8 THE CONTINUING YET CHANGING SIGNIFICANCE OF RACE

The Changing Context of Race and Neighborhoods

While varying degrees of racial segregation existed in nineteenth-century American cities, the social boundaries of the caste system were rarely translated into explicit geographic boundaries until about 1910, when the dominant white majority sought to formalize those boundaries using racial zoning. Reacting to the move by a Black lawyer and his family into a house in a white neighborhood in Baltimore, the city enacted an ordinance specifying that “no negro may take up his residence in a block within the city limits of Baltimore wherein more than half the residents are white.”⁵ The idea quickly spread to other cities but was invalidated by the US Supreme Court in 1917.⁶ Not surprisingly, the court’s objections were not to the principle of racial segregation but instead to the restrictions on private property rights that the ordinances imposed.

Shorn of the ability to use municipal ordinances to enforce racial segregation, at a time when the First Great Migration stimulated by World War I was leading to increased Black urban populations, developers and property owners turned to racial covenants to accomplish the same end. Covenants, also known as deed restrictions, are a legal device originating in English common law to limit the use of properties by incorporating restrictions into the deed to the property rather than relying on an external restriction such as a zoning ordinance. In principle deed restrictions are a neutral device and are widely used today to, for example, ensure that affordable housing developments remain affordable over time or that land preserved for farming is not subsequently developed or to regulate such mundane matters as fencing and home businesses. Covenants have a dark side, however. With the demise of racial zoning, they became the principal way that racial exclusion was enforced.

Reflecting the narrow construction of whiteness common at the time, the 1919 Minneapolis real estate ad shown in figure 8.1 featured the following restriction: “The premises … shall not at any time be conveyed, mortgaged or leased to any person or persons of Chinese, Japanese, Moorish, Turkish, Negro, Mongolian, Semetic [sic] or African blood or descent.”⁷ A 1928 covenant from Seattle barred occupancy “by any Hebrew or by any person of the Ethiopian, Malay or any Asiatic Race.”⁸ Ethiopian meant Black, Malay meant Filipino, and Hebrew meant Jew. While many covenants, such as those above, barred anyone not meeting full whiteness standards, such as Asians, all barred Black buyers and tenants.

The US Supreme Court upheld the validity of racial covenants in 1926, ruling that “the constitutional right of a Negro to acquire, own and occupy property does not carry with it the constitutional power to compel sale and conveyance to him of any particular private property.”⁹ From the end of World War I until the court reversed its position in 1948 and held that racial covenants were unenforceable as a matter of law, covenants barring Black families from buying or renting in newly built developments were commonplace.¹⁰ According to an article cited by the US Commission on Civil Rights, “by 1940, 80 percent of both Chicago and Los Angeles carried restrictive covenants barring Black families.”¹¹

The end of racial covenants in 1948 did not mean the end of legally imposed segregation. Not only did the nation lack fair housing laws to bar private discrimination, but Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration mortgage lending policies, as described in chapter 4, ensured that as America suburbanized after World War II, the new mass suburbs would be all but completely restricted to whites. While a 1961 executive order by President John Kennedy ended overt discrimination in lending by federal agencies, discriminatory practices have continued even after passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act banning discrimination in marketing, selling, and renting housing.

Even where discrimination in sales and rentals is not an issue, Black neighborhoods are bedeviled by other forms of racial discrimination and targeting. Redlining, as the practice of lenders and insurance brokers denying mortgages or policies to property owners in Black neighborhoods came to be known in the 1960s, has not disappeared. Indeed, redlining took a strange turn in the widespread practices of subprime mortgage lenders in the early 2000s. Instead of denying mortgages to Black (and Latinx) neighborhoods during the housing bubble years, in a practice that came to be known as “reverse redlining” lenders aggressively marketed subprime and other questionable mortgage products in many of those same neighborhoods, with ultimately disastrous consequences.

Over half a century after passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, urban and suburban neighborhoods remain stubbornly segregated by race. According to studies that have tracked segregation at the neighborhood level across metropolitan areas, racial segregation has been decreasing but at a disappointingly slow rate.¹² Two common explanations for the persistence of segregated neighborhoods are that racial prejudice is alive and well but has simply gone underground and that whites shun Black neighborhoods not because they are Black but because they are poor. Neither explanation is compelling. Few white families buy in predominantly Black neighborhoods, whatever the incomes of their residents or the amenities the neighborhoods offer. At the same time, growing numbers of white buyers appear to be comfortable living in racially integrated neighborhoods, where the percentage of Black households is significant but generally less than a majority.

