cawacko
Well-known member
I've always been interested in demographics and the movement of people. From today's WSJ. When my family moved to Oakland it was 47% black (today it is 22% and Hispanics outnumber black residents). When I went to school in L.A. South Central was a majority black, today it is a majority Hispanic. In California you had a combination of many people moving more inland where it was cheaper or back to the South.
Since this is a political board there's a political element as the article states in places like Georgia where the state has become purple due to the large influx of new black residents.
Historically black people had challenges being able to buy in certain areas which made them stay in large urban areas in such high numbers. Once that changed, and crime and poor schools in inner cities increased, black people moved more to the suburbs. Additionally as the cost of living in coastal cities increased returning to the South where there were job opportunities and cheaper living were options, many did so.
Black Americans Are Leaving Cities in the North and West
Departing residents head for the suburbs or metro areas in the South, census estimates show
The waves of migration that brought Black Americans to many northern cities are reversing.
Departing residents are heading everywhere from nearby suburbs to high-growth areas in the southern U.S., such as metro Atlanta, according to demographers, real-estate agents and public officials.
The latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates, released Thursday, indicate Black residents are continuing to leave many urban centers in the North and elsewhere, adding to decades of decline. These losses have hit many major cities with historically large Black populations, including Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Oakland, Calif.
The outflow marks a reversal of the Great Migration that began in the early 20th century as millions of Black Americans left the South looking for more economic opportunities and to flee racial violence. Much of the current shift is driven by younger, college-educated Black people who are relocating from northern and western places to the South, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.
Some are motivated by rising housing costs and worries about safety.
“I wanted some peace and quiet. I was tired of the gunshots, the sirens,” said Mary Hall-Rayford, a retired teacher who moved from Detroit to neighboring Eastpointe, Mich., in 2012. “Eastpointe was a nice little city.”
She serves on the school board and is running for mayor.
The new census estimates show other cities included in the county-level data, like Philadelphia and Baltimore, saw the number of non-Hispanic Black residents decline more steeply than their overall population in the last measured year, which runs through mid-2022. This comes as many cities saw their numbers broadly shrink because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Khary Minor grew up in South Philadelphia and opened a barbershop there in 2016. Since the pandemic hit and crime rose, he said about 5% of his customers have left the city. The 47-year-old father of three is planning his own move when his lease expires in December and is scouting houses in suburban Darby, Pa.
“Better school district, nicer neighborhood, there’s not people out on every corner,” Minor said.
The decline in Philadelphia’s Black population is recent and coincides with the pandemic, so it remains unclear whether the trend is temporary, said Katie Martin, project director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia Research and Policy Initiative.
This new migration has implications large and small. The influx of Black voters—many of whom vote Democratic—has turned formerly GOP-dominated Georgia into a swing state in recent elections.
When people filter out from inner cities, the neighborhoods and businesses they leave can suffer, according to residents and politicians.
Growing up in Cleveland’s majority-Black neighborhood of Mt. Pleasant, Mayor Justin Bibb said he got his first haircut, bought his first bicycle and went on his first date at a local ice cream shop—all on the same street.
“The majority were Black-owned,” the 36-year-old Democrat said, regarding shops there. “And unfortunately they went out of business.”
Bibb said Cleveland is focused on restoring commercial corridors in a city where the overall population shrank from more than 900,000 in 1950 to 373,000 people in 2020.
Nationwide, Black people haven’t suburbanized at the same level as the broader population, but the share of the Black population living in metropolitan-area suburbs reached 44% by 2020 from 33% two decades earlier. Over the same period, the percentage of the Black population living in central cities declined to 47% from 53%.
At the same time, Black populations in some southern metro areas have increased. Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston, added about 18,000 non-Hispanic Black residents between mid-2021 and mid-2022, according to the census estimates.
Counties surrounding Atlanta, broadly speaking, also saw gains.
Lakeisha McLean-Williams moved to Clayton County, just south of Atlanta, in the fall of 2021. The 41-year-old nurse said she decided to leave her house in Willingboro, N.J., near Philadelphia, because she was unhappy with the way the police responded to an altercation between her teenage son, who is Black, and a white teen.
McLean-Williams was able to find a five-bedroom house, bigger than the house she sold, for about the same price.
