The Truth About White Flight. Conventional history of the exodus out of cities ignores numerous complex and interrelated causes.

City Journal ^ | Autumn 2020 | William Voegeli

[karpov]

...

How differently would white flight have unfolded absent the crime wave that began in the 1960s? According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the national homicide rate doubled between 1960 and 1980, from 5.1 murders per 100,000 Americans to 10.2, its highest level. Chicago, always a rough city, already had a homicide rate of 10.5 per 100,000 residents in 1960, but it exploded to 28.7 in 1980 and 30.7 in 1990.

The riots of the 1960s saw lawlessness engulf entire neighborhoods. Chicago’s most serious disturbance was in April 1968, after Martin Luther King’s murder. Some of the looting and National Guard deployments were near South Shore, Rotella recounts, but most of the mayhem was on the West Side. By the riots’ conclusion, nine people were dead, more than 300 injured, more than 2,000 arrested, and 260 stores and businesses destroyed. In its aftermath, white flight from Chicago accelerated. The city, which had been 85.9 percent white in 1950 and 76.4 percent in 1960, saw that proportion fall to 65.6 percent in 1970 and 49.6 percent in 1980. (The Census Bureau didn’t begin to identify “non-Hispanic whites” as a separate category until 1980, when that group accounted for 43.2 percent of Chicago’s population.) In 1988, an official in the city’s planning department calculated that nearly 500,000 people, mostly whites, departed the city in the first half of the 1970s.

We know that the sharp drop in crime that began in the early 1990s coincided with gentrification, evidence that many whites prefer high- to low-density living—if cities are safe. Some of the gentrifiers are the children or grandchildren of people who, with varying degrees of reluctance, moved out of neighborhoods like South Shore.

[moovova]

“Crime. Period. It’s all about the crime.”

Exactly!

I could care less who’s living beside me as long as they keep their house up...and aren’t involved in criminal activity.

The first drive-by shooting...and I’m loading up the Uhaul.

[PerConPat]

While it's understandable for Michelle Obama to resent what she took to be whites stereotyping her family, this experience does not validate her own generalizations.

Ms. Robinson Obama's generalizations are the product of the policies put in place by Rats like her husband. The deterioration of her girlhood neighborhood was caused by socialist bull$hit programs created by vote buying charlatans like LBJ etc...Nothing she says is understandable.

[BobL]

“BTW: I enjoy reading your posts and agree with your positions, which at times aren’t popular on this forum.”

Thanks Babble! My going after Lin Wood didn’t play too well here, but I only did that after he told Republicans to boycott the Georgia Senate elections. As it is, it’s going to be a big effort for me and my wife to leave the country, and we’d rather have a couple of years to work on it (if we can win at least one of the Georgia Senate races), rather than a few months, when Biden packs the courts and simply rams through whatever he wants, starting with gun grabs.

Either way, I see the country as finished once the Supreme Court put the (credible) threat of a bunch of white Leftists rioting in our cities, over the perfectly legal case brought by Texas - meaning that the country either divides, or we have civil war - and I prefer to not be a part of either outcome, and getting out sooner than later gives people many more options (the people who held out in South Africa are now finding their farms are worthless and no one wants them). Bites.

[Clemenza]

Michael Jones is a pro-Iran fool who peddles the absurd “Catholic cleansing” theory that even a layman like myself can punch holes in. Read his more recent garbage and let me know your thoughts.