Any effort to isolate one cause of neighborhood segregation, however, distorts our understanding of neighborhood change. Race cannot be separated from economic class, as it is layered with perceptions of class. The engrained associations of class and race and their manifestations in physical space are equally important. Moreover, racial attitudes and economic interests do not shape neighborhood trajectories in a straightforward, linear process. Instead, these and other factors interact with each other in complex feedback processes influenced by specific historical and geographical contexts, resulting in neighborhood racial patterns that are more varied and complex than conventional wisdom suggests.

The widely held belief that racial tipping is inevitable creates a confirmation bias that inhibits our ability to recognize the diversity of neighborhood change patterns, including healthy Black neighborhoods and stably integrated neighborhoods. As we discuss later in this chapter, the racial tipping point hypothesis, first described by political scientist Morton Grodzins in the 1950s and elaborated by economist Thomas Schelling in 1971, is fundamentally flawed.¹³ While segregation remains widespread, our analysis of racial change by census tract in St. Louis over nearly sixty years from 1960 to 2019 illustrates the diversity of racial dynamics. While the narrative of racial change leading to resegregation was largely true from 1960 to 1980, reflecting in part the traumatic effects of the rapid pace of both Black in-migration and white flight during those years, the picture shifted significantly from that point onward.

As figure 8.2 shows, the number of segregated Black census tracts (75% or more Black) leveled off after 1980, and the continued decline in segregated white tracts (less than 25% Black) through 2000 reflected an increase in the number of racially mixed tracts. Since 2000, despite the traumas of the foreclosure crisis and Great Recession, the distribution of neighborhoods by race in St. Louis has remained roughly constant. Moreover, while the handful of racially mixed tracts in 1960 were not stably integrated but were in transition from white to Black, racially mixed tracts today are more stable. Two-thirds of the racially mixed tracts in 2019 had been integrated for twenty years or more.

St. Louis has not become an integrated city. Over two-thirds of the city’s census tracts are still racially segregated, and the great majority of the city’s Black population live in segregated neighborhoods. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that neighborhoods in which 20–50 percent of the population is African American are St. Louis’s highest-value neighborhoods, with median house values nearly 25 percent higher than those in the city’s predominantly white neighborhoods. These are typically the neighborhoods that St. Louis residents cite as gentrifying neighborhoods, a subject we discuss in chapter 10.

Neighborhood change and racial attitudes embody powerful feedback loops. Neighborhood life cycle theory, which along with tipping point theory perpetuated the stereotype that the arrival of Black families in a neighborhood is a prelude to racial segregation and neighborhood decline, continues to influence people’s thinking. But times and conditions have changed. Even in St. Louis, with its well-deserved reputation as a racially divided city, spatial patterns of segregation and integration have become more complex and diverse in recent decades.¹⁴

Whether the experience of new patterns of racial diversity will significantly reduce racially motivated behavior and set in motion virtuous feedback effects remains to be seen. Moreover, even if conscious racial attitudes change, the unconscious identification of race and caste is likely to persist. That said, it is the exceptions to the racial stereotypes that best illustrate the complex dynamics of neighborhood change and offer insight into possible pathways to the future good neighborhood. In the next two sections of this chapter, we explore two key exceptions: good Black neighborhoods and stable integrated neighborhoods. Black suburban neighborhoods, along with the intersection of race, class, and political institutions in shaping them, are discussed in chapter 13.

The Good Black Neighborhood

The scholarly focus on concentrated poverty neighborhoods and the distress of the so-called Black underclass, along with the persistence of the racial stereotyping of “Black space,” have caused both scholars and the general public to overlook the existence of vital, healthy Black neighborhoods.¹⁵ Most Black families do not live in areas of concentrated poverty or abandonment. While many neighborhoods are segregated, many of them are also good neighborhoods, with well-kept homes, moderate levels of crime, adequate or better schools, and a community life rooted in churches and other third places, such as barbershops and beauty salons. While some are affluent neighborhoods, most are neighborhoods of working-class and middle-class families: factory workers, owners of small businesses, and public employees. They are middle neighborhoods.¹⁶

Even the most successful Black neighborhoods, however, are almost always at greater risk of destabilization than comparable white neighborhoods because of the inherent economic and social insecurity of Black people in American society and also because they are embedded in a larger geography of race that often places them adjacent to areas of concentrated poverty.¹⁷ Other things being equal, this means that they will be more vulnerable to recessions and more exposed to crime and have access to less well-performing schools. Moreover, as we will discuss later, the resistance of white buyers to buying homes in largely Black neighborhoods means that they have difficulty sustaining enough market demand to replace departing homeowners.

