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Conventional wisdom is that whites and Asians in the US insulate themselves from inner city blacks by pricing them out of homes. But in the process of researching where in the Midwest I want to move to, I've found that most Midwest metros have suburbs/exurbs in the eminently affordable $150-250k median home value range and yet remain 90+ percent white. Can anyone help me understand this?
For example, here's a racial dot map of St. Louis and its southern suburbs/exurbs, with some of the individual cities and their white % and median home value labeled. The same pattern exists for most other Midwest metros I've looked at, too. Certainly most metros have some suburbs that are very expensive. In the St. Louis example, that would be the western suburbs (you can tell because of the red Asian dots). But not all the suburbs are expensive like that.
So, why aren't African Americans moving to these cheap white suburbs to get away from the awful inner city black neighborhoods? It's not like these places are full of "white trash" - poverty rates are low and incomes are high compared to outside of metros. Certainly a good many inner city blacks really can't afford a $100k-150k home, but surely enough can that it'd drive these places well down from 90+ percent white?
And what about immigrants - why aren't there substantial numbers of immigrants who move to these places? High-SES Asians tend to move to richer suburbs because they can afford it, but surely many working class immigrants would appreciate being in a cheap white suburb with easy commuting to the city core?
A related question I have is why smaller-tier cities (say, in the 50k-100k population range) tend to be so much more diverse than metro suburbs. There are only 2 cities in the entire country that are >50k population and >90% white (Ankeny, IA and The Villages, FL), yet 90+ percent white suburbs of metros are common.
As one example among many, why is Columbus, IN (pop. 50k, 45 miles south of Indianapolis) 24% nonwhite despite median home values ($185k) that are higher than many of the 90+ percent white suburbs of Indianapolis (e.g., Franklin, Mooresville, Greenfield)? Certainly some black families moved there generations ago and the current inhabitants want to remain near family. But that can't be the whole explanation, because many of these places are substantially foreign-born (e.g., Columbus IN is 15% foreign-born). Surely a newcomer's job prospects are better in a cheaper commutable suburb of Indianapolis than in a more expensive isolated small city like Columbus.
Demographic data for this post come from the Census's 2019 American Community Survey 5-year estimates. Housing values are from policymap.com, which uses the 2021 ACS 5-year estimate. Racial dot map is from Dave's Redistricting App.
This is from my own majority-minority town, and its majority-white suburbs, my general impression.
Short answer? They are, but the minute they hit critical mass, and it's a relatively low percentage of the population, the pattern begins anew.
I'll tell a short story that is a few different stories sort of rolled into one. Single mother of two moves out of the east side (black ghetto) to the township (working class whites) so that her boys won't fall in with the "bad crowd" at the 95% black city schools. Now her boys are the "bad crowd", years behind in their schooling, with connections and culture formed by the 'hood (which is why their mom is trying to get them out). Then the mother's sister gets out of jail and moves in with her, bringing along her boyfriend (gang member) and his friends (ditto). Now there's six cars parked on the lawn of a single-family home every day, random gang members wandering the neighborhood, and houses start getting broken into. The boys are getting into fights at school. The old couple whose house was broken into moves out. The next year, two white families leave after their kids get mugged for their phones by "youths". Single mother's best friend moves into one of the empty houses with her boyfriend and six children. The block is now 20% black by house count, but higher than that by population. All the houses are now getting broken into, sheds, garages etc. Bars are appearing on windows. Fences go up. Lawns are less cared for. Then someone who doesn't live there gets shot on the block. Everyone non-black with kids leaves. Housing prices plummet, making it affordable to more people from the east side, who follow on to get into the better neighborhood that isn't there anymore, and the better schools that also are dying fast. In a decade, there's one or two of the original inhabitants of the block left, people too poor or old to move. Surrounding neighborhoods avoid it and start looking for other housing options, further away from the dysfunction. This drives down house prices, increasing the attractiveness to those fleeing bad neighborhoods in the city.
In twenty years, the ghetto moves six miles. Eventually, if you get far enough from the city, you get to neighborhoods rural, pricey or hispanic enough to resist this somewhat, and a sort of stasis sets in. The expanding "donut" of poor, crime-ridden, primarily minority neighborhoods eventually leaves a hollowed-out urban core which in some cases is re-developed (gentrification). This gives us patterns like Detroit where you drive from the nice neighborhoods through the war zones to get to the clean, hipster downtown section.
