11 THE CRISIS OF THE URBAN MIDDLE NEIGHBORHOOD

The Rise and Fall of Middle Neighborhoods

The typical urban middle neighborhood as it emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, outside of a cluster of cities in the Northeast, was a neighborhood of single-family homes.² While American cities of that vintage had a central core made up of their downtowns, their major universities and medical centers, and a handful of immediately proximate residential areas, that central core typically covered 5 percent or less of its land area. The rest was made up of single-family residential neighborhoods dotted with the factories, rail yards, and similar features that sustained the cities’ historic industrial economy. Even today, except for publicly subsidized lower-income rental housing projects, large apartment buildings outside the central core are rare.

The image of the early twentieth-century urban neighborhood as a tenement neighborhood is wildly misleading and reflects the extent to which images of New York City—truly only Manhattan—dominate our perceptions of that era. Even after decades of attrition, today over 90 percent of all the residential structures in Baltimore and Philadelphia and over 80 percent in Cleveland are single-family homes. In Baltimore and Philadelphia, these houses are usually brick row houses, while in midwestern cities they are more often detached houses, occasionally brick but usually wood frame.

Either way, these neighborhoods were and still are in ecological terms monocultures of single-family homes, like fields in which only a single crop is planted. This can vividly be seen in figure 11.1, an aerial view of part of Cleveland’s West Side. Block after block of houses were dotted with scattered convenience stores and crossed at intervals by wider streets along which the neighborhood’s main commercial activities were concentrated. As middle neighborhoods were re-created in the suburbs during the years following World War II, they followed a similar model, fashioning a lower-density version of the urban neighborhood based on the automobile rather than the pedestrian.

The people who lived in these houses were of varying economic levels and cultural backgrounds, but in an era when marriage and child-rearing were all but universal norms, almost all were couples who married early and would spend most of their lives together raising children. The physical form of these neighborhoods reflected their social role. Families had the privacy of a separate home and a small backyard but at the same time were close enough to one another to encourage walkability and neighborliness. The commercial streets with their grocers, butchers, bakers, and taverns were rarely more than a short walk away, a necessity in the preautomobile era. Children walked to the neighborhood public school or the parochial school attached to the neighborhood parish church. Some neighborhoods clustered around factories, where most of the neighborhood’s men worked. In other neighborhoods, jobs were only a streetcar ride away.

The urban middle neighborhood’s heyday was from the 1920s through the 1960s, driven by the increasing acculturation and prosperity of the nation’s immigrants as they moved out of their enclaves, as we described in chapter 3, and by the economic mobility made possible by the unionization of industrial work. It was an overwhelmingly white phenomenon. While many Black breadwinners also saw their wages grow, racial discrimination gave them few options to move into the new neighborhoods being built around them. By the 1950s, when middle neighborhoods were at their height and unbeknownst to most residents teetering on the edge of traumatic change, most families in American cities were middle income in the sense of having a family income fairly close to the citywide median. In 1970, well after many neighborhoods had begun to decline, nearly two-thirds of the census tracts in St. Louis and over half in Baltimore were middle-income tracts.³

There were many gradations among middle neighborhoods. Those built around factories tended to be modest working-class neighborhoods, with smaller and plainer houses. Others, where white-collar wage earners took streetcars to downtown jobs, often had larger houses, often with more decorated doorways or cornices. But blue- and white-collar families lived side by side in most neighborhoods and shared similar lifestyles. They shopped in the same stores, attended the same churches, sent their children to the same schools, and shared largely common values and aspirations.

Although rooted in a substratum of racial discrimination and grounded in seeming moral certainties that are widely questioned today, the urban middle neighborhoods of the 1950s can nonetheless be seen as good neighborhoods. These neighborhoods worked well for the people who lived in them, fostering both strong and weak ties. As Ray Suarez writes about the suburbanites who left them behind in his elegiac The Old Neighborhood, “people talk about the closeness, the intimacy of the old neighborhood.… We knew each other then.”⁴ We do not want to paint them in too rose-colored hues. They could be stifling and intolerant, and by the end of World War II, as we’ve mentioned, they were often shabby and crowded. But no neighborhood is idyllic, and for the most part they worked well.

