White Buyers Outnumber Black Buyers in Black Neighborhoods

Some in the LGBT half jokingly note that gays have long been one of the best harbingers of neighborhood change - and some would argue gentrification - given their willingness to move into marginal or historically black neighborhoods due to (i) less concern about neighborhood schools, and (ii) a desire to buy low priced historic homes in need of major upgrades.  Indeed, after coming out, still on a mortgage for the home for my former wife, I was limited in my buying power and attracted to post turn of the 20th century architecture. The solution: buy in a predominately black neighborhood close to Old Dominion University and Norfolk's upscale Ghent neighborhood.  My 1917 arts and craft house needed a thorough redo - new kitchen, bath, removal of old carpet (and thousands of carpet staples) to refinish hardwood floors, repainting inside and out, new roof, etc.  The result was a historic home at far less the cost (much of the work other than plumbing and electrical was done by my ex-boyfriend and me) than in posh and expensive nearby Ghent.  Since I bought the house, new - and much higher priced homes - have been built on vacant lots and many other homes on the street have been extensively remodeled (my youngest daughter and her family live in the house now).  

As a piece in the New York Times notes, the trend that I was part of out of financial necessity is spreading across the country with whites moving into historically black neighborhoods while blacks and other minorities buy in the suburbs. The verdict is out on whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, likely depending on one's perspective.  For cities, it is certainly helping to rebuild their tax base.  One disturbing note: mortgage lenders may be redlining minority buyers in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods.  Here are article highlights:

RALEIGH, N.C. — In the African-American neighborhoods near downtown Raleigh, the playfully painted doors signal what’s coming. Colored in crimson, in coral, in seafoam, the doors accent newly renovated craftsman cottages and boxy modern homes that have replaced vacant lots.

To longtime residents, the doors mean higher home prices ahead, more investors knocking, more white neighbors.

Here, and in the center of cities across the United States, a kind of demographic change most often associated with gentrifying parts of New York and Washington has been accelerating. White residents are increasingly moving into nonwhite neighborhoods, largely African-American ones.

In America, racial diversity has much more often come to white neighborhoods. Between 1980 and 2000, more than 98 percent of census tracts that grew more diverse did so in that way, as Hispanic, Asian-American and African-American families settled in neighborhoods that were once predominantly white.

But since 2000, according to an analysis of demographic and housing data, the arrival of white residents is now changing nonwhite communities in cities of all sizes, affecting about one in six predominantly African-American census tracts. The pattern, though still modest in scope, is playing out with remarkable consistency across the country — in ways that jolt the mortgage market, the architecture, the value of land itself.

In city after city, a map of racial change shows predominantly minority neighborhoods near downtown growing whiter, while suburban neighborhoods that were once largely white are experiencing an increased share of black, Hispanic and Asian-American residents.

At the start of the 21st century, these neighborhoods were relatively poor, and 80 percent of them were majority African-American. But as revived downtowns attract wealthier residents closer to the center city, recent white home buyers are arriving in these neighborhoods with incomes that are on average twice as high as that of their existing neighbors, and two-thirds higher than existing homeowners. And they are getting a majority of the mortgages.

Such disparities in incomes and mortgage access aren't apparent in suburban neighborhoods with a growing share of Hispanic, black and Asian-American residents.

In South Park, a neighborhood with picturesque views of the Raleigh skyline, the white home buyers who have recently moved in have average incomes more than three times that of the typical household already here. Whites, who were largely absent in the neighborhood in 2000, made up 17 percent of the population by 2012. Since then, they’ve gotten nearly nine in 10 of the new mortgages.

In neighborhoods like South Park, white residents are changing not only the racial mix of the community; they are also altering the economics of the real estate beneath everyone. . . . . Some of that change can be positive, she said. This realization was not: “Our black bodies literally have less economic value than the body of a white person,” she said. “As soon as a white body moves into the same space that I occupied, all of a sudden this place is more valuable.”

In the places where white households are moving, reinvestment is possible mainly because of the disinvestment that came before it. Many of these neighborhoods were once segregated by law and redlined by banks. Cities neglected their infrastructure. The federal government built highways that isolated them and housing projects that were concentrated in them. Then banks came peddling predatory loans.

“A single-family detached house with a yard within a mile of downtown in any other part of the world is probably the most expensive place to live,” said Kofi Boone, a professor at North Carolina State University’s College of Design.

