White flight/black flight

It's not unreasonable to worry about the impact of gentrification and what that means for the minority families who used to live in urban rowhouses who are now forced to move to the 'burbs because of the lack of affordable housing in the city.

In Washington, D.C. (once called Chocolate City), the number of African Americans and Latinos in the city is decreasing while the number of whites is increasing. This means communities which once included Black churches, families who have lived there for generations, and Black business owners disappear and are replaced by Whole Foods and young white people.

If people voluntarily move to the suburbs for a better life, that's one thing. If they are forced to move from their communities and homes because of increased property taxes and the lack of affordable housing, that's another thing. That's something a Crunchy Conservative should be worried about: the loss of community created by consumerism.

Daniel, I hear what you're saying, and recognize that there are real moral complications to this kind of thing. Your post made me think about suburbanites in certain parts of the Dallas area who are portrayed in the media as racists because they worry about the value of their property in the face of poor immigrant Hispanics moving in. Are they necessarily racist? Or are they worried about losing a way of life they've worked hard to achieve. Or perhaps both? These things get complicated.

My neighborhood in Dallas recently got historical landmark status. It's one of the oldest in the city, with lots of architecturally significant buildings. But it was allowed in decades past to become a slum. Our next-door neighbors -- working-class Mexicans -- talk about how in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, it was gang central. You couldn't sit on your front porch without fear of bullets. Then it started to gentrify. Gays and white urban pioneers started to move in and fix up the old houses. The (white, single, middle-aged) women who live across the street from us in two houses bought their places for something like $60,000 each. They poured a lot of sweat equity, and money, into making their old dumpy houses nice. Now, the neighborhood is desirable again. But a lot of the people who lived there in the past no longer can afford to. Yet those who remain, like our Mexican-American neighbors, enjoy a much higher quality of life, and historically significant houses that were falling into ruin are now saved.

So what's right, and what's wrong?

What I hoped to point out with this post is simply that the way the media and political leaders choose to frame these issues often reflects their own biases. No journalist nor politician will ever write that white people leaving the city costs the city some of its soul. There's some "magic Negro" stuff going on there. I can understand a black writer like Ta-Nehisi Coates getting his feathers ruffled over what he perceives as well-meaning whites thinking of black people as objects of their pity rather than free moral agents.

And for what it's worth, I am a white person who lives in the inner city, and I would much rather be the only white person on my street, so long as the street was filled with families who had strong middle-class values (even if they were not economically in the middle class), versus a street filled with people who had the same color of skin as me, but antagonistic values in their hearts.

Among my tips for living relatively well in the Third World society we are rapidly becoming: it is better to be the poorest person in a rich neighborhood than the richest person in a poor neighborhood (unless you have aspirations in local politics.) Of course, you may be unable to avoid getting priced out of such a neighborhood, but the amenities available there are worth some sacrifice.