Posted on 02/17/2014 7:20:42 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Detroit isn’t a monster — it’s just ahead of the curve. Or it is a monster, in the classical sense of that word: a warning of things to come. We should all be paying attention, but those Americans who should be paying the closest attention are those who are unfortunately least inclined to do so: the happy inhabitants of the gilded communities of Northern California.
I have written a great deal about Detroit as the inevitable endgame of progressive politics and economics, and those who are disinclined to be persuaded by such analysis as I have to offer respond as with one voice: “San Francisco!” The case bears some examination.
Though its charms are wasted on me, San Francisco obviously is enormously appealing to a great many people, as is the Bay Area in its entirety. There are some rough spots, to be sure, but the great swath of territory that runs from San Francisco to San Jose before taking a U-turn up to Berkeley contains a great deal to recommend itself: untold high-tech wealth, a stimulating intellectual climate, world-class educational and cultural institutions, beautiful waterfront properties, and municipal infrastructure that is much better than the American average. As one of my progressive correspondents put it, the high price of San Francisco real estate should communicate to a market-oriented critic such as myself that the city is doing something right. And there is something to that, but there is an important limitation to that analysis. California is a great place to live if you are rich.
And California is not very rich.
The median income for a three-member household is only $67,401 in California. That is not a terrible figure, but it is a bit less than the considerably less glamorous Commonwealth of Pennsylvania ($68,848), only about 30 venti frappuccinos per year ahead of Nebraska ($67,235). That figure is considerably lower than in, say, Wyoming, where the median three-member household takes in nearly 10 percent more each year, and it is far, far behind Alaska, where the median three-member household could buy a new Ford every year and still have as much left over as its California counterparts.
Of course, California has some very poor spots, and your typical Silicon Valley grandee does not spend very much time so much as downwind of one of them. But there is trouble in the happy valley, too. San Jose boasts one of the nation’s highest median household incomes at $81,000 a year — pretty heavy money for a midpoint. But the median price of a single-family house in San Jose is $775,000, or just over nine and a half times the median income. By way of comparison, in Austin, San Jose’s high-tech Texas cousin, the ratio is only 4 to 1 — even as the Texas capital sees record housing prices. In San Francisco, the ratio is 10.2 to 1; in Houston, it’s only 4.3 to 1.
That means that the median family in San Jose could never responsibly purchase the median house in San Jose: Saving ten years’ pre-tax wages and betting it all on a single investment — in California real estate, no less — would be enormously risky. No responsible mortgage lender (if there is such a thing) would approve that loan.
Similar ratios have held up for a long time in New York City, which is arguably a special case. But even if it isn’t, there is an important difference: Expanding the calculation into the greater metropolitan region, New York City still does not look great, but it looks a lot better. Compare the San Jose metro with the Austin metro, and the comparison looks even worse for California than it does on a city-to-city basis. When housing prices are nine or ten times family incomes, there are basically two ways that distance can be crossed — and, high as incomes are in Northern California, do not bet on seeing them multiplied in short order.
But what happens between now and then?
Places like San Francisco and San Jose have become the economic and cultural equivalent of the Southern California phenomenon most loathed by good progressives everywhere: the gated community. The cities of Silicon Valley are not organized around golf courses, tennis courts, and clubhouses on the traditional gated-community model, but that is merely a difference in taste and recreational interest. The barriers between them and the water-starved California inland — or the poor sections of Oakland — are not physical, but they are nonetheless ruthlessly patrolled, a fact not lost on Silicon Valley’s less-well-off, who recently have taken to breaking the windows of the hated “Google buses,” the private coaches that spare California’s tech royalty the indignity of a ride on the BART. The vandals’ manifesto reads: “You are not innocent victims. You live your comfortable lives surrounded by poverty, homelessness and death, seemingly oblivious to everything around you, lost in the big bucks and success.”