Here, because of that history, it’s a bargain. And while that briefly remains true in South Park, the disinvestment and reinvestment are visible side by side on any given street.
African-Americans have remained so segregated in American cities in large part because white people have avoided living in black neighborhoods, and seldom even considered buying a home in one. What changed, then?

How did the first developer to renovate a home know a new market would be waiting for it?  “I guess the answer is I didn’t know,” said Jason Queen, a 39-year-old developer in Raleigh. “But I did know that I wanted to be in downtown.”

Mr. Queen, who had worked in historic preservation, has rehabilitated or built about 100 homes in the historic corridor just east of downtown Raleigh, starting with a house that he and his wife lived in and renovated on the edge of South Park a decade ago. Mr. Queen was his own market: He rejected long car commutes and cul-de-sacs. This part of the city was more affordable than anywhere else near downtown. And he wanted diversity.

“What I didn’t want to do is move to a neighborhood where all the kids look exactly the same as my kids,” said Mr. Queen, who is white. “I didn’t think that was the right thing to do.”

Crime plummeted in the years preceding all this redevelopment. Public housing projects were demolished for mixed-income housing. Cities reinvested in neglected downtowns.

The run-up in home prices in the early 2000s also left middle-class households searching for affordable housing. By then, many working-class white neighborhoods in good locations had already gentrified. Predominantly African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods were what remained.

[I]n the aftermath of the housing bust, mortgage lending tightened, particularly for African-Americans and Hispanics. White buyers got a head start in places like South Park just as they were becoming newly desirable. By the time more lending returned for minorities, these neighborhoods were increasingly priced out of reach.

“The city is always the battleground; when it was failing, that was a problem, and now that it’s succeeding, that’s also a problem,” said Ken Bowers, Raleigh’s planning director. People used to debate whether the city was delivering equal parks or transit service in all neighborhoods. “Now the debate we’re having is ‘Are these parks gentrifying the neighborhood?’ ” he said. “That’s a very dysfunctional place to be.”

In the suburbs, a far different set of processes is driving the demographic change, as middle-class minority families seek more space or better schools, as immigrant communities take root, or as families are increasingly priced out of the city. This kind of increased diversity may bring its own challenges. But at least among the homeowners, there is something stabilizing in the fact that the new households economically resemble their neighbors — whether the communities around them are working class, middle class or wealthy.

“We made some progress by getting to a point where the entry of one black family did not signal that, ‘Oh my god, this is a neighborhood that’s going to fall apart,’ ” Ms. Ellen said. “Maybe we can get to a point where the entry of one white family is not a signal that, ‘This is a neighborhood that’s immediately going to have million-dollar condos.’ ”

My 1917 house after a near total remodel.

Do Democrats Have a Gentrification Problem?

One of the results of Donald Trump's take over of the Republican Party which now counts right wing Christian extremists and white supremacists as its core base is that educated whites, especially those who are college educated have fled the GOP.  Many of these exiles have joined into the Democrat Party, especially in East Coast and West Coast cities and large cities in the blue archipelago in between.  Some now argue that the Democrats risk alienating less educated whites - or at least those who haven't already rallied to Trump's embrace of Christofascists and  racism - and racial minorities as a result of the so-called gentrification of Democrat circles.  Among the reasons for this supposed intra-party strain is housing and income inequality and the increased importance of affluent whites as donors for the Democrats.  A column in the New York Times looks at this question which I personally has been somewhat overblown.  Here are excerpts:

The nation’s largest cities and metropolitan areas — home to a majority of Democratic voters — are at the forefront of the party’s most vexing racial, ethnic and class conflicts.
Last week, in an essay for CityLab, Richard Florida, a professor of urban planning at the University of Toronto, described how housing costs are driving the growing division between upwardly and downwardly mobile populations within Democratic ranks:

The rise in housing inequality brings us face to face with a central paradox of today’s increasingly urbanized form of capitalism. The clustering of talent, industry, investment, and other economic assets in small parts of cities and metropolitan areas is at once the main engine of economic growth and the biggest driver of inequality. The ability to buy and own housing, much more than income or any other source of wealth, is a significant factor in the growing divides between the economy’s winners and losers.

Allies on Election Day, the two wings of the Democratic Party are growing further estranged in other aspects of their lives, driven apart by the movement of advantaged and disadvantaged populations within and between cities. These demographic patterns exacerbate intraparty tensions.