Again, these were, with scattered exceptions, white neighborhoods. The majority of Black families in the 1950s, whatever their economic means, were still effectively confined by racial discrimination to Black ghetto neighborhoods. Although many of these neighborhoods had many of the features of good neighborhoods, with vital shopping districts and strong networks of social clubs and community organizations, they shared appalling housing conditions, as Thomas Sugrue writes about Detroit. “Blacks were entrapped in the city’s worst housing stock, half of it substandard, most of it overcrowded. They lived in overwhelmingly Black neighborhoods, a reflection of the almost total segregation of the city’s housing market. Detroit’s Black population had doubled between 1940 and 1950, but the pool of available housing had grown painfully slowly.”⁵ With almost all housing owned by absentee landlords, the Black ghetto was a reservoir of pent-up demand for better housing and the opportunity to become a homeowner.

Although the first wave of mass suburbanization began in the 1950s, the greatest changes took place in the 1960s. The demographic changes that we described in chapter 7 were beginning to undercut the traditional family patterns that were in many respects the raison d’être of middle neighborhoods at the same time that millions of white families were abandoning the cities for the lure of the suburbs. During that decade, the white populations of cities plummeted. And between 1960 and 1980, as the baby boom shifted to the so-called baby bust, the number of child-rearing married couples in cities fell rapidly.

White flight is often mistakenly used as a synonym for neighborhood decline; indeed, some see the history of urban neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s as a simple racialized story of invasion and succession: “Blacks moved in, whites moved out, and the neighborhood fell apart.” As we discussed briefly in chapter 4, the actual story is more complicated. True, vast numbers of whites left, and some neighborhoods did fall apart. But many neighborhoods did not fall apart. And in many cases when they did, it often had less to do with racial change per se than with parallel economic changes and predatory real estate practices.

While overcrowding, defined as more than one person per room, was widespread in America’s older cities immediately after World War II, most older cities soon transitioned from a painful housing shortage to an equally problematic housing surplus. Part of this was due to large-scale construction of new housing—mostly single-family homes and garden apartments—in central cities. From 1950 to 1960, New York City added over 350,000 units and Chicago over 120,000. In one decade, Milwaukee increased its housing inventory by nearly 25 percent. As a housing shortage changed to a housing surplus, the threat to middle neighborhoods shifted from overcrowding and congestion to vacancy and abandonment. The vacancy rate in the ten largest cities increased from 1.8 percent in 1950 to 6.8 percent in 1980. It was during those years that cities first saw houses being abandoned en masse, and large stretches of Northside St. Louis and Detroit’s East Side begin to turn into the derelict near-prairies that still exist today.

Another important part of this story, however, is rarely told. Middle neighborhoods continued to exist, although diminished in number and extent. In a few cases they remained largely white, frequently ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods such as The Hill, the St. Louis Italian neighborhood that was the birthplace of iconic mid-twentieth-century baseball star Yogi Berra. Often, however, they went through racial transformation but experienced far less social or economic change as working- and middle-class African American families took advantage of the space left by white flight to leave their overcrowded and substandard ghettos and move into neighborhoods from which they had previously been excluded. In a little-recognized process largely obscured by dominant narratives about neighborhood decline and suburbanization, many formerly white middle-class neighborhoods in America’s older cities that went through racial transition in the 1970s became and remained for decades afterward good Black middle-class neighborhoods, as we described in chapter 8. Many of those neighborhoods, however, are under threat today.

Middle neighborhoods, white, Black, Latinx or mixed, still accommodate 25–40 percent of the population of most older cities and arguably a larger share of many regions’ inner-ring suburbs. As such, if only by the significance of their numbers, their future matters greatly to the future of the American neighborhood. There are, however, strong reasons that middle neighborhoods matter over and above the significance of their numbers.

