Why Blacks are Fleeing Inner Cities

Gene Veith is a Lutheran evangelical and former cultural editor at World magazine. In a recent article ($), he details what is being called black flight, i.e., blacks leaving traditional inner-city enclaves like Washington D.C., Chicago, and Detroit.

Washington, D.C., has long been a “minority majority” city.  It isn’t any more.  In 1970, more than 71% of the population was Black.  According to the 2010 census, the percentage was 59%.  Now, though, according to the latest census, that number has dropped to 41%.

Chicago has been a major center of Black culture since the earlier 20th century.  In 1980, some 40% of the city’s population was Black.  Today that number has dropped to 29%.

A similar exodus has taken place in nine of the ten American cities with the largest Black populations.  Politico is running a series on the phenomenon entitled The Next Great Migration.

Why are black Americans moving? They seem to be moving away from bastions of liberalism in cultural and economic decline in the Northeast and Midwest to the same places whites are moving to, often in the South, where they can get jobs and experience less economic oppression.

For instance, black college graduates often do not move back home but to where their careers take them. Places like Houston, which is the only one of the top 10 U.S. cities where the percentage of the black population has increased. Other blacks sell their home for good money as whites move in, then move to the suburbs. My next-door neighbors in Austin back in the 1990s did exactly that. Motivations for this trend include better jobs, affordability, better schools, and less crime.

Many liberals appear to believe this is a bad thing, complaining about gentrification and black communities being diluted:

The Politico series is framing this exodus as a bad thing. But why? Yes, the loss of traditional neighborhoods can be sad, and it’s understandable that politicians will lament the loss of their power base. But the urban “ghettos” have been a scandalous manifestation of racial division and inequality in American society. That they are breaking up at the initiative of the people who were once trapped in them is genuine progress.

What is happening is the restoration of normal patterns that have been taking place in our country since its founding. Ethnic minority populations, often immigrants, have traditionally moved to lower cost neighborhoods, then moved to better neighborhoods once their economic circumstances improve. Then the next group moves in. For instance, their use to be a neighborhood in Detroit names Poletown where Polish immigrants lived for years. But as their economic status improved, they moved out and the next minority moved in. In this case, it was blacks (sidenote: Poletown doesn’t exist anymore; the Democratic leadership of Detroit condemned the entire neighborhood, forced all the blacks to move out, then gave the property to GM to build a car plant).

However, the migration of ethnic groups from meager to wealthier circumstances was stunted with blacks when welfare and civil rights laws were passed in the 1960s. Many blacks became trapped high crime areas with bad schools and no jobs, and what became known as the permanent underclass came into being. The “compassion” of liberals, many of whom may have been well intentioned in promoting the welfare of blacks, brought about exactly the opposite of what they intended.

Today’s liberals–better known as progressives, though, often bemoan improvements in the welfare of blacks because it doesn’t fit their political agenda. Veith cites one community organizer bemoans the change in one neighborhood from black majority to boutiques–even though he moved out of the neighborhood himself–and is “leading the charge to take back D.C. We mean, we have a right to the city.”

Veith also points out how integration is no longer a focus of progressives:

A major watchword of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was “integration,” so that Black Americans could be fully integrated into the rest of American society. Progressives don’t say much about “integration” today, preferring to emphasize separate “cultures” and dividing Americans into conflicting identity groups. But integration is happening, nonetheless.

Racism is inherent in big government. The upward mobility of blacks was growing rapidly prior to the 1960s progressive push for welfare and civil rights. But when the federal government decided to go beyond eliminating government racism–which was the main problem in the south–to taking over the family, private property, and the economy through LBJ’s Great Society, many blacks became trapped in a permanent underclass. Not because of racism, but because of welfare, public schools, the minimum wage, and other progressive government policies that limited social and economic opportunity and therefore made it more difficult for blacks to do what many minorities did before them: move up in the world.

Today, in the case of black flight, it appears that liberty and free markets are doing what they always do; providing individual citizens opportunities to prosper despite the efforts of progressives and big government to thwart them.