what if white flight never happened

No knowledge - please explain...
'white flight' is an American term. It's the movement of mostly-white middle class people from the cities out into the suburbs as a response to rising levels of poverty & crime amongst the inner cities' lower classes (especially, in this context, black and hispanic groups), leading in turn to a reduction in the city administrations' incomes and thus to poorer public services which make things even worse in the inner cities, which leads to more middle-class people moving out, etc...
One potential [partial] solution might be to expand the areas of city governments' authority to include the suburbs concerned, but I gather that doing so would be legally &/or politically more difficult in the USA than it is in the UK.
 
Racism and the fear of falling property values

Some of the factors in white flight was racism and the fear of falling property values. While it is getting better, for a long time in the US there were sterotypes of minorities that caused the whites to leave an area once they moved in.

Regarding property values, for many middle class families, a key part of their wealth is the value of their homes. When a minority family would move into a white neighborhood, some of the whites would start to sell their homes. As more homes went up for sale, the price of the homes dropped which triggered more whites to sell before the price dropped further. This created an image that once a minority family moved into a neighborhood, you would lose the value of your home.

I read an article many years ago about a program in I think Chicago. Since part of white flight was the fear of losing the value in your home, if there was a program to prevent that loss, then whites might not move out a panic. From what I remember, it was an insurance policy that would guarantee the current value of your home for 5 years. If you sold your home within the 5 year time period, then the policy would pay for any difference in the value of the home. The thinking was that if the whites did not have to worry about the value of their homes, they would not move out in mass. During the 5 years, the whites might get to know their minority neighbors and realize they do have some things in common.

I dont know if the program worked out. I would hope that it did.

Stubear1012
 
Surprised no one tried to exploit that. Pay a minority family a healthy sum to move into a white neighborhood, wait for the idiots to starts to sell and the scared sheep to follow them, buy up all the property at a reduced rate, pay the minority family to move to another neighborhood, sell all the houses at a premium ("This is a good neighborhood historically associated with...the right sort of people, if you know what I mean") to more white families. Rinse, repeat, exploiting the predictability of racists for profit.
 

MSZ

Banned
Without going into the "How white flight is prevented", the results of it not occuring would be:

- Lower price of suburbian/rural estates outside cities
- Higher prices of estates in urban areas
- Stronger 'districtisation'/ghettoisation
- More crime in cities
- Higher population density in cities/cities expanding in total area
- Better and expanded communal services
- Lower unemployment
 
Surprised no one tried to exploit that. Pay a minority family a healthy sum to move into a white neighborhood, wait for the idiots to starts to sell and the scared sheep to follow them, buy up all the property at a reduced rate, pay the minority family to move to another neighborhood, sell all the houses at a premium ("This is a good neighborhood historically associated with...the right sort of people, if you know what I mean") to more white families. Rinse, repeat, exploiting the predictability of racists for profit.
What makes you so sure that nobody did exploit that?
 
Surprised no one tried to exploit that. Pay a minority family a healthy sum to move into a white neighborhood, wait for the idiots to starts to sell and the scared sheep to follow them, buy up all the property at a reduced rate, pay the minority family to move to another neighborhood, sell all the houses at a premium ("This is a good neighborhood historically associated with...the right sort of people, if you know what I mean") to more white families. Rinse, repeat, exploiting the predictability of racists for profit.
Thats acually a business practice called "Blockbusting". Look it up its alittle more complicated but thats the small of it.
 
It's a fairly difficult thing to prevent.

As populations in cities rose, crime rose, property prices went into derp mode, ethnic tensions obviously rose, and so on. The people who had the funds to leave, largely did. It's called white flight because the majority of those who had funds to do so were middle class whites.

Few people to want to live in a cramped, crime-infested city, with ridiculous property ranges, you'd have to change human nature to stop the flight of wealth out of the cities.
 
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Young Urban Professionals Moving back to the City

What is interesting is that in the metroplex that I live in, young urban professionals have been moving into the former African American and Hispanic districts. The districts are close to downtown which has really been redeveloped. The districts are close to major highways and the airport. The homes while small are often in decent shape. They are buying these bungalows, remodeling, and upgrading them. In some cases if the home is too far gone to remodel, they tear it down and build a two-three story house that takes up the entire small lot.

Unfortunately for the minorities, is that the price of housing in these areas has climbed to very high levels. Due to the property tax rates, many who own their home are being forced to sell since they can not keep paying the property taxes. Since the tax form tells them what the property is apprasied for, they expect to get more than that. Some times they have more than one couple that wants to buy their house. While they get a great price for their house, many are unhappy since they would rather live out their lifes in the old neighborhoods. Instead, they end up moving to outskirts of the City and it is not the same.

Stubear1012
 
What is interesting is that in the metroplex that I live in, young urban professionals have been moving into the former African American and Hispanic districts. The districts are close to downtown which has really been redeveloped. The districts are close to major highways and the airport. The homes while small are often in decent shape. They are buying these bungalows, remodeling, and upgrading them. In some cases if the home is too far gone to remodel, they tear it down and build a two-three story house that takes up the entire small lot.

Unfortunately for the minorities, is that the price of housing in these areas has climbed to very high levels. Due to the property tax rates, many who own their home are being forced to sell since they can not keep paying the property taxes. Since the tax form tells them what the property is apprasied for, they expect to get more than that. Some times they have more than one couple that wants to buy their house. While they get a great price for their house, many are unhappy since they would rather live out their lifes in the old neighborhoods. Instead, they end up moving to outskirts of the City and it is not the same.

Stubear1012


So if the whites don't leave the inner city, the minorities will have to do so instead?
 

Hoist40

Banned
Is it called ‘Black Flight” when blacks move out of mostly black neighborhoods and move into mostly white neighborhoods?
 
It's going to be really hard to avoid white flight. Middle class families were moving out of the cities even before the 1960s (the invention of the automobile pretty much ended the need for living in crowded, cramped cities and opened up new possibilities in the suburbs); I think realistically the best you can do is reduce the amount of people leaving the cities, rather than outright end white flight, which is going to happen thanks to the automobile being invented.

The best way to do that, IMO, is to not have the Supreme Court decide to use busing as a means of integration.
 
The best way to do that, IMO, is to not have the Supreme Court decide to use busing as a means of integration.


Doubtful. Iirc, some of the heaviest White Flight was from Philadelphia, where no busing scheme was ever proposed.

Busing was probably more the occasion for flight than the cause. Parents who had been reluctant to disrupt their children's education by moving, now saw no reason to wait, as it was going to be disrupted anyway.
 
Stopping the late 1960s riots would probably go a long way to helping slow down white flight, even if it wouldn't stop it outright.
 
Stopping the late 1960s riots would probably go a long way to helping slow down white flight, even if it wouldn't stop it outright.


Movement to the suburbs was already well under way before the late sixties. Iirc, William Whyte talked quite a bit about the suburbs in The Organisation Man, while Theodore H White emphasised the importance of the suburban vote in The Making of the President 1960.

I don't really think that can be changed. Rather, you need to get more blacks moving to the suburbs at the same time as the whites - which probably means they need to be richer.
 
Well, gentrification is happening in big cities in the western world, i.e. mostly white people are moving in due to luxury renovations by the landlords.
Besides, in Europe, the ethnical minorities live in the suburbs (not villa suburbs) and the 'Whites' often live in the inner cities.

Would an early version of New Urbanism help against White Flight?
 
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