Middle Neighborhoods as Spaces of Economic, Racial, and Ethnic Diversity

Twenty-first-century American cities are often described as a “tale of two cities,” reflecting a well-justified concern over their economic and racial polarization. Yet, in many respects they may be more aptly seen as a “tale of three cities,” with middle neighborhoods representing a third, often overlooked, intermediate environment that sustains much of what is left of their historic economic diversity. Middle neighborhoods fall between the poles of wealth or gentrification and poverty or disinvestment. They remain rooted in the single-family home and the school and still house working- and middle-class families.

Middle neighborhoods tend to contain a more diverse economic mix than wealthy and poor neighborhoods, both of which are increasingly economically and demographically homogenous. As table 11.1 shows, in the seventy-one tracts with tract median incomes in 2016 between $35,000 and $55,000 in Baltimore, at most 20 percent of the households living in those tracts actually have incomes in that range; the incomes of the people who live in these tracts are evenly distributed across the entire range from under $15,000 to over $100,000. These tracts, taken as a group, have retained the mixed-income character of the traditional urban neighborhood, itself an important value. The social benefits of mixed-income communities, although hard to quantify, are real and significant.

From a racial standpoint, the picture is more complex. Most middle neighborhoods tend to be predominantly white, predominantly Black, or, in cities such as Chicago with large Latinx populations, predominantly Latinx. At the same time, more are racially diverse than either poor or wealthy neighborhoods. One-third of middle neighborhoods in both Baltimore and Philadelphia have Black population shares between 20 percent and 70 percent.

Middle neighborhoods represent a reservoir of economic and racial diversity in cities that are still racially segregated and becoming increasingly economically polarized. Middle neighborhoods are more likely to preserve the weak bridging social ties we discussed earlier as characteristic of good neighborhoods, enabling their residents to share public spaces with people who are different from them. People from different backgrounds and different economic levels may not become friends but can learn to get along with one another, cutting across the tribal boundaries that characterize so much of American life today.

The Forces Threatening Middle Neighborhoods

Both the number and stability of middle neighborhoods, particularly in central cities, have been undermined by many of the large societal and economic forces discussed in chapter 7 as well as forces specific to their physical and locational characteristics.

Middle neighborhoods have been hardest hit of all neighborhoods by the growth of income inequality and the hollowing of the middle class, the declining number of middle-income families, and the growth in economic sorting that has led to increasing numbers of rich and poor urban and suburban neighborhoods. Since many middle neighborhoods were sustained by the growth of the unionized industrial workforce, they have been further undermined by the decline of manufacturing, particularly in the older cities of the Midwest and Northeast, and the plunge in union membership, both of which began in the 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s. Having been created as places where families reared children, their market has been further depleted by demographic shifts that have led to fewer child-rearing families and more single individuals and nonfamily households. Those shifts have only been offset to a limited degree by immigration, which has replenished the demand pool for some but relatively few middle neighborhoods.

Those forces would have been enough to threaten the vitality of middle neighborhoods without any contributing local factors. The effect of the national forces, however, has been reinforced by distinctive local forces disproportionately affecting these neighborhoods as well as by public policies, often seemingly neutral in intent but malign in effect.

The Disproportionate Decline of African American Middle Neighborhoods

In chapter 8 we discussed the Detroit neighborhood of Crary–St. Mary’s, which went through racial transition in the 1970s and became a strong African American neighborhood. It was still a stable middle-class neighborhood in 2000. The median household income in 2000 was $38,325 (roughly $60,000 in 2021 dollars), 30 percent above the citywide median and close to the countywide median. Vacant homes were few, the poverty rate was low, the homeownership rate was high, and the share of households that were married couples with children was only slightly below the national level of 24 percent.

By 2010 conditions had changed dramatically, a change that has continued particularly with respect to the increase in vacancies and the decline in homeownership (table 11.2). By 2017, the area’s median household income had dropped to $31,805, a 44 percent decline in real income adjusted for inflation. In only a few years, Crary–St. Mary’s had changed from being a stable middle-class neighborhood to becoming a more thinly populated area struggling with high vacancies and concentrated poverty (figure 11.2).