The story of urban Black middle neighborhoods is closely tied to the story of white flight. As we discussed in chapter 4, as late as the 1950s middle neighborhoods, with scattered exceptions, were white neighborhoods. Racial discrimination still effectively confined the great majority of Black families, whatever their economic condition, to Black ghetto neighborhoods. With most ghetto housing owned by absentee landlords, the Black ghetto was a reservoir of pent-up demand for better housing and homeownership opportunities.

Beginning in the 1950s and through the 1960s and 1970s, millions of white families abandoned the cities for the lure of the suburbs. In every major city white flight exceeded Black in-migration, usually by a significant margin. For every Black person moving into St. Louis in the 1960s, four white residents left. It was during those years, with the wholesale depopulation of many urban neighborhoods, that cities first saw houses being abandoned en masse and large stretches of St. Louis’s Northside and Detroit’s East Side began to turn into the urban prairies that still haunt these cities today. Because of this depopulation, white flight is often mistakenly used as a synonym for neighborhood collapse. The real 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 than with parallel economic changes and predatory real estate practices.

The other important part of this story is rarely told. Middle neighborhoods continued to exist, although diminished in number and extent. In a few cases, they remained largely white neighborhoods. More often, they went through racial change but retained their economic and social strength as working- and middle-class Black families took advantage of the space left by white flight to leave their overcrowded and substandard housing behind and become homeowners in neighborhoods from which they had previously been excluded. In a little-recognized process largely obscured by dominant narratives of neighborhood decline and suburban growth, many formerly white middle-class neighborhoods in America’s older cities that went through racial transition in the 1960s and 1970s became and remained for decades thereafter good middle-class Black neighborhoods.

The small northwest Detroit neighborhood of Crary–St. Mary’s, named after the public school and parish church that bookend the area, was typical. Its homes were built from the later 1930s to the 1950s, an era of prosperity and rapid growth in Detroit. It was a middle-class community with solid although unpretentious brick houses set back from the street by generous front yards (figure 8.3). Up to 1970, its population was entirely white. That changed during the 1970s as its residents fled the city for the burgeoning suburbs. By 1980, Crary–St. Mary’s was 84 percent Black. The skin color of the people living in the houses had changed, but little else did, as can be seen in table 8.1.

The Black newcomers were middle- or working-class families. They were homeowners whose incomes were similar to those of the people they replaced, and they raised families. The number of married couples with children in the area actually increased from 1970 to 1980. Seen in the context of the decline of the Detroit economy and the demographic shifts changing the nation, Crary–St. Mary’s remained highly stable through the 1980s and 1990s. At the end of the millennium, it was still a middle-class neighborhood. We will revisit this neighborhood and its subsequent trajectory in chapter 11.

Crary–St. Mary’s had many counterparts in Detroit as well as in almost every other older city in America, including Lee-Miles in Cleveland, Overbrook in Philadelphia, and South Shore and Chatham in Chicago. The rise of the Black urban middle neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s, the enactment of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, and the growth in Black homeownership during those decades are all related. The number of Black homeowners in the United States grew by over 40 percent during the 1960s; in Detroit alone, over fifty thousand more Black families became homeowners. By 1980, well over half of Detroit’s Black families were homeowners. Most of the Black families who bought homes in Crary–St. Mary’s during the 1970s were almost certainly first-time home buyers.

In Black Picket Fences, Mary Pattillo-McCoy documents life in a similar middle-class Black neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago she dubbed “Groveland.” Groveland went from being entirely white in 1960 to 98 percent Black in 1980, but the homeownership rate never fell below 70 percent, and the educational levels of the neighborhood’s adults actually increased.¹⁸ Groveland embraced a Black cultural identity along with a fierce attachment to middle-class standards of property maintenance and decorum.

For more than a generation, these neighborhoods were the principal seedbed of the Black middle class in American cities as well as centers of community engagement and leadership. They were a haven for Black families, as veteran Chicago reporter William Lee wrote of his childhood neighborhood years later. “In my mind’s eye, the South Shore of my youth was pristine. With its big old homes and apartments, four grocery stores and doctors’ offices, South Shore had all kinds of residents—laborers, city workers, artists, businessmen and executives—raising their families side by side. A black child in the ’80s could feel insulated from the trappings of urban life. It’s where first lady Michelle Obama called home.”¹⁹

Obama grew up in an apartment on the second floor of a brick bungalow in South Shore. As she writes in her autobiography Becoming, “Everything that mattered was within a five-block radius.”²⁰ This included her church, her grandparents, Bryn Mawr Elementary School, and Rosenblum Park. When Obama lived there the neighborhood went through racial transition, going from almost entirely white in 1960 to 98 percent Black in 1980. Initially, despite rapid racial change, the neighborhood remained strong. As she writes, “in general, people tended to their lawns and kept track of their children.”²¹ Researchers have repeatedly shown that the first Blacks moving into white neighborhoods tended to have higher incomes than the whites they were replacing, and property values initially remained stable or actually increased.²² As one detailed study of neighborhood change put it: “Upper middle-class blacks … are the leading edge of racial change.”²³

