There's something sad about it, especially when there's so much talk of "diversity" in society today. There's a lot that's dishonest in that talk -- whether or not the deception is ill-meant. A diverse society usually has mechanisms at work underneath to make people more alike and bring them together. So yesterday's "diverse" institutions have to be kept alive with efforts that a down-sizing economy doesn't always want to make. Desires for success and assimilation and for stability and tradition come into conflict and, inevitably, something has to give way. So unless you can make a compelling case for separate Polish and Irish, German and Italian groups, they tend to get folded together into larger units.
But some people are quite angry about the closing of ethnic parishes, and the larger question of the fate of older ethnic communities. E. Michael Jones, originally from Philadelphia, has written about the effects of "urban renewal" on older Catholic ethnic communities in cities like Philadelphia and Boston. He is very angry and very much a partisan of old school Catholicism, and his book has gotten mixed reviews. Jones tends more to look for villains than for causes and for conspiracies than for solutions, and his paleocon view looks less impressive as time goes on, but his stuff may be worth a look, if a very skeptical one.
I have a MAJOR problem with Jones's work. I could cite study after study to refute his contentions, but the most concrete example is my own family.
My dad essentially grew up in a "Polish Village" in Newark, New Jersey. Everyone knew each other, everyone went to St. Casimir's and everyone was suspicious of outsiders. It was a self-contained community that never experienced a large influx of blacks, unlike the rest of Newark. There were never any large scale "urban renewal" projects in the nabe either. Nevertheless, my dad always told me that there was a consensus among him and his friends that they would NOT live in Newark when they grew up and they would NOT have the same dead end blue collar jobs as their parents. It was upward mobility, more so than "urban renewal" or "white flight" that caused the problems that Jones likes to discuss.
White flight typically occurred in areas where people were already leaving. The initial flight to the suburbs of the upwardly mobile after WWII caused many urban communities to "mature" and property values to decline. Since the younger generation of "white ethnics" had no desire to remain in their communities, the only strong demand for housing in such neighborhoods was from blacks and Latinos. This is what has happened in New York and much of the urban northeast in general.
Living in Philadelphia, I can say that Jones is absolutely on the mark as far as what happened here to make a 80% white Republican dominated city a 55% minority Democrat dominated city.
The Democrat City governments elected since the 1960's have purposefully attacked white ethnic neighborhoods with a variety of programs to drive out the inhabitants.
Most recently, under Rendell and Clinton starting in 1993-4, a full frontal attack was made on Overbrook Park, Oxford Circle, Juniata Park, Lower Mayfair, Northwood, and Crescentville, with the city encouraging Section 8 criminals and other assorted lowlifes to move in and purposefully working to undermine hiterto stable ethnic neighborhoods (mostly Republican neighborhoods too - surprise, surprise). Tactics like withdrawing Police Officers from precincts in these neighborhoods, encouraging no down payment/no closing cost realtors to attack the blocks, etc., etc.
Many people around here are very bitter about how this has all played out.