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.
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.
The author is presenting a comparison that doesn't exist. Detroit and Silicone Valley are not comparable. When I grew up in SF back in the 1950s, blacks were about 15 percent of the city. The blacks fled, and today they're less than 6 percent. They are largely confined to two areas of the city on the east industrial side, many in projects. That explains why their income is so low, and why much of the drug felonies and murderers are black; black on black crime. Those areas are becoming gentrified with incoming asians and latinos, and the black population continues to shrink. Other remaining blacks are retired middle class seniors who are relatively well to do.
SF is at the tip of a peninsula. The rest of the peninsula is largely devoid of blacks, except for East Palo Alto and that city is doing fairly well gaining commercial activity from proximity to Silicone Valley. There is no black problem as there is in Detroit.