A crucial factor in creating and sustaining strong Black neighborhoods was and still is sufficient demand by Black home buyers. The rise of the Black middle neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s was fueled by massive pent-up demand by families whose aspirations to homeownership had been blocked by racial segregation. Healthy neighborhoods need a steady supply of middle-class homeowners who can maintain their housing and be engaged in their neighborhood. Since few white families buy homes in Black neighborhoods, the market for Black home buyers is largely limited to the region’s Black families. While this means that the opportunity space for good Black neighborhoods is greater in metropolitan areas with large Black middle-class populations, such as Chicago and Atlanta, that opportunity space only exists if enough of those Black middle-class buyers choose to buy in Black neighborhoods rather than in the larger number of racially mixed and largely white neighborhoods potentially accessible to them. The crisis of today’s Black middle neighborhoods, which we will discuss in chapter 11, is in many respects the result of those buyers increasingly opting to buy elsewhere.

Good Black neighborhoods are not only less secure but also do not necessarily confer the same social and economic benefits on their residents as good white neighborhoods. Aside from the market implications of racial stereotyping, Black neighborhoods face additional challenges not faced by white neighborhoods. Black neighborhoods may face invidious behavior by lenders and insurance companies, while racial stereotypes may inhibit retailers from locating in their commercial areas. Their proximity to areas of concentrated poverty means that middle-class youths in those neighborhoods are more likely to be exposed to the temptations of the street and “fast money.”²⁴ As Pattillo-McCoy sums it up, “Black middle-class neighborhoods like Groveland subsequently have more crime, fewer services and resources, less political clout, and less adequate schools than most white neighborhoods.”²⁵

For all their challenges, good Black neighborhoods are a useful corrective to what Mary Pattillo calls the “conundrum of integration,” the assumption that integration is the only way to improve the lives of Black people, an assumption that stigmatizes Black communities and lifts up proximity to whites as a value in itself.²⁶ Racial integration is not an end in itself. But it is another way to achieve good neighborhoods.

The Successful Integrated Neighborhood

Traditional theories of neighborhood change have little room to accommodate the existence of stable racially integrated communities. Neighborhood life cycle theories and the ecological model of the Chicago School of Human Ecology both offered a deterministic view of race and neighborhood change. As the ubiquitous Homer Hoyt wrote in 1939, “the presence of even one nonwhite person in a block otherwise populated by whites may initiate a period of transition.”²⁷ The theory of racial tipping points gave earlier theories a more scientific gloss.²⁸ Clearly influenced by the traumatic effects of white flight, which was taking place in American cities as they were writing, Grodzin, Schelling, and other tipping point theorists argued that whatever the preferences of the majority, if even a small percentage of white homeowners in a neighborhood do not tolerate the presence of Black neighbors and move out, that process will initiate a cycle of moves that ultimately leads to the neighborhood becoming entirely Black. That theory was summed up by the influential community organizer Saul Alinsky, who quipped that integration was merely the time “from the entrance of the first Black family to the exit of the last white family.”²⁹

These deterministic theories were a product of their time, detached from history and context. Even then, there were many exceptions. Some neighborhoods were racially diverse and remained that way over many decades. In 1990, 19 percent of neighborhoods in all metropolitan areas were racially diverse (defined as having Black populations between 10 percent and 50 percent), and over three-quarters of the census tracts that were racially diverse in 1980 remained that way in 1990.³⁰

Since 1990, the number of stable integrated neighborhoods has steadily grown. A recent study found that the percentage of integrated Black-white neighborhoods that tipped and became racially homogeneous over two decades fell from 40 percent between 1970 and 1990 to only 20 percent between 1990 and 2010. Both white flight from integrated neighborhoods and white avoidance of such neighborhoods fell significantly after 1990.³¹ The St. Louis analysis described earlier reinforces that point. Not only had most of the diverse census tracts remained that way for twenty or more years, but a large number had also seen their Black population share exceed 50 percent, only to gradually decline while retaining substantial Black populations over time. A carefully designed test of the tipping point theory concluded that “the ‘tipping point’ is closer to an urban legend than an unstable equilibrium that explains racial segregation.”³²

