In places like Detroit racism was very much the primary reason in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s at least. Some of it was just personal racism, pure and simple. See "blockbusting" techniques used by realtors who would hire a black mother to walk down the street with a baby carriage to give the impetus for white people to sell quickly and cheaply. Or a black family moving into a house, the white neighbors trying to push them out via lawsuit for breaking a racially restrictive covenant, then losing so that all the white people left the neighborhood (e.g. read about Orsel and Minnie McGhee in Detroit, I was the primary author of the National Register nomination for their house).

The racist pressure to move was also a structural issue supported by the Federal government. Redlining meant you couldn't get loans to buy houses in certain neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods were exactly where black people lived. Literal walls could be constructed between two similar communities of different races so that the white side could be higher rated and have better access to loans (e.g., the Birwood Wall in Detroit). A ton has been written about the topic, I can't really do it justice, but the idea that people just wanted a bigger house was not the case. A lot of Detroit actually consisted of single-family homes with yards anyhow, so it was literally white people leaving a house for a very similar one.

▲

legitster 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Racism might be part of the reason, but you have nearly entirely white cities like Portland that also experienced their own explosive suburban growth in the same time period.

Also, if "suburbanization" was really the explanation for the decline in community, you would see a clear pattern where people (regardless of race) in the suburbs have fewer friends and social lives and people in urban areas have more. But the opposite is largely true!

▲

paimapi 19 hours ago | parent [-]

You don't think the racial make-up of Portland had anything to do with racism?

That's honestly a little wild that people don't realize exactly what principles Oregon was founded on and the role Portland played in all of it.

One, the Portland municipal government explicitly admits to racism during white flight: https://www.portland.gov/bps/planning/adap/history-racist-pl...

Two, the state itself has passed multiple anti-Black exclusionary laws and was founded as a 'white utopia': https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/exclusion_laws/#...

> Any free Black person who refused to leave would be subject to lashing, a provision that was known as "Peter Burnett's lash law."

> The second exclusion law was enacted by the Territorial Legislature on September 21, 1849. This law specified that “it shall not be lawful for any n** or m*** to enter into, or reside” in Oregon, with exceptions made for those who were already in the territory.

> Voters [...] approved the exclusion clause by a wide margin. Incorporated into the Bill of Rights, the clause prohibited Black people from being in the state, owning property, and making contracts. Oregon thus became the only free state admitted to the Union with an exclusion clause in its constitution.

This, too, is covered extensively: https://www.oregonlive.com/history/2020/06/oregons-founders-...

And more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53996159

I honestly don't know if you could've found a worse example.

	▲	legitster 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> but you have nearly entirely white cities like Portland that