Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
No, sprawl was the primary factor, and white flight was the secondary effect.
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I mean, let's consider on the flipside Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh has been ranked one of the sprawliest metros in the U.S. by some metrics, which may be in part due to topography (can't build as dense in the steep slope areas) and the historically polycentric nature of the metro (lots of small cities/mill towns were built out in the late 19th/early 20th century once they ran out of industrial land in Pittsburgh, which developed their own "suburbs" in turn). Due to being a shrinking MSA overall, real estate prices in lots of these suburbs are also dirt cheap.
Yet if you look at Pittsburgh, you see there are tons of intact areas within the city still, when compared to Detroit. Indeed, the historically blighted areas are limited to maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of the city tops, with most of the remainder pretty much intact. There are neighborhoods that remained middle (and even upper-middle) class and desirable through the 20th century, and there are other neighborhoods that went through a period of undesirability and later gentrified, retaining 80%-90% of their original housing stock.
The major difference between Pittsburgh and Detroit is simply Pittsburgh wasn't as heavily impacted by the Great Migration, with large-scale black migration ending decades earlier. Less neighborhoods were impacted by white flight, and less neighborhoods ended up blighted. To be clear, there are examples of blighted white urban neighborhoods - areas like
Spring Garden,
Esplen,
East Deutschtown, etc. - but these mostly tended to be areas which were cut off by highway construction or similar issues. There were plenty of working-class white neighborhoods which survived fine, like the South Side, Lawrenceville, Bloomfield, Polish Hill, etc. - and then gentrified from the 1990s onward. Populations in these neighborhoods fell dramatically due to shrinking household sizes (and there was some abandonment in isolated places) but it didn't get to the point of no return before cities became fashionable again.
In contrast, every single majority urban black neighborhood ended up impacted by abandonment and blight by the late 20th century (there are some black "suburbs in the city" which held up pretty well). Still, the dynamic of increased abandonment within areas with a growing black population still continues to this day in some areas of the West End and Southern Hilltop portions of the city.
Of course, with many dirt cheap suburbs, the black population in Pittsburgh is quickly suburbanizing, just like everywhere else in the Rust Belt. Pittsburgh lost 10% of its black population (which was basically the only thing which stopped growth last decade, since we shrunk by less than 1%) in a single decade, with the emptying out of historically black neighborhoods in the East End particularly notable (in some cases the decline was due to gentrification, in others due to continued blight/abandonment). But because the overall black population is relatively small this is spread lightly throughout the "suburban" portions of Allegheny County (though focused to the East) with it not looking like any new suburbs will demographically transition any time soon.
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