Arguably the single most blatant flaw in tipping point theory is its failure to understand the racial configuration and preferences of the pool of would-be home buyers eager to buy in a neighborhood. Although Schelling appears to know otherwise, his model all but assumes the existence of a nearly infinite pool of Black home buyers as well as all but universal white aversion of integrated neighborhoods, both egregious misrepresentations of reality then and even more so today. As discussed in chapter 6, since a predictable percentage of any neighborhood’s homeowners regularly move, the neighborhood’s racial configuration is ultimately determined by the racial mix of the pool of home buyers and renters. If that pool is dominated by one group or the other, eventually the character of the neighborhood will tip toward the group that dominates that pool, whether white, Black, or other. Assuming that 10 percent of white homeowners lack tolerance for Black neighbors but the Black share of the home buyer pool is also 10 percent, the neighborhood will remain stably integrated. Moreover, race is rarely the only factor driving decisions, while the effect of friction, the cost in both time and money to sell one house and buy another, acts as a further deterrent to flight. In retrospect, the urban crisis era of white flight and rapid racial transition was an extreme and dramatic moment in American history, unlikely to be repeated in the future.

That said, in America’s racialized society long-term stable integration does not come easily. Racial determinants of behavior, whether systemic or individual, have a momentum that is difficult to overcome. The racialized perception of space affects housing searches, creating institutional barriers to the creation and maintenance of stable integrated neighborhoods. Maria Krysan and Kyle Crowder call the process by which segregation is perpetuated through racially divergent housing searches the “social structural sorting perspective.”³³ The home search is not a rational process in which the buyer considers all the alternatives dispassionately and then chooses the one that maximizes their goals; rather, it is one that relies on heuristics to narrow the alternatives and simplify decision making. Krysan and Crowder point out that “residential moves are structurally sorted along racial lines, with individuals’ perceptions and knowledge of residential options shaped by lived experiences and social interactions within a racially segregated social system. The racialized patterns of mobility and immobility that emerge from these structural conditions continually reproduce the system’s segregated social and spatial structure.”³⁴ As they note, for many white home buyers in the Chicago metropolitan area, the South Side is “a large, aggregated swath of sameness” that they do not even think to consider.³⁵ Most white buyers would probably say the same thing about the North Side of St. Louis or Cleveland’s East Side. Similarly, many Black home buyers eliminate white neighborhoods from consideration because of their geographically constrained social networks and lived experiences as well as the not unrealistic fear that they will not be welcomed in such neighborhoods. While these factors make it more difficult to sustain integrated neighborhoods, recent experience nonetheless suggests that for many people factors other than race may be as important or more so. These factors in turn influence the likelihood that a neighborhood will be able to achieve stable racial integration.

The characteristics of regional housing markets affect the opportunity space for integrated neighborhoods. Stronger regional housing markets and higher home prices relative to incomes constrain home buyers’ choices. In such a market, integrated neighborhoods may more often land on white buyers’ radar. Another factor may be the size and configuration of Black settlement in the region. Massey and Denton suggest that the most problematic regions are those they call “hypersegregated,” where much of a region’s Black population “lives within large, contiguous settlements of densely inhabited neighborhoods that are packed tightly around the urban core.”³⁶ A study of the Washington, D.C., suburbs found that distance from the Black population center was positively correlated with stable integration.³⁷ Beyond that, all the same factors that affect neighborhood choice everywhere come into play, including the character of the housing stock and neighborhood amenities such as public transit, open space, and proximity to downtown or major universities and medical centers.

While local actors can build a more appealing housing stock and stronger neighborhood amenities, structural factors are almost completely beyond the power of local actors. Structural or ecological factors, however, do not dictate outcomes but instead operate through perceptions and behaviors that can be influenced by local actors. As the authors of Paths of Neighborhood Change observe, “if ecological facts are overwhelming, it is because of the effect of these facts on the perceptions and actions of individual [residents] and corporate actors. In a neighborhood that goes up and down, it is ultimately the actions of these residents that make the outcomes real.”³⁸ Residents can and do act to counter the structural factors driving resegregation. As Ingrid Gould Ellen observes, “almost every case study of diverse communities has identified an active community group.”³⁹ Strong community organizations working for stable integration may not guarantee success but they increase the odds.

Neighborhood racial change or stability can become self-fulfilling prophecies. If people believe that their neighborhood will resegregate, it probably will. If they believe that it will maintain a stable racial mix, it most likely will. And the longer a neighborhood maintains a stable racial mix, the greater the likelihood that it will remain stable into the future. The challenge in racial change, as in all neighborhood change, is that it is subject to social contagion and rapid feedback effects. Change may be inevitable, but it need not be destabilizing. The challenge for local actors is to prevent the cascade of negative effects flowing from uncontrolled change. Examples of integrated neighborhoods from the urban crisis era can tell us a great deal about the ability of neighborhood actors to foster stability and virtuous cycles.

