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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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