Trends are similar in Black middle neighborhoods in Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, and many other cities. Neighborhoods that had been relatively stable for decades and were still vital communities in 2000 had lost ground with respect to social, economic, and housing market indicators by 2018. Table 11.3 shows the aggregate change in key indicators for predominantly Black (80 percent or more Black) middle neighborhoods in six older American cities. While the conditions vary from city to city, with Baltimore’s Black middle neighborhoods faring considerably better than those of Detroit and Cleveland, all lost ground. This does not mean that every neighborhood lost ground; indeed, in each city a few remained stable, and a handful may have even revived or gentrified. But the great majority followed a downward trajectory, gentle in Baltimore and steepest in Detroit and Cleveland.

By contrast, predominantly white (under 30 percent Black) tracts in the same cities showed much more varied trajectories. While some declined, quite a few gentrified, and most stayed roughly the same. Figure 11.3 compares trajectories of Black and white middle neighborhoods in Baltimore. Nearly half of all white middle neighborhoods moved upward. These neighborhoods made up the great majority of that city’s gentrifying neighborhoods.

Table 11.4 shows aggregate change for predominantly white and predominantly Black middle census tracts from 2000 to 2018. Relatively few white middle neighborhoods, outside of Baltimore, actually gained ground, yet in every city, with respect to every indicator, white neighborhoods fared better, or at least less poorly, than Black neighborhoods in the same city.

There is a profound historical irony to this phenomenon. During the urban crisis years as cities generally were on a sharp downward trajectory, Black urban middle neighborhoods remained oases of relative stability. As the cities began to revive in the new millennium with waves of in-migration and investment, these same neighborhoods began to lose ground. While many neighborhoods were subject to stresses and strains well before 2000, more and more Black middle neighborhoods were overwhelmed by their problems after 2000, creating vicious cycles of decline. Understanding why this is happening is critically important to addressing the challenges to good urban neighborhoods as well as the role race plays in the making and unmaking of those neighborhoods.

All the larger economic and demographic changes described earlier disproportionately undermined Black middle neighborhoods. With Black workers often “last hired, first fired,” they have a weaker toehold on middle-class status. Often subject to overt or covert racial discrimination, they were more deeply affected by the regional economic decline and loss of industrial jobs that began in the 1970s and continued into the new millennium. Patterns of social stress and economic insecurity exacerbated by the invidious position of African Americans in the larger society and economy can destabilize Black middle neighborhoods in ways that do not affect their white counterparts.¹⁵

These neighborhoods gained little from the post-2000 urban revival. In city after city revival was concentrated in a few small areas, which rarely included any of the city’s Black middle neighborhoods. Relatively few of those neighborhoods’ residents benefited from the new jobs created in the downtowns or at the universities and medical centers, while they suffered disproportionately from the continuing erosion of manufacturing and other blue-collar jobs. By 2000, these neighborhoods were already highly vulnerable to internal and external pressures.

One of those pressures, which affected nearly all Black middle neighborhoods, was the often traumatic generational shift that became apparent around the new millennium. In 2000 homeowners in these neighborhoods were still often the founding generation, people who had moved there in the 1960s and 1970s as young families and formed the social and organizational core of these neighborhoods. By 2000, however, they were no longer young, and their children had largely grown and moved away. As was also true of their white counterparts in the postwar suburbs, they were beginning to age out and die or move away. The generational shift both increased the need for home buyer replacement and eroded neighborhood social capital, rendering it less capable of withstanding the shocks that came with the foreclosure crisis and the Great Recession.

Race, however, plays a much more explicit role in what came after. The first factor destabilizing the Black middle neighborhood was the rise of subprime lending at the end of the twentieth century and the resulting wave of foreclosures that followed. We discussed this traumatic episode in American economic history in chapter 5 but will focus here on its long-term effect on Black middle neighborhoods, which were ground zero for the wave of foreclosures that struck American neighborhoods.