Local “fragile movements,” as Juliet Saltman called them, for integrated neighborhoods grew out of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s as civil rights activists realized that history and institutional racism, more than legal barriers, drove residential segregation.⁴⁰ Just as affirmative action was necessary to overcome the historic burdens of racial discrimination in job markets, activists realized that affirmative steps were needed to overcome the historic legacy of segregated neighborhoods. Their efforts were typically implemented by suburban governments and neighborhood associations.

While many suburbs resisted racial integration, some welcomed it. Local governments in Oak Park outside Chicago, Shaker Heights in the Cleveland area, and University City west of St. Louis successfully fought tipping pressures, sustaining white and Black home buyer demand at levels that have maintained their racial balance, as shown in figure 8.4. Oak Park, Shaker Heights, and University City can be called intentionally integrated communities because they have intentionally used public policies to maintain stable integration or, as it is sometimes called, integration maintenance. Some policies were relatively uncontroversial, such as banning for-sale signs to counter blockbusting and requiring strict property inspections when homes changed hands to forestall their deterioration. Other policies designed to boost white housing demand, such as affirmative marketing and home buyer assistance programs targeted to white buyers but not Black buyers, were more controversial. Prompted by the NAACP, which enlisted the Reagan administration’s Justice Department, federal courts in 1988 ruled that racial quotas designed to maintain neighborhood racial balance were unconstitutional.⁴¹ Since then the courts have generally upheld local integration maintenance policies as long as they do not involve quotas.⁴²

Early on, Shaker Heights banned for-sale signs to discourage panic selling and started an affirmative housing marketing program to encourage whites to buy in areas where they were underrepresented. Arguably more important, the community worked to maintain a high-performing school system, using busing and magnet schools to maintain a racial balance. An integrated municipality, however, may or may not also mean integrated neighborhoods. In Shaker Heights, the Black population share of individual census tracts ranges from 4 percent to 90 percent. Integration is much more granular in Oak Park, where no census tract has more than a 28 percent Black population and only two have less than 11 percent.

Saltman suggests that integration is not about intimate socializing but instead creating a pluralistic community, “meaning two or more diverse groups living peaceably in a common territory and sometimes joining in common effort.”⁴³ Her argument is consistent with our stress on the importance of weak ties for bridging across social divides. Black and white residents of Shaker Heights, Oak Park, and University City have lived together for decades, sharing blocks and neighborhoods to varying degrees, rubbing elbows in shared public spaces, and working together in local government and civic organizations.

The task of maintaining stable racial integration in central city neighborhoods falls on civil society rather than on city government, for which integration maintenance is rarely a priority. A study of fourteen stable integrated communities in the late 1990s called them “one of the best-kept secrets of our nation.”⁴⁴ We tell two stories of such neighborhoods here. West Mt. Airy in Philadelphia, a neighborhood that reached roughly two-thirds Black population in the 1980s and has been stable at roughly 50 percent white and 50 percent Black since 2000, and Vollintine Evergreen in Memphis, which has sustained a stable population that is about 60 percent Black and 40 percent white over the same period. Notably, both neighborhoods’ proximity to high-poverty African American neighborhoods would have suggested to many that they were fated to tip racially and decline socioeconomically.

Located in northwest Philadelphia and surrounded by neighborhoods that are largely either white or Black, West Mt. Airy has strong amenities.⁴⁵ It is well served by public transit; bordered on two sides by green space, Fairmont Park and Wissahickon Gorge; and boasts a diverse, attractive, and increasingly competitive housing stock. Prices have risen steadily over the past decade, to about $400,000 during the first half of 2021, almost double the citywide median price.⁴⁶

West Mt. Airy’s success reflects the institutions its residents formed to sustain the community. Black families began moving into the area in the 1950s. Reflecting fears of possible panic selling, local churches and synagogues came together in 1959 to form West Mt. Airy Neighbors to support racial integration, persuading the Philadelphia City Council to pass an ordinance prohibiting solicitations and “sold” signs and limiting the number of for-sale signs.⁴⁷ West Mount Airy Neighbors is still active after more than sixty years. Known as the “PhD ghetto,” West Mt. Airy has established a distinct market niche. The neighborhood’s reputation as a diverse community has attracted like-minded people, including many Jewish and Black families of relatively high educational and socioeconomic status and strong progressive values, nurturing a vibrant civic scene. Weaver’s Way, a food co-op founded in 1973 with nine thousand members today, manages two working farms and provides fresh food to a local shelter and schools. West Mt. Airy began early and built momentum. Historical momentum can support integration as well as segregation.

