial mix, you would be applauding.

What? Sorry to break the news to you but I'm not a racist. People are people, no matter the color of their skin. Over focus on "race" by racists like Jessie Jackson and the like create problems that shouldn't exist. These parents are being racist, they should be called on it.

[Vector]

And I say the parent's are not racists, they are realists.

[Posmo]

Ffs.. When are people going to understand that people of different races (Yes, I think its appropriate to use the term "race". According to the latest (1992) research, most biologists believe that the term 'race' is appropriate to describe people of different ethnic backgrounds) do not mix particularly well.. I mean, as soon as the black/hispanic/arabian minorities pass 20% of total population in a given area, lots of things start happening. The crime rates shoot up, 'racism' (never liked the word, exept when uttered in the Zero Punctuation Crysis review) arises and everyone who can afford it, move away.. Racial(not cultural) diversity is not a gift.In some cases it can, and will work, but in a large scale, there is no positive impact on anything.

Call me racist, I dont care. Just dont neg. rep. me for having opinions.

[jayhawk]

Originally Posted by Posmo

Call me racist, I dont care. Just dont neg. rep. me for having opinions.

No, I think you are right. Human beings are inherently racist. You are, and I am, and so is everyone else on this board.

The difference being is that you can try to fight against it everyday in your mind, or give up and succumb.

You seem like a fighter to me, so how about putting on some boxing gloves and fight those demons in your head. I know you can, I believe in you.

[Posmo]

Originally Posted by jayhawk

No, I think you are right. Human beings are inherently racist. You are, and I am, and so is everyone else on this board.

The difference being is that you can try to fight against it everyday in your mind, or give up and succumb.

You seem like a fighter to me, so how about putting on some boxing gloves and fight those demons in your head. I know you can, I believe in you.

That sounds like an introduction to a crappy, new rocky movie

But honestly, I think religion is a big part of the issue, and honestly, 2 boxing gloves, however large, are not sufficient for kicking Islam out of this world. I suggest you all go to Youtube and watch videos by a british comedian called Pat Condell, he is at the heart of the issue.

[tigger]

People are always scared of things that are different; things they don't understand. You can take this argument and substitute black/city for white/suburb. And vice-a-versa. I only wish people would try a little harder to 'get over' racial and cultural differences in their communities instead of bitching about it. I've moved from the inner city to the suburbs, and back ... and places in between. Gone to mostly black schools and mostly white. The same issues of racism, fear of change are present everywhere. It's a shame.

Anyway, Kansas City is a pretty good example of this whole "white flight, in reverse" phenomena. Smack in the middle of KC's east side, a historically black neighborhood for oh, the last 80 years or so, city planners built a fantastic entertainment district and sports arena. People (mostly white) are actually living in downtown now, a few people I know who recently graduated have bought 100k+ lofts down there. Black community leaders are (choosing their words tactfully) very dissatisfied with this 'white invasion', despite the fact that a few years ago they where complaining how dead downtown was. It's all very funny, and a little sad too.

[Firecat]

Kind of on the same subject

White Americans no longer a majority by 2042
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26186087/

Keep in mind, they will still be the largest minority. So according to this, by 2050 the number will be 46%. Blacks at 15% (not much of a change) and hispanics 30% (compared to 15% now). That's a huge jump.

This kind of leads into what I posted in the other thread about letting in more skilled immigrants. Not only should there be a greater emphasis on skills, but maybe try to maintain proportions by not allowing a larger amount of immigrants from a single geographic location?

I understand the increase isn't only related to immigration, but also birth and mortality rates as well. But the immigration system can be used to balance things out.

I'm kind of rambling here, and it probably goes against the whole "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses"....but I wonder how different this country will be a few decades from now, and if it will be for the better or worse.

[klankymen]

Originally Posted by Posmo

Ffs.. When are people going to understand that people of different races (Yes, I think its appropriate to use the term "race". According to the latest (1992) research, most biologists believe that the term 'race' is appropriate to describe people of different ethnic backgrounds) do not mix particularly well.. I mean, as soon as the black/hispanic/arabian minorities pass 20% of total population in a given area, lots of things start happening. The crime rates shoot up, 'racism' (never liked the word, exept when uttered in the Zero Punctuation Crysis review) arises and everyone who can afford it, move away.. Racial(not cultural) diversity is not a gift.In some cases it can, and will work, but in a large scale, there is no positive impact on anything.

Call me racist, I dont care. Just dont neg. rep. me for having opinions.

I think you're wrong. It's not race, it's culture.... or nation

If the 20% blacks had all been results of adoption by white parents, this would be a non-issue.

The fact that they're immigrants is the issue. You don't have to be mexican to be an illiterate thug, you can just as well be a serb or a russian, who are chalkier than a glass of milk.

[un-dee]

Yeah but you can hardly call the african americans immigrants.

[klankymen]

Originally Posted by un-dee

Yeah but you can hardly call the african americans immigrants.

well, maybe not immigrants in the sense that they came to the country recently, but in the sense that they come fromt their own, seperate culture, there are parallels.

[SuperStalin]

I'm going to say an incredibly wise thing here, so bear with me:

People are dumbasses. The problem is not in the racial difference, it's the people, who are dumbasses.
Where there are people, kids, whatever, who are nice and intelligent, there are no problems with race,
no matter how much races you throw into the mix.

But, when you take in all the people, from the entire range of social and other backgrounds, you can bet your
ass the dumbasses among them will prevail and make life hell for everyone else, and everyone else will turn into
dumbasses.

The worse the ratio of dumbasses to normal people is, the worse the place is. Prisons are 99.9% dumbasses, look at how they turned out. Highschools, similar. Colleges, a bit better. Highly proffessional environments, a lot better.

[SuperStalin]

Originally Posted by klankymen

I think you're wrong. It's not race, it's culture.... or nation

If the 20% blacks had all been results of adoption by white parents, this would be a non-issue.

The fact that they're immigrants is the issue. You don't have to be mexican to be an illiterate thug, you can just as well be a serb or a russian, who are chalkier than a glass of milk.

As a Serb I can testify to that. A huge number of our worst asswipes goes
abroad and just continues their rural habits in the big cities around EU or USA.

On the other hand, there are lots of professionals, regular people who can't find a job here, even though they're highly educated. They move to EU or USA, and most likely you couldn't even guess where they are from, because they don't feel the urge to announce their ethnicity with loud folk music, flags and tattoos.