San Francisco, the world capital of progressive piety, has a population that is barely 6 percent black, but its population of persons arrested for drug felonies is 60 percent black. More than 40 percent of those arrested for homicide are black. In this bastion of well-heeled progressive governance, about half of the black households make less than $25,000 a year. And this isn’t in Laramie, Wyo., where you can rent a three-bedroom home for less than $800 a month. This is less than 25 grand a year in one of the most expensive places in the country.
In 1950, nobody thought Detroit — by many measures then the world’s most prosperous city — would end up a half-abandoned, bankrupt, violent basket case. Nobody thought that U.S. automakers would be so inept as to fail to keep up with Japanese and European competitors, that their unions would be so corrupt and rapacious, or that the city of Detroit would slide into Third World standards of municipal governance. But bear this in mind: The automakers had large, expensive factories in Detroit. Their capital was physical. Sure, Google and Apple have real estate and physical infrastructure in California, but high-tech firms are much less tied to the land than were their industrial-age competitors. California’s cities are falling to bankruptcy and fiscal crisis like water dripping in a sink. Meanwhile, the local radicals, driven by envy and ideology, have taken to accosting Silicon Valley engineers at their homes. The companies are responding with increased reliance upon private security forces. But there are other possible responses, such as relocating to where they are more welcome.
Is San Francisco the progressives’ best counterexample to the devastation in Detroit? Ask again in 20 years.
— Kevin D. Williamson is a roving correspondent for National Review.
The article doesn’t mention the one thing that really destroyed Detroit. I’m guessing that you know what that is.
Envy is an ugly thing. Funny that the big money liberals are being attacked by the gimme free stuff liberals. I guess that’s what happens when you nurture a culture that most sane people escape from as soon as possible. I just hope they don’t relocate to red states and turn them into a toilet with their stupid ideas
More than anything else, the race riots of 1943 and 1967 killed Detroit. After 1967, the whites simply left in droves, and the city died.
If Silicon Valley is going to go the way of Detroit, it will be the assaults on the personal safety of the Golden Programers that will kill it.
Get out the double barrel and fire a couple of blasts over their heads!
keynesians are going to be surprised at how bad shape many cities are in once they can no longer be propped up on promises. Even a few FReepers buy into the fantasy that all is well as long as there are still taxpayers to keep paying.
Detroit once had taxpayers too.
OK, I’ll mention it in comment 4.
Yet the midwest is trending red.
White flight is a liberal cop out phrase.
The simple fact is that it was business that fled Detroit and it didn’t happen all at once. I’ve got a neighbor who was a black kid in Detroit when his father’s bakery was firebombed during the rioting. They were lucky because his father had enough money to move to Jackson and find decent factory work.
Others weren’t as lucky, they lost their businesses yet had no money to get out. The third group were those who were wisely insured and managed to rebuild but they were living on borrowed time because along came Chairman Young who inflicted damage on an unprecedented scale in the form of redistributionist and confiscatory taxes and regulations. He was also the one who started using public sector unions as enforcers.
True, but then the conservatives were the first wave, eventually the limousine liberals will be on the last wave out of town. That’s who you fear.
One could argue that rich liberals support progressive policies out of fear, they know what is being pointed out in this article is true and are trying to placate the masses by giving them just enough to keep them from rioting. Knowing that it will be their heads the roll first.
They can never give enough. They would have to completely begger themselves before the rioters would be satisfied. Homeless, without a job, that would be all they could do to stop what they’ve set in motion.
I agree, they don’t seem to know that the takers will never be appeased. They will simply keep raising the bar higher and higher for what is minimally acceptable welfare until the rich can give no more, then they will riot and take everything else.
They unleashed the mob on us all when they gave the vote to everyone.
Only a republic could have lasted (with limited voting rights), Democracy will always fail.
Microsoft buses in Seattle have become objects of contempt. I wonder if that’s where they got the idea?