These neighborhoods, which were already struggling with speculative pressures as well as the aging of their founding generation of home buyers, were ground zero for subprime lending. Not only did many new buyers in those neighborhoods have subprime or other toxic mortgages, but many existing homeowners refinanced their homes with equally toxic cash-out loans. Subsequent foreclosures, combined with the loss of jobs and income from the recession and increasingly stringent mortgage requirements imposed after the bursting of the bubble, all contributed to a collapse of the housing markets in Black middle neighborhoods. In Crary–St. Mary’s, where 80 percent of all the mortgages made in 2005 were subprime loans, the median home price dropped from $92,000 in 2006 to $13,000 in 2011, while the number of sales fell by one-third. In a telltale sign, the number of home purchase mortgages went from 118 in 2006 to zero in 2011, indicating that the great majority of the 2011 buyers were not families planning to move into these homes but rather investors or speculators looking to rent out the homes, make a quick killing for a few years, and move on.

Increasing crime and disorder, deteriorating public schools and public services, and indifferent bureaucracies all helped drive out Black middle-class households, while the affordability of many suburbs offered alternatives even for families of modest means. All of these factors were exacerbated by the targeting of subprime lending to Black as well as Latinx neighborhoods. Many homeowners lost their homes and were forced to move, while others, as foreclosures increasingly destabilized the neighborhoods and residents faced increasing disorder in their midst that they felt powerless to change, concluded that flight was the only rational response.¹⁶

This part of the story, if not as well known as it should be, has been well documented. What is less well known is what came afterward. Neighborhoods of all kinds took substantial hits during the foreclosure crisis and the Great Recession, including white middle neighborhoods in the same cities and new subdivisions in the Sunbelt. And yet, as the national economy slowly recovered and the national housing market revived, Black middle neighborhoods—with few exceptions—remained stuck. Figure 11.4 compares sales price trends for white and Black middle neighborhoods in Cleveland from 2000 to 2019. From 2000 to 2012, prices in the two clusters rose and fell in lockstep, rising until 2006 and falling from 2007 to 2012. From then on, however, their fortunes diverged. The white neighborhoods began to recover, and by 2019 sales prices were back to their 2000 level. Sales prices in the Black middle neighborhoods barely budged during the same period, remaining stubbornly stuck at little more than half their 2000 level. For those neighborhoods, the recession has never really ended.

This is the critical question: not why these neighborhoods declined but why they have not revived. To explain this, we must take a closer look at these neighborhoods’ housing markets. The story of Black middle neighborhood decline over the past decade is in large measure a story of housing markets and highlights the role of the market factors discussed in chapter 6 in sustaining or undermining good neighborhoods. Like most such stories, it has a racial dimension but is not just about race. It is about who is buying homes and, even more so, where they are buying them, which raises important questions about what people look for when they choose a neighborhood.

The decline of Black middle neighborhoods has been driven in part by the out-migration of middle-class families but more so because they are not being replaced by new middle-class homeowners. Too few people are buying homes in urban Black middle neighborhoods to replace the homeowners who leave. Although the share of Black home buyers nationally is smaller than it should be, this shortfall is not primarily a function of an overall shortage of Black home buyers.

Black home buying in the United States, after dropping sharply during the foreclosure crisis and the Great Recession, has rebounded strongly since then. Nationally, home purchase mortgages to Black home buyers, after hitting a low of 118,000 in 2011, rose to 284,000 by 2019.¹⁷ But far fewer of those Black home buyers are buying in traditionally Black urban neighborhoods. In 2005, 307 Black home buyers took out mortgages to buy homes in Cleveland’s Black middle neighborhoods. In 2018 the number was 73, less than a quarter as many, and over half of those 73 mortgages were in the Lee-Miles neighborhood, which may be Cleveland’s last remaining stable Black middle neighborhood. Compared to fifteen or twenty years ago, today’s Black home buyers in Cleveland and elsewhere are far more likely to buy in the suburbs than the central city. In 2019, only 350 mortgages were made to Black home buyers in Cleveland, but 1,500 were made to Black home buyers in the surrounding Cuyahoga County suburbs. Inside the city, they are more likely to buy in racially mixed than predominantly Black neighborhoods than in the past.