“I wanted to live down South but still wanted the city feeling,” she said.
Amber Noble, a real-estate agent and managing broker for Keller Williams Main Line in the suburbs of Philadelphia, said she has helped clients sell houses before relocating to Atlanta. “People call it the Black mecca of the world,” she said, adding that most people leaving Philadelphia say they are seeking better schools.
Oakland’s Black population has been declining for decades. The new census estimates show the Black population declined by 2.3% in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, between mid-2021 and mid-2022.
A history of practices such as redlining made it historically harder for Black people to acquire property and benefit when the housing market improved, said City Councilmember Carroll Fife. Redlining was a racist practice in which banks avoided lending in certain areas, often lower-income communities.
Fife has commissioned a “Black New Deal” study that aims to research the continuing effects of policies like redlining and urban renewal that damaged neighborhoods. “What we invest in and what we focus on grows,” she said.
Black people who live in the city are at risk being pushed out or into lower-income neighborhoods as housing costs rise, said Carolyn Johnson, chief executive of the Black Cultural Zone, a community-development organization in the city. She is concerned this dispersal saps the political power of Black residents within the city.
“Black people deserve to stay in the places that they held down when it wasn’t fun,” Johnson said.
While the Black population in Detroit’s Wayne County again ticked down, the share of Black residents in Macomb County, which includes Eastpointe, increased to an estimated 13.5% last year from 2.7% in 2000, the new census estimates show.
Eastpointe changed its name from East Detroit in the early 1990s, hoping to avoid associations with the Motor City, according to Kurt Metzger, a demographer who founded the nonprofit Data Driven Detroit. Many Black Detroiters moved to Macomb County in the first decade of the century, despite a history of racism, to take advantage of low home prices during the 2007-09 recession, he said.
Kevin Lancaster, a former Ford Motor employee, has run the Love Life Family Christian Center in Eastpointe since 2008. It now occupies a former elementary school, and Lancaster estimates about 30% of his predominantly Black congregation moved from Detroit.
“I’ve been pulled over in Eastpointe. I’ve gone through a lot of stuff in Eastpointe,” Lancaster said. “Now you’re seeing more minorities coming into prominence and coming into positions—which we need to see.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/black-...-the-north-and-west-c05bb118?mod=hp_lead_pos5
Since this is a political board there's a political element as the article states in places like Georgia where the state has become purple due to the large influx of new black residents.
Historically black people had challenges being able to buy in certain areas which made them stay in large urban areas in such high numbers. Once that changed, and crime and poor schools in inner cities increased, black people moved more to the suburbs. Additionally as the cost of living in coastal cities increased returning to the South where there were job opportunities and cheaper living were options, many did so.
Black Americans Are Leaving Cities in the North and West
Departing residents head for the suburbs or metro areas in the South, census estimates show
The waves of migration that brought Black Americans to many northern cities are reversing.
Departing residents are heading everywhere from nearby suburbs to high-growth areas in the southern U.S., such as metro Atlanta, according to demographers, real-estate agents and public officials.
The latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates, released Thursday, indicate Black residents are continuing to leave many urban centers in the North and elsewhere, adding to decades of decline. These losses have hit many major cities with historically large Black populations, including Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Oakland, Calif.
The outflow marks a reversal of the Great Migration that began in the early 20th century as millions of Black Americans left the South looking for more economic opportunities and to flee racial violence. Much of the current shift is driven by younger, college-educated Black people who are relocating from northern and western places to the South, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.
Some are motivated by rising housing costs and worries about safety.
“I wanted some peace and quiet. I was tired of the gunshots, the sirens,” said Mary Hall-Rayford, a retired teacher who moved from Detroit to neighboring Eastpointe, Mich., in 2012. “Eastpointe was a nice little city.”
She serves on the school board and is running for mayor.
The new census estimates show other cities included in the county-level data, like Philadelphia and Baltimore, saw the number of non-Hispanic Black residents decline more steeply than their overall population in the last measured year, which runs through mid-2022. This comes as many cities saw their numbers broadly shrink because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Khary Minor grew up in South Philadelphia and opened a barbershop there in 2016. Since the pandemic hit and crime rose, he said about 5% of his customers have left the city. The 47-year-old father of three is planning his own move when his lease expires in December and is scouting houses in suburban Darby, Pa.