Getting strong “left behind in Rosedale” vibes from this comment
I can tell the story from the mother's point of view as well.
She's a worker, been one her whole life, but opportunity is slim when you grow up poor in the rust belt. She got pregnant in high school like half her cohort, it being the fastest way to a Section 8, but she didn't need it because her parent's house was owned outright. When they died young, she could afford to raise her now two kids with her high school sweetheart on their dual meager incomes. Just barely. The city property taxes were last assessed in the mid-80s, when Saginaw was still rich and prosperous. Now the homes in that neighborhood go for $20k, and there's 8k of property taxes a year. And for that princely sum, they don't get a lot in teh way of city services, Saginaw being a perennial top-5 Most Violent Midsized Cities in the country, until the population drain got so bad we don't even qualify as mid-sized anymore. A lot of those people went out to the townships.
So money troubles, a young marriage and a life of poverty amid violence resulted in divorce, to the surprise of no one. Virtually everyone she knows has been divorced, has kids with different fathers etc. She's the 1%. Her kids are both from the same father, who married her (for a while), and pays his child support. In the 'Nasty, that's called winning at life. But the boys are getting older and the father gets remarried and isn't around much. They're looking for belonging and mentorship, father figures. And all around them is nothing but deadbeats, wanna-be rappers, small time criminals, con men, the perennially partially in college to milk the student funds. Despite the statistics, most of the city is pretty safe, but not where she lives. So she goes out to the county, finds a way to scrape together the rent, sells her house cheap, and risks it all to get her boys a shot at a decent trade job someday. And then her sister turns up, always the fuckup, needing a place to crash, just for a day or two.
But two days turned into two weeks, and while she's at work paying the rent, her sister is hosting hangout sessions for her crackhead boyfriend and his shitstain friends. She tries to put her foot down, but they're the only child care she has. And they won't go without a fight, and that would mean calling the cops on her own sister, maybe having a violent confrontation in her own home with her kids present. And before she can get it figured out, one of those shitstain friends breaks into some old ladies' garage and steals a case of beer out of the refrigerator. Not exactly the crime of the century, but they're old, probably a bit racist already and within six months of her moving in, they get robbed. That's not going to improve community or race relations. The parents talk, the kids talk, everyone knows basically what happened, even if where they put the blame is different.
The white kids wait until school to run their mouths directly at the boys, the vague racial feeling being that black kids are tougher, meaner. Best to talk shit in front of the teachers to avoid an ass-kicking, but it didn't work. Now her boys are suspended for fighting, everyone hates them, and a house just opened up. Those cranky old victims of the Great Beer Heist went to Florida for good. She calls her best friend, the only other one from her neighborhood with her shit together, tells her to put in an offer on the house. With some support in the neighborhood, maybe things will work out after all. The friend's husband was in the military, which might be enough to put some pressure on her sister and boyfriend. And they can swap child care.
Yadda yadda yadda, the military husband has a drinking problem, and after several confrontations with the boyfriend and his "posse", two of them take potshots at him in the street, he gives chase and shoots one of them. A few times, including after he was already down. So now he's doing a nickel for manslaughter (plead out), the two friends are both single mothers, the older people in the neighborhood start moving out when they retire, and their kids sure as hell don't want to live in this area. The neighborhood is friendlier now, more interconnected and dramatic, but also undeniably dirtier, poorer and more violent.
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Like I said, it's a composite story. Not all of that happened in one neighborhood or to one person. It's just the pattern over time, all perfectly understandable and done with the best intentions the people involved can manage.
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I'll start with the less loaded question, immigrants are attracted to areas with a lot of economic growth because they want to land their dream job. In the midwest there's no construction boom for working class immigrants to work in. There's no flood of nouveau rich craving exotic restaurants. There are no high paying engineering jobs to attract high skill immigrants.
Basically to an immigrant the midwest is bad weather, a foreign language, and limited job prospects. There are plenty of other cities on earth.
Now for the more controversial section.
"Nonwhite" isn't the relevant metric. Columbus, IN is only 2.1% black. 12.5% asian in 2020. 5.6% asian in 2010. Asians don't drive down housing prices in general and their increasing numbers imply that there are white collar jobs hiring in the area.
Poor blacks don't cease to be poor by moving out to the exurbs. They just get to be poor with long commutes.