Constructed largely between 1922 and 1944, Vollintine Evergreen was one of the first trolley suburbs east of downtown Memphis.⁴⁸ As in West Mt. Airy, Black in-migration and real estate agents’ block busting triggered panic selling in the late 1960s, leading to local church leaders forming the Vollintine Evergreen Community Association (VECA). Rather than taking a race-specific approach, however, VECA has focused on strengthening the neighborhood’s quality of life. VECA remains active and engaged over fifty years after its founding. Indeed, the neighborhood itself is most often known today as “VECA” rather than the more cumbersome Vollintine Evergreen.

Vollintine Evergreen has many assets that VECA leveraged to attract residents. Its distinctive bungalow homes with large verandas, shown in figure 8.5, helped it to win designation as a National Historic District. Nearby Rhodes College serves as a neighborhood anchor, drawing home buyers. The neighborhood’s most distinctive amenity, the V&E Greenline, is a testament to the extraordinary civic capacity of the community. In 1980 the Louisville & Nashville Railroad abandoned a line running through the heart of the neighborhood, which soon became an unsafe area and a dumping ground. Although the city refused to purchase the right of way, VECA organized volunteer clean-ups and tree plantings while encouraging residents to walk and bicycle along its route. In 1997 VECA was able to purchase the right-of-way and created a separate volunteer-driven community corporation to maintain the Greenline. In 2019, four hundred people provided 4,300 voluntary hours of service to the greenway, which according to a 2012 survey is used by nearly sixty-five thousand people each year. Vollintine Evergreen has become a stable integrated community, attracting both white and Black families, in which houses in 2021 were selling for $200,000 to $300,000.

We are not suggesting that integrated neighborhoods such as West Mt. Airy and Vollintine Evergreen are the only way to build good neighborhoods for people of color or that intentional integration and quality-of-life maintenance are necessary for stable racial integration. They show, however, that racial tipping was not an inevitable outcome even at the height of the urban crisis era, let alone today. Moreover, they are stably integrated neighborhoods with significant Black populations. Integration is not always the “one-way street” that Stokely Carmichael criticized over fifty years ago, which assumes that the path to integration is one of small numbers of Black people joining much larger numbers of white people in white people’s neighborhoods.⁴⁹

Race and Neighborhoods in a Globalizing Nation

Sixty years ago when white flight and racial change were transforming America’s cities and their neighborhoods, race was largely seen as binary. While the Black-white racial divide and the persistence of discriminatory behavior specifically directed toward Black people continue to play a powerful role in American society, as the United States moves toward becoming a majority-minority nation, race and ethnicity and their relationship to neighborhood trajectories have become more complex. Large and growing Latinx and Asian communities in American cities and suburbs have muddled the binary dynamic, adding a more complex Black-white-Latinx-Asian frame to the underlying Black-white racial dynamic.

Moreover, each of those generic categories is actually an umbrella term for groups that are divided into innumerable distinct racial and ethnic identities. A new generation of racially diverse neighborhoods is emerging, fostered not by integration maintenance strategies but instead by structural dynamics largely unrelated to intentional activity. Race continues to shape neighborhood trajectories, but it does so differently than in the past.

The restructuring of urban economies has changed cities’ racial dynamics. The clustering of new economy jobs in downtowns and urban tech corridors, coupled with the “march of the millennials” described in previous chapters, has produced a pool of mobile, highly educated young people seeking a more “authentic” urban experience, many of whom see racial diversity as a part of that experience. Derek Hyra has described how the Black history of the Shaw–U Street neighborhood in Washington, D.C., was used as a marketing tool to stimulate housing demand.⁵⁰ Whether this is racial progress or crass commercialization, it would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. Each generation’s racial attitudes are shaped by the collective memories of growing up in a distinct historical period. While the racial turmoil of the 1960s was traumatic for many people, as Jennifer Hochschild and her colleagues write, “the fading of the collective racial memory of the 1960’s era, coupled with a new set of collective memories, new people and new experiences in the context of increasing racial and ethnic heterogeneity,” have led to new more tolerant attitudes and practices among younger people.⁵¹ Acting on these attitudes, young people have chosen to live in more integrated neighborhoods.⁵² Racial attitudes may shape neighborhoods, but neighborhoods also shape racial attitudes.