I had heard that Detroit hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1957. And a lot of the Democrats have been unusually corrupt and incompetent, I think. Tales of the Kilpatrick administration alone are quite shocking.
I’m a big believer in the existence of ‘white flight’.
For 17 years, I have worked in Land Development, in a community with anemic 1.5% annual growth. So where are all the new homebuyers coming from? The answer is simple - anyone who can get out of the city will do just that...and for whatever reason, the majority of those that can leave are white.
Did the businesses leave first? In our line of work, the model is businesses follow ‘rooftops’...meaning businesses go wherever the newer houses go, not the other way around.
I’m fascinated with ‘white flight’ trends...keeping in mind that I don’t blame white people like myself for ‘fleeing’ (which is exactly what I have done). It just amazes me how efficiently urban decay destroys places...and the differences between adjacent cities can be, well, black and white.
As an example, I am originally from the Birmingham area - the city of Birmingham is now only 21% white, while the city of Hoover, which is immediately adjacent to it (i.e. they share a border) is 73% white. Something has caused this shift in population, and its interesting to try and find out why. BTW, the county that includes Birmingham has declared bankruptcy...hello next Detroit.
Anyway, I think ‘white flight’ is real. I just don’t blame whites for fleeing. Its exactly what I have done. I live near Topeka, KS, the home of the famous ‘Brown vs Board of Education’ desegregation case - and my kids go to a school that is around 98% white. So much for desegregation.
White flight is a fact. The liberals use it as a cop out phrase, but they caused it. And to some extent we are in a “chicken and egg” argument here.
Yes, Coleman Young’s socialist policies drove businesses out of Detroit, but they were by and large white businesses. Therefore, white flight. He gained power because a significant number of black voters put him there. The significant number of black voters had been growing during the 1950s and 1960s, but reached a critical mass after the riots of 1967.
So I argue that Young didn’t cause white flight, he was it’s beneficiary and his policies that did not suppress crime and saw deteriorating schools only hastened an already ongoing process. Where the liberals have their say is the allegation that white flight is caused by blacks in their neighborhoods, as an indictment of white racism. That is the liberal cop out. White flight is, in reality, caused by two things: High crime and poor schools. People who want to work for a better life for themselves and their kids will not stay in a community where there is high crime and the schools are bad. That applies to both black and white people, just like your neighbor’s bakery. Lots of blacks live just fine in the suburbs, and they are here for the same reasons white people are.
So I will concede this point that it should not be called “white flight,” and won’t use the phrase any more. It should be called “affluent flight” or “productive flight.” People are free to draw whatever conclusions they wish from the demographics of the phenomenon.
San Francisco is a fortress city. Parts of it are beautiful, although almost no one can afford to live in those parts. But every time I go there I am staggered by the number of people living in sleeping bags on the street - one small block can easily have 15-20. New York and LA are like that, although maybe slightly less so. Wherever the left rules, opportunity for those most in need of it dies, and the much lamented “inequality” becomes most manifest.
You say “White flight is a fact.” And then in the same post you say “... it should not be called ‘white flight,’ and won’t use the phrase any more.”
That’s exactly what Political Correctness is, the abandoning of a factual term of speech because you’ve, supposedly, upset someone else. Of course, because you’re terminology is, indeed, factual, the persons upset always have an ulterior motive for getting you to abandon the factual term.
Take “illegal aliens.” It’s a factual statement but rubs liberals (and illegals) the wrong way, so we’re all supposed to say “undocumented workers” now, as in “well, they work; they just haven’t got their documents...yet.” Both are factual, but one emphasizes illegality; the other emphasizes work.
Granted, the person using the terms “white flight” or “illegal alien” might have an agenda, but more likely they are stating a fact as fact, and others with an agenda find that fact inconvenient, or outright damaging to their cause and so bring the “political correctness” cudgel to bear.
I urge you to reconsider your decision. If the flight is white, it is indeed “white flight.” Why sugarcoat it? More important, why give the PC police another victory?
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