In chapter 6 we discussed the concept of replacement, that is, the key function of a steady flow of new home buyers to replace those homeowners who leave for the normal life cycle reasons (aging, employment, and mobility). By comparing the number of homeowners to the number of new buyers, we can calculate the actual replacement rate and compare it to the replacement range, the ratio of new home buyer purchases or purchase mortgages to the pool of existing owners needed to ensure that adequate replacement is taking place.

While Black middle neighborhoods in Baltimore and Chicago are seeing some revival of home buying, although not quite enough, Black neighborhoods in St. Louis, Cleveland, and Detroit are seeing far too little home buying to sustain their housing markets. The number of mortgages made to Black home buyers in 2018 in Cleveland’s Black middle neighborhoods was less than 1 percent of the 8,411 homeowners living in those neighborhoods. What that means is that when the time comes to sell their homes, only a small percentage of homeowners in Cleveland’s Black middle neighborhoods have any realistic possibility of finding a new homeowner to take their place. In some cases, their home may be bought by an investor, but often it will find no buyer, and eventually be abandoned. It is therefore not surprising that from 2000 to 2018, Cleveland’s Black middle neighborhoods lost 30 percent of their homeowners, and their average vacancy rate had risen to above 20 percent. The median sales price in these neighborhoods in 2019 was under $40,000, less than half of what it had been in 2005.

Weak home buyer demand is not the cause of the challenges that Black middle neighborhoods are facing. On the contrary, it is a product of those difficulties, accumulated over many years. Once sustained weak demand takes over, however, it can create a vicious cycle that perpetuates continued disinvestment, destabilization, and the out-migration of those who can afford leave, as shown in figure 11.5. For that reason, stabilizing these neighborhoods will require breaking that cycle and restoring healthy home buyer demand.

One cannot fault Black home buyers for deciding to move to the suburbs. Where people move is rarely driven by ideological goals and far more by concrete desires to further their families’ well-being. Black home buyers are buying elsewhere, perhaps with regrets, because they believe that other areas better meet those desires. Any effort to revive urban Black middle neighborhoods must acknowledge and address the reasons they have become less attractive than their suburban and more racially mixed counterparts. What this means comes out clearly from focus groups held by Detroit Future City, an advocacy organization that has called attention to this issue:

When asked about middle-class neighborhoods and what the middle class found desirable, focus group participants were consistent in describing these characteristics: cleanliness, well-maintained homes, low vacancy and blight, high rates of home ownership, adequate public safety, and access to a range of quality amenities and services, including good schools. Focus group participants also seized upon the costs of living in the city and what they believed was discouraging middle-class residents from staying or moving to Detroit. Among the deterrents were familiar themes such as high insurance and tax rates, struggling schools, blight and vacancy, and a lack of retail amenities.¹⁸

To this we would add the expectation of reasonable appreciation in the value of one’s home over time.

Race is never far from the surface. As we discussed in chapter 8, white home buyers mostly confine their housing searches to white communities, while African Americans consider communities with a wide variety of racial compositions. Thus, while the small regional Black demand pool is dispersed across all the region’s neighborhoods, little of the much larger white demand pool reaches Black areas. This reflects the apparent reality that, as studies by Courtney Bonam and her colleagues have found, middle-class Black space is “invisible” to white people. “The asymmetry in racial stereotype content shapes class perceptions, which spread to a more holistic set of trait perceptions, ultimately operating to dampen perceivers’ willingness to live in … the same house when it is located in a Black, versus White, neighborhood. This gap in avoidance and devaluing of the Black versus White neighborhood house is present at both class levels, but is greater when the house is objectively middle-class versus lower-class.”¹⁹ In essence, as a report in Slate on Bonam’s research put it, the typical white buyer “is almost incapable of assigning middle-class status to houses in Black neighborhoods.”²⁰

The data bear this out. Only 1 percent of white home buyers in St. Louis in 2018 bought homes in the roughly 40 percent of the city’s census tracts that were 75 percent or more African American. Roughly one-quarter of those buyers bought homes in a single census tract near the affluent, largely white Skinker-DeBaliviere area. This is not a trivial concern, because it perpetuates racial segregation and also because the pool of potential Black home buyers in most cities is not large enough to sustain all the traditionally Black middle neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods emerged at a unique moment in time when massive pent-up Black homeownership demand needed an outlet. While Black home buying has returned to respectable levels nationally and in a few cities such as Atlanta and Indianapolis, in many other cities it remains well below the minimum level needed to sustain current Black homeownership rates.