New types of neighborhood are emerging. As one study notes, “neighborhoods where blacks and whites live in integrated settings alongside Hispanics and Asians represent a new phenomenon in the United States.”⁵³ The authors call neighborhoods with minimum threshold numbers of non-Latinx white, Black, Latinx, and Asian residents “global neighborhoods.” The increasing racial and ethnic diversity resulting from immigration is leading to more integrated neighborhoods. Zhang and Logan argue that the increase in diverse neighborhoods cannot be explained simply by the increase in the racial or ethnic diversity of metropolitan areas. Rather, it and is due in large part to “process changes that are driven by the transformation of intergroup relations and neighborhood dynamics.”⁵⁴ One possible explanation of these changing racial dynamics is the buffering hypothesis, namely that the presence of Latinx and Asian populations provides a buffer between Black and white residents, making Black people less visible and less threatening to whites.⁵⁵ We are skeptical. Multiethnic neighborhoods have emerged in all sorts of contexts, including in metropolitan area that were initially mostly white or divided between Blacks and whites, suggesting that other factors are at work.

A further dimension is added by the growing suburbanization of America’s Black families, a process that has accelerated markedly in the past decade.⁵⁶ In many metropolitan areas, Black suburban populations exceed those in central cities. The effects on segregation are mixed. While in many cases this process appears to be furthering diversity and integration, elsewhere, notably St. Louis County surrounding the city of St. Louis, it is leading to growth in both racial segregation and concentrated poverty, a phenomenon exacerbated by the county’s political and institutional fragmentation, which we discuss in chapter 13.

It is important, however, not to overstate the rise in neighborhood diversity. At the same time that racial segregation has declined and new global neighborhoods have emerged, the number of nearly all-Black neighborhoods has grown while many white households continue to flee racial diversity. Perhaps the most disturbing trend is the increase in the number of Black concentrated-poverty neighborhoods, including many formerly Black middle neighborhoods, which have increased while racial diversity has grown in middle- and upper-income neighborhoods.

The new patterns of neighborhood racial diversity have built-in limitations. Diversity is indeed a crude statistical measure that obscures important details. With few exceptions, the presence of white households in racially diverse neighborhoods has had little effect on school segregation. Moreover, efforts to draw the children of affluent white in-migrants into public schools may end up creating stratified school systems rather than furthering either racial or social class integration.⁵⁷

Other things being equal, more diverse neighborhoods appear to have weaker social ties than more homogeneous neighborhoods. Robert Putnam found that residents living in ethnically diverse neighborhoods reported lower levels of trust not only between groups but also among their own group, a phenomenon he called “hunkering down.”⁵⁸ In other words, diverse urban neighborhoods may be statistically integrated but socially segregated. Derek Hyra found this in his study of Washington’s Shaw–U Street neighborhood.⁵⁹

In that neighborhood, however, racial diversity was overlaid with extreme economic inequality, something that is likely to reduce intergroup interaction. Lower-income residents of one racial or ethnic group are unlikely to have more than minimal social interactions with affluent, more educated residents of another. Indeed, diverse neighborhoods are often riven by class cleavages and fears of displacement by the less affluent, often as much social and political as physical displacement.⁶⁰

While recognizing its roots in lived experience, we nonetheless question the widespread pessimism about the new diversity in urban neighborhoods. Given the less central role that neighborhoods play in the social and economic relationships of the twenty-first-century American city, to expect residents of widely varying racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds to form intimate social relations is not only unrealistic but also reflects a nostalgic yearning for a bygone era. It is likely to be enough that diverse residents develop weak ties, mingling in public spaces and learning to tolerate and respect each other’s differences. Good neighborhoods can be an important source of bridging social capital without intimate ties.

All of this takes us back to the paradox with which we began this chapter: that race is an enduring constant in neighborhoods and is constantly changing. The great majority of Latinx residents self-identify in the US census as white, and many of them may already be seen as white by the majority. While people of Asian origin are largely, in Canadian terminology, “visible minorities,” that may not pose an insurmountable barrier to their being assimilated by the majority into whiteness, which may already be happening. Race as a social construct is constantly changing. As happened to many immigrant groups during the first half of the twentieth century, over time more and more groups leave minority status and become “white,” with the sole exception of Blacks.

The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the 2020 murder of George Floyd suggests that the country has made little progress on race relations. In many respects that is true. Regarding neighborhood dynamics, however, we have come a long way from the white flight and resegregation that characterized so many communities during the urban crisis era. At that time, the Chicago School’s model of neighborhood change and its corollary, the racial tipping point theory, seemed credible. Today, we can see both as artifacts of their distinctive moments in American urban history. The opportunity space for building good diverse neighborhoods has expanded. Nonetheless, race remains stubbornly persistent in the American psyche, while spatial polarization by economic condition and the income and wealth gap between Black and white households have grown even as urban revival, immigration, and millennial in-migration have led to new models of urban diversity. The urban crisis, with its fraught history of racial tension, has not disappeared but is now overlaid with a new set of historical forces.