(MintPress) – Scores of African-American families are leaving northern rust belt cities in record numbers. Decreased job opportunities due to outsourcing, deteriorating infrastructure and increased crime rates have sent many longtime residents packing. In Detroit, a city that was once the heart of America’s booming automobile industry, the population of all residents, African-Americans included, has dwindled with decreases as much as 25 percent in the past decade. Now with a shrinking tax base, empty storefronts and few jobs to offer residents, mayors of once thriving cities are struggling to keep long-time residents from moving.
Black flight
Detroit had a population of around 2 million through much of the 1950s when post WWII manufacturing was thriving. That number, however, was cut in half, to 1 million by 2000, and now stands at around 750,000.
“We are still a manufacturing nation. But we use relatively few workers to produce products anymore. Inner cities are left with a population that is poorer and less highly educated,” said Reynolds Farley, a demographer at the University of Michigan.
In certain sections of Detroit, the housing market has reached abysmal levels with some houses selling for just $6,000. It costs the city around $8,000 to level a home and clean up the debris. However, abandoned house demolition has been used more frequently by the city of Detroit and other declining cities, such as Cleveland, Ohio, and Buffalo, N.Y.
When asked about the issue of continued population decrease, Detroit Mayor David Bing expressed concern in a recent interview, saying, “Yes I am concerned about that and we have to be realistic. There has been so much neglect for such a long period of time that anybody who wants instant gratification. I’m not going to promise that.”
Since the dramatic economic downturn in 2008, the economy has made modest gains, with unemployment now at 8.2 percent nationally, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, across much of the Midwestern U.S., in towns and cities formerly known for their manufacturing, unemployment remains higher than the national average with 9.3 percent unemployed in Cleveland, Ohio, 10.4 percent in Buffalo, N.Y. and 16.9 percent in Detroit, Mich.
Additionally, African American communities across the U.S. have been hit harder by the recession, with unemployment rates exceeding those of white Americans. According to a CNN Money report, the unemployment rate for African Americans stood at 14.4 percent for the month of June while white unemployment stood just at 7.4 percent.
These conditions, not surprisingly, have sent large numbers of skilled and semi-skilled laborers to other parts of the U.S. in search of jobs and better living conditions.
Reverse Great Migration
In other parts of the United States, black flight has taken place for reasons of gentrification. Historically working class African-American neighborhoods in more more affluent cities like New York City have been increasingly taken over by white collar professionals in search of inexpensive housing.
Central Harlem, a section in the upper part of Manhattan, is not immune to this creeping influence of gentrification. In 2008, just 40 percent of residents were African-American, a record low for a neighborhood which was previously almost 100 percent black. Although African-Americans still represent a plurality in most Harlem neighborhoods, large numbers of middle class and upper middle class whites are populating the area with increasing regularity.
Some have gone so far as to call the black flight from cities like Detroit and New York City a reverse “Great Migration.” The Great Migration took part largely in the early part of the 20th century when approximately 6 million African-Americans fled the oppressive conditions of the Jim Crow South. Many blacks coming from agricultural professions transitioned into Fordist modes of assembly line production, working in the burgeoning manufacturing sector for decades.
The movement of African-Americans from Northern cities to suburbs, and sometimes back to Southern U.S. states, is reminiscent of the original black migration which brought blacks to cities in the Northern U.S.