Those inner city neighborhoods have a lot going for them. Plenty of infrastructure. Many social services. Close to jobs. They're highly desirable apart from the demographics.
Partly. Nonblacks have to choose between pricing them out or moving farther away.
Gentrification involves various programs to move the poor blacks out of inner cities to blue collar suburbs. Liberal whites move in to the newly vacant areas. Blue collar suburbs get stuck with crime and race riots. The residents then flee to more distant exurbs.
A good example is Ferguson, MI. 70% white in 1990, 70% black now. There were serious riots in 2014.
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One thing is that most people have at least some preference to be around people demographically similar to themselves, which can partly compensate for other factors.
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My experience in the suburbs where I grew up is having lots of upper-middle class minorities and immigrants interspersed with the white people. This was in the South rather than the Midwest, but I don't see why that would make a difference.
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Cheap is relative. In the really bad neighborhoods of St. Louis you're looking at much less than that for a house, maybe $30k-$100k.
Other reasons I can think of:
Some people don't mind it as much if they're from the neighborhood. I worked with a girl who grew up in the hood and still lived and there and she said that people have each others backs. You might get shot but it's going to be somebody from another street, not your street. That doesn't sound very comforting to me but I guess it's different if you grew up that way.
A lot of these people are on Section 8, which not all landlords accept and can't be used to buy a house. Of the ones who aren't on section 8 directly a lot live with a girlfriend/mom/grandma who is so they aren't mobile.
Black people are only 13% of the population so there can't be many of them everywhere.
Columbus is a college town, it's not going to be comparable to other small towns or to a big city like Indianapolis. There are more Asians than blacks there which is definitely not true of St. Louis.
Well, I'm also wondering why immigrants don't seem to go to these suburbs. I imagine a hard-working Hispanic immigrant working a decent trade could afford these places, not to mention skilled immigrants. Yet they don't seem to want to move there...
Maybe you're thinking of Bloomington, but Columbus is not a college town. Only 3% of its population is enrolled in undergraduate studies, which is pretty close to the base rate for everywhere. By comparison, true college towns like Bloomington are 30+ percent enrolled in undergraduate studies.
Suburbs in places that get lots of immigrants(eg, Texas) have lots of immigrants. Suburbs in places that get few immigrants(eg, Wisconsin) have no immigrants.
There’s certainly heavily Hispanic neighborhoods with a similar income level to nearby white neighborhoods, but that’s because of wanting to have the same first language as the neighbors.
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Yeah, I derped and mixed it up with Bloomington
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Perhaps only a few inner city neighborhoods are that bad. That is usually the case
If those areas are cheap, there is probably something wrong with them. Perhaps there are few jobs, or poor transportation options to where the jobs are.
Perhaps your premise is wrong. According to this, there are 1364 homes for sale in areas of St Louis where the current average asking price is under $250K. Of those, 800 are in St Claire County, IL, which is 59.6% White and 29.7% black. Of the places listed on your map that are not in that realtor list, on realtor.com there are 28 current home listings for High Ridge, 10 in Murphy, 22 in Valley Park, 80 in Oakville but only 20 under 250K.
Note also that your map says that the median home value in Arnold is 168K, while the realtor link above says the average asking price is 401K. Some of that might be a difference between mean and median, but perhaps not all of it.
Some are certainly worse than others, but I wager the majority are going to be substantially worse than the sort of suburbs I mentioned, on almost any metric that's universally cared about (e.g., crime, income, jobs, stable families, etc.), and casually browsing ACS data on policymap.com will certainly back that up.
It's possible I'm missing something (and it's one of the reasons I'm here asking), but I haven't been able to find it despite a wealth of ACS data to go off of. And given how social ills tend to correlate with each other, I would expect it to be noticeable somewhere.
A few things:
ACS data on median home values lags present data. The most recently published ACS data is an average of 2016-2021. But the home value increases since then apply across cities, not just to these suburbs. So to the extent these white suburbs have gotten more expensive, so has everywhere else. And even if that wasn't the case (and Zillow's graphs of home values over time indicates it is), it doesn't explain why so few non-whites moved to these cities before the most recent ACS data.
Your source includes only current listings, which may not be representative and/or have small sample sizes.
Zillow data is pretty consistent with ACS data.