“Better school district, nicer neighborhood, there’s not people out on every corner,” Minor said.
The decline in Philadelphia’s Black population is recent and coincides with the pandemic, so it remains unclear whether the trend is temporary, said Katie Martin, project director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia Research and Policy Initiative.
This new migration has implications large and small. The influx of Black voters—many of whom vote Democratic—has turned formerly GOP-dominated Georgia into a swing state in recent elections.
When people filter out from inner cities, the neighborhoods and businesses they leave can suffer, according to residents and politicians.
Growing up in Cleveland’s majority-Black neighborhood of Mt. Pleasant, Mayor Justin Bibb said he got his first haircut, bought his first bicycle and went on his first date at a local ice cream shop—all on the same street.
“The majority were Black-owned,” the 36-year-old Democrat said, regarding shops there. “And unfortunately they went out of business.”
Bibb said Cleveland is focused on restoring commercial corridors in a city where the overall population shrank from more than 900,000 in 1950 to 373,000 people in 2020.
Nationwide, Black people haven’t suburbanized at the same level as the broader population, but the share of the Black population living in metropolitan-area suburbs reached 44% by 2020 from 33% two decades earlier. Over the same period, the percentage of the Black population living in central cities declined to 47% from 53%.
At the same time, Black populations in some southern metro areas have increased. Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston, added about 18,000 non-Hispanic Black residents between mid-2021 and mid-2022, according to the census estimates.
Counties surrounding Atlanta, broadly speaking, also saw gains.
Lakeisha McLean-Williams moved to Clayton County, just south of Atlanta, in the fall of 2021. The 41-year-old nurse said she decided to leave her house in Willingboro, N.J., near Philadelphia, because she was unhappy with the way the police responded to an altercation between her teenage son, who is Black, and a white teen.
McLean-Williams was able to find a five-bedroom house, bigger than the house she sold, for about the same price.
“I wanted to live down South but still wanted the city feeling,” she said.
Amber Noble, a real-estate agent and managing broker for Keller Williams Main Line in the suburbs of Philadelphia, said she has helped clients sell houses before relocating to Atlanta. “People call it the Black mecca of the world,” she said, adding that most people leaving Philadelphia say they are seeking better schools.
Oakland’s Black population has been declining for decades. The new census estimates show the Black population declined by 2.3% in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, between mid-2021 and mid-2022.
A history of practices such as redlining made it historically harder for Black people to acquire property and benefit when the housing market improved, said City Councilmember Carroll Fife. Redlining was a racist practice in which banks avoided lending in certain areas, often lower-income communities.
Fife has commissioned a “Black New Deal” study that aims to research the continuing effects of policies like redlining and urban renewal that damaged neighborhoods. “What we invest in and what we focus on grows,” she said.
Black people who live in the city are at risk being pushed out or into lower-income neighborhoods as housing costs rise, said Carolyn Johnson, chief executive of the Black Cultural Zone, a community-development organization in the city. She is concerned this dispersal saps the political power of Black residents within the city.
“Black people deserve to stay in the places that they held down when it wasn’t fun,” Johnson said.
While the Black population in Detroit’s Wayne County again ticked down, the share of Black residents in Macomb County, which includes Eastpointe, increased to an estimated 13.5% last year from 2.7% in 2000, the new census estimates show.
Eastpointe changed its name from East Detroit in the early 1990s, hoping to avoid associations with the Motor City, according to Kurt Metzger, a demographer who founded the nonprofit Data Driven Detroit. Many Black Detroiters moved to Macomb County in the first decade of the century, despite a history of racism, to take advantage of low home prices during the 2007-09 recession, he said.
Kevin Lancaster, a former Ford Motor employee, has run the Love Life Family Christian Center in Eastpointe since 2008. It now occupies a former elementary school, and Lancaster estimates about 30% of his predominantly Black congregation moved from Detroit.
“I’ve been pulled over in Eastpointe. I’ve gone through a lot of stuff in Eastpointe,” Lancaster said. “Now you’re seeing more minorities coming into prominence and coming into positions—which we need to see.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/black-...-the-north-and-west-c05bb118?mod=hp_lead_pos5
