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Originally Posted by Steely Dan
Detroit did not boom later than Milwaukee. They boomed together, and then Detroit REALLY boomed in the early 20th.
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Right. But my point is that Detroit has more interwar fabric, and interwar stuff is pretty much invariably less urban than stuff built out before WW1.
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Originally Posted by 3rd&Brown
I'm not sure this is true. Center City is "mostly middle class"? Philly doesn't have $100k+ census tracts? Center City's HHI is just shy of $100K while the surrounding neighborhoods are north of 100K (Fairmount, Northern Liberties, Fishtown, Southwest CC etc). Center City is brought down I'd argue because of the disproportionate number of students that live in CC. If you were to exclude students (of which there are 10s of thousands in this number) the HHI would for sure be well north of 100K.
Then as you mention, all of NW Philadelphia (Chestnut Hill, East Falls, Roxborough (which has gone very upmarket in the past 5 years), Manayunk, Mt Airy) is uniformly around 100k.
https://www.inquirer.com/news/philad...-20231207.html
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Checked out the stuff via
Justice Map. Hotlinking no longer works, but you can compare Philly and Chicago.
There are dark blue precincts in Philadelphia, of course, but the "big blue blob" in Chicago is much larger - almost an unbroken swathe from the South Loop to Horner Park.
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Originally Posted by goat314
I'd like to push back on that. It's not that black people don't prefer "hyperblack" communities (very unique choice of words). It's just that black people of a certain socioeconomic status would prefer to live in neighborhoods with good schools, services, infrastructure, safety like any other middle class American. Unfortuntely, because of our history of redlining and benign neglect against black neighborhoods, they don't have the same amount of options as their white counterparts. With that said, even in the Baltimore and St. Louis metros there are majority black, solidly middle class neighborhoods that have very little crime. Let's not even talk about t how they have many of these neighborhoods right outside of Atlanta, DC, Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, etc. Let's not generalize.
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IIRC, a survey of black Americans found that the median black respondent wanted a neighborhood in the range of 40%-60% black. Obviously, there will be outliers on either end (and IIRC, most black people do not live in hyper-segregated neighborhoods, they live in integrated areas).
I never said that all the black neighborhoods in cities like Baltimore or Saint Louis (even within city limits) are bad. My understanding is that within Baltimore, Ashburton is a pretty thriving black middle-class neighborhood, for example.
However, I don't think it can be denied that there isn't as strong an interest in revitalizing traditionally urban neighborhoods among younger black professionals. Or put more simply, there just aren't a ton of "buppies." Black mass suburbanization was about 30 years behind white suburbanization. I don't think we've really had enough time yet for a critical mass of younger black people who grew up in the suburbs to become disillusioned with it and want to try out urban life. So even in heavily black metros, with tons of black professionals, it's still rare that urban core gentrification is driven by black folks. Where it does happen (like say Harlem around 20 years ago) they often functionally end up first-wave gentrifiers, swamped once the neighborhood gets white interest.
Quote:
Originally Posted by edale
Thank you for saying this. Also, DC is an example of a 'hyperblack' city that has experienced huge amounts of gentrification. I understand the general point that Black neighborhoods are some of the last to undergo gentrification in many markets, but I disagree with the generalization expressed in the post. There are plenty of examples of Black neighborhoods that have gentrified over the years, so the attitude that Baltimore's demographics will damn its chances at revitalization is somewhat puzzling to me. Plus, DC contends with Atlanta for the professional Black class-- it's definitely seen as one of the premier markets in Black America. Further reason to pay less attention to race and more to income. Baltimore does have issues with concentrated, entrenched poverty in many parts of the city. That's a challenge that Austin and Nashville didn't really have to overcome, at least not to the same degree.
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DC has been somewhat of an exception, as black neighborhoods absolutely do gentrify there. But this was driven by a notable lack of any real in-town working-class white neighborhoods, coupled with high real estate prices. Baltimore wouldn't need price parity with DC to experience the same thing, but you'd need a lot more local demand than what the metro currently has.
Also, to be clear, I'm not saying that Baltimore couldn't further improve, just that given the vast array of highly segregated, poor neighborhoods in states of disrepair, coupled with the relatively low growth rate of the Baltimore MSA, it's probably not feasible that more than a handful of black neighborhoods improve each decade. Indeed,
the last "gentrification map" of Baltimore I saw showed that most gentrification has been limited to white and mixed areas of the city.