I'm not sure where you're from, but I live in Pittsburgh and a lot of areas in the Rust Belt just have an ineffable shittiness about them that isn't necessarily reflected by statistics, other than, of course, property values. A lot of these are technically suburbs but were built out prewar due to some local industry that isn't there anymore and had little to offer during postwar suburbanization, with more attractive alternatives nearby. Now they just sort of exist, with no hope of gentrification or investment. Mediocre housing stock, lack of local amenities, and distance from major employment centers often aren't enough to make up for relative safety and low housing costs. These places are also filled with white trash, though that hasn't necessarily stopped black people from moving into other places with low housing costs. It's also worth noting that a lot of urban violence, isn't as widespread as it can seem by crude zip code maps. I can only speak for Pittsburgh, but the areas with the most random pedestrian violence tend to be the ones with the most pedestrians, not the ones that are the most violent. Downtown and the South Side (the biggest nightlife district) take the cake when it comes to crime stats, even though no one really thinks of them as high crime areas. That perception is changing somewhat as Downtown has a problem with homeless addicts and the South Side has had a few prominent incidents, but these were the highest crime areas by volume long before such perceptions existed, and they are both still high-value areas as far as housing is concerned. In the actual poor areas, most of the violence is relegated to bad housing projects or areas with high drug activity, and is usually limited to those in gangs. These places aren't great but grandma probably doesn't have much to worry about walking down the street in the daytime. Leaving a place like Homewood to move to a place like Whitaker is probably going to be a step down in quality of life for someone with connections to the former but not the latter.
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I'm sure they are, but your premise was not that they are worse, but rather that they are "awful." That's not the same thing!
Do you have data re jobs?
And, again, if prices are low in those places, that can only be because 1) supply is high; or 2) demand is low. Based on realtor.com listings, I don’t see much evidence of the former, though maybe there is evidence elsewhere. If the latter is true, then those places must be undesirable for some reason.
.>Zillow data is pretty consistent with ACS data
And yet the Zillow current listings are much higher. Is it possible that the Zillow average includes vacant lots and the like?
All they need to be is worse to raise the question of why people don't move out of them when there are affordable alternatives.
These suburbs are within commute distance of major metros. I think it's safe to say there are jobs galore, and I won't believe you if you claim to doubt it.
I agree! That's why I'm asking. But the consistency of this phenomenon across metros seems to demand an explanation beyond some idiosyncrasy of one place.
You're right, and that is curious. While I would expect listings to be a bit more valuable than the median home value, simply because nicer ones are more likely to be for sale, the disparity here is too great to be comfortable with that explanation. But while I don't know enough about that particular market to hazard any guesses, I will say that this is one thing that doesn't seem to generalize to other metros' white suburbs. A few more examples:
Greenfield, Indiana (20 miles east of Indianapolis, 96% white) has a Zillow median value of $244k, there are many homes listed for less than that.
Indianola, Iowa (20 miles south of Des Moines, 95% white) has a Zillow median value of $272k with many homes listed for less than that.
Pretty much all the suburbs of Cincinnati are ~95% white, and there are plenty of non-dilapidated homes for <$250k.
Who said anything about idiosyncrasies of one place? The access to jobs issue could easily be common to all.
Here is another problem: It looks like currently about 72% of whites are homeowners but only 43% of blacks are. The Greater St. Louis area is 77% white and 18% black. So, if my math is correct, one would expect a place that is almost all homeowners -- which I think describes the places highlighted on the map -- to be about 88% white. That is little different than several of the places onthe map, and for others, you are essentially asking, why are these places 95% white instead of 88%? A pretty small discrepancy, perhaps so small that it is not worth wondering about, and one which could easily be explained by the fact that most urban black people dont live in awful neighborhoods.
That doesn't really address the question, it just changes it to "why are whites more likely to be homeowners". It's not straightforwardly obvious to me why Hispanics and blacks would prefer to rent rather than own.
Yes, that is my point: The initial conundrum that you present does not seem to be a conundrum at all, at least based on the initial evidence you presented.
Who says that they prefer to rent? It is hardly surprising that Hispanics and blacks have lower rates of home ownership, given their lower income and lower median age. They would have lower rates of home ownership even if they were equally desirous of owning.
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I don't know that I've high quality evidence for this but my experience has been community and culture. My current community is >90% white. Those from non-white backgrounds tend to be recent immigrants from asia, the subcontinent and africa. Top decile domestic non-whites are absent.
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