Florida, writing with Benjamin Schneider of CityLab, expands on this point:

While the advantaged members of the knowledge, professional, and creative class have enough money left over even after paying the cost of housing in these cities, it’s the less-well-paid members of the service and working classes who get the short of end of the stick, with not nearly enough left over to afford the basic necessities of life. They are either pushed to the periphery of these places or pushed out altogether.

The competition for housing between rich and poor has become a critically important and divisive issue in urban America.

One of the most expensive metropolitan areas in the country, San Francisco, is also one of the most Democratic sections of the country, (San Francisco County: Clinton 84.5 percent, Trump 9.2 percent). According to Romem, between 2005 and 2016, those moving into the San Francisco area had median household incomes averaging $12,639 a year more than the households of the families moving out, $70,015 to $57,376.

Conversely, in the struggling Syracuse metropolitan area (Clinton 53.9 percent, Trump 40.1 percent), families moving in between 2005 and 2016 had median household incomes of $35,219 — $7,229 less than the median income of the families moving out of the region, $42,448.

Research that focuses on the way city neighborhoods are changing by income, race and ethnicity, while not specifically addressed to political consequences, helps us see the potential for conflict within the Democratic coalition.

In firmly Democratic neighborhoods across the country, the economic status of those moving in and out began to shift radically starting at the beginning of this century.

[T]he core of the nation’s cities is being taken over by members of the affluent wing of the Democratic Party at the expense of the less affluent, disproportionately minority wing of the party:

Central neighborhoods of most U.S. metropolitan areas experienced population decline 1980-2000 and population growth 2000-2010. 1980-2000 departures of residents without a college degree accounted for most of the decline while the return of college educated whites and the stabilization of neighborhood choices by less educated whites drove most of the post-2000 rebound.

. . . . neighborhoods surrounding cities’ central business districts have experienced a turnaround.

A similar pattern has emerged in the urban West. “Gentrification in the Bay Area, Portland and Seattle,” Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, told me in an email, “is definitely pushing disadvantaged populations out of old neighborhoods and into far-flung exurbs.”

Upscale liberal whites “who consider themselves committed to racial justice” tend to be “NIMBYists when it comes to their neighborhoods,” Cain wrote, “not living up to their affordable housing commitments and resisting apartment density around mass transportation stops.”

Michael Lind, a professor of public policy at the University of Texas in Austin, wrote in a prescient 2014 essay, “The Coming Realignment: Cities, Class, and Ideology After Social Conservatism,” that “high-density downtowns and suburban villages are coming to have an hourglass-shaped social structure.”

“Wealthy individuals” are at the top, according to Lind, with a “large luxury-service proletariat at the bottom.”  . . . Lind’s point raises a fundamental question for the Democratic Party: Can it find a way to hold its “hourglass-shaped” political coalition together?

[A] Democratic Party based on urban cosmopolitan business liberalism runs the risk not only of leading to the continued marginalization of the minority poor, but also — as the policies of the Trump administration demonstrate — to the continued neglect of the white working-class electorate that put Trump in the White House.

In other words, Democratic strategists looking to piece together a 21st century political alliance have to consider the unintended consequences of taking the easy route: constructing a coalition explicitly dominated by elites.

I say easy because — compared to the average resident of the United States — the affluent are “vastly more engaged politically,” as Douglas S. Massey and Jacob S. Rugh, sociologists at Princeton and Brigham Young University, write in a forthcoming paper, “Isolation at the Extremes”: Whereas 99 percent of the wealthy voted in the 2012 presidential election and 60 percent gave money to a political candidate, the corresponding figures were just 78 percent and 18 percent for Americans in general. As a result, the affluent are far more likely to have their political preferences reflected in public policies than other Americans.

The hurdle facing those seeking to democratize elite domination of the Democratic Party is finding voters and donors who have a sustained interest in redistributive policies — and the minimum wage is only a small piece of this. Achieving that goal requires an economically coherent center-left political coalition. It also requires the ability to overcome the seemingly insuperable political divisions between the white working class and the African-American and Hispanic working classes — that elusive but essential multiracial — and now multiethnic — majority. Establishing that majority in a coherent political coalition is the only way in which the economic interests of those in the bottom half of the income distribution will be effectively addressed.