Black home buyers typically make up a much smaller share of most cities’ demand pool than the city’s share of existing Black homeowners. With Black neighborhoods competing with neighborhoods throughout the metro area, a neighborhood that can attract only a small number of buyers out of an already small pool is at an inherent disadvantage. With their supply of homes far exceeding the demand, those homes will command lower prices than similar homes in white or more racially mixed neighborhoods that are not invisible, in Bonam’s terminology, to the white home buyer market, while their market weakness means that they will also have more difficulty recovering from shocks such as the foreclosure crisis and the Great Recession as well as the potential future effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. David Rusk has called this the “segregation tax.”²¹

The simultaneous spatial shifts in Black home buying and the decline of so many Black middle neighborhoods pose a version of the classic people versus place dilemma. Those shifts are undermining those neighborhoods. Their inability to replace their homeowners destabilizes them, perpetuating declining house values and loss of homeowners’ equity and wealth, leading in turn to deterioration in the neighborhoods’ quality of life and opportunity. At the same time, those buying elsewhere can reasonably be seen as making rational decisions on behalf of themselves and their families. Every legacy city metro offers many neighborhoods, both within the central city and in nearby suburbs, where available indicators suggest that public safety, school outcomes, and house price appreciation are all materially better than in many of the Black middle neighborhoods in those same cities. While house prices are often higher in these destination neighborhoods, they are not so high as to prevent middle-income households from buying those houses. This might suggest that public policy should simply allow these processes to take their course and see Black middle neighborhoods in much the same way many people viewed the immigrant neighborhoods that made up large parts of American cities a hundred years ago after the immigrants had moved on: as areas that served a particular purpose during a particular historical era but, once that purpose was no longer relevant, could evolve or decline as market forces might dictate.

We do not support that position. Parallels between today’s Black experience and the earlier white immigrant experience are at best seriously flawed. Strong but anecdotal evidence suggests that the decision to leave neighborhoods such as Crary–St. Mary’s is often undertaken reluctantly and with misgivings. These neighborhoods mattered to the people who left and still matter to those who remain. As Diane Richardson, a resident of one such Philadelphia neighborhood, told reporter Sandy Smith. “ ‘This community means so much to me. I love where I live. I work to keep it up. I don’t want it to decline.… If there are foreclosures, we need help from the city to resolve the issue and get new people in. To take us to the next level.’ ”²²

What Richardson and many others are saying is both important and relevant. The Black experience is fundamentally different from the immigrant experience. The likelihood that Black households will assimilate more or less seamlessly into the so-called melting pot, becoming effectively invisible as has happened over time, albeit not without strains, to white immigrant communities, is not a realistic possibility in today’s America. Race matters. Healthy, vital Black neighborhoods have an important social function. As Detroit advocate and blogger Lauren Hood states, “Detroit needs not just places, but whole neighborhoods, where black people feel welcome—it’s essential to our emotional and mental well-being. Safe black space is where black people are free from judgment. Free to be loud in conversation, laughter, music, and dress. Free to gather in large groups and not be perceived as a threat. Free to talk openly about race and not be classified a separatist or race-baiter. Free from profiling. Allowed to be seen and acknowledged.”²³

As long as race plays anything resembling the role that it currently plays in American society, such spaces will continue to be important. Clearly, one can argue that they do not have to be these particular spaces, but to relinquish spaces that have performed that role ably over an extended period in return for an uncertain, unpredictable future seems at best foolish, at worst dangerous.

These neighborhoods’ role goes beyond this. As Chicago reporter William Lee points out, “the loss of the black middle class deprives their communities of their skills, tax revenue, and political clout while also robbing a younger generation of desperately needed role models.”²⁴ Urban Black middle neighborhoods have been central to the formation of today’s Black middle class, wellsprings of Black civic, political, and cultural engagement in the cities of which they have been a part. They also represent a body of valuable fixed assets, including homes and businesses as well as parks, schools, and other community institutions and a reservoir, albeit shrinking, of Black wealth.

The potential loss of these neighborhoods takes on particular significance in light of the changes taking place in American cities. The shift from manufacturing to eds and meds as their principal urban economic base has led to the cities’ workforce becoming increasingly made up of suburban commuters, and the migration of a young, well-educated, and largely white generation to the cities is redefining historically nonresidential downtowns and nearby areas as new types of upscale urban neighborhoods. These changes have increasingly polarized cities along mutually reinforcing spatial, economic, and racial lines. We suggest that a city that is spatially polarized between rich (or at least well-to-do) and poor (or near poor), especially if that polarization is not only economic but also racial, is socially problematic and most probably unsustainable. The continued survival and vitality of Black middle neighborhoods in cities such as Baltimore and Detroit is perhaps the most important bulwark against this polarization and for a more equitable future for our cities.

The Middle Neighborhood Opportunity

The urban middle neighborhood, which flourished from the 1920s through the 1960s, with all its faults, was a cohesive community, strong in social capital, that enveloped its residents in a comfortable, although to some constricting, web of relationships. After World War II, the locus of the good middle neighborhood for many shifted in part to the suburbs. Millions of white families moved into Levittowns and Park Forests, where they adopted a car-oriented version of the middle neighborhood, as we discuss in chapter 13. In the central cities, hundreds of thousands of Black families who had been effectively barred from most neighborhoods and were still barred from most suburban developments took advantage of white flight to create their own middle neighborhoods. In all cases, while the middle neighborhood had little room for the poor, one did not have to be wealthy to enjoy its not insignificant benefits. They were homes for the blue-collar or white-collar family, whether Black or recent immigrants. Good places to raise children, they were conveyer belts of upward mobility.

Although fewer than they once were and often threatened, middle neighborhoods are still a valuable source of good neighborhoods in our cities and suburbs. As noted earlier, 25–40 percent of most legacy cities’ populations live in middle neighborhoods. They are more likely to be racially and economically diverse than both poor and wealthy neighborhoods. Many middle neighborhoods have valuable assets such as solid older housing, walkable retail nodes or corridors, good parks, and decent schools, but they are often undervalued by the marketplace.

Middle neighborhoods are a significant challenge for both central cities and their inner-ring suburbs but have tended to fall into a policy blind spot, attracting far less media and public-sector attention than what has been lavished on gentrifying neighborhoods and on areas of concentrated poverty. As with the American medical system, resources are devoted to solving acute problems rather than keeping healthy neighborhoods from falling into decline. It is far less expensive to stabilize a healthy neighborhood than to wait until it has fallen apart and then try, usually with little success, to revitalize it.

The neglect of middle neighborhoods has begun to end, albeit slowly and haltingly. Cities such as Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Des Moines have begun to look more closely at their struggling middle neighborhoods, while the national Middle Neighborhoods Initiative has been formed recently to fill this gap in the community development system.²⁵ The initiative supports the Middle Neighborhoods Community of Practice, a network of practitioners, researchers, and policymakers that supports research, conducts webinars, and lifts up best practices from cities across the country, including not only large central cities but also suburban communities such as Shaker Heights, Ohio, and Plano, Texas.

The widespread decline of urban middle neighborhoods highlights the fundamental challenge to the idea of neighborhood as we enter the third decade of the new millennium. Given the nature of American society and the economy today, can we create and sustain, or re-create, good neighborhoods that do not depend on their residents being disproportionately wealthy, which by definition excludes the majority of the population? The answer to that question, of course, is interwoven with many other questions about the future of the American economy and the United States as a society but is critical to any hope of restoring social health and cohesion after the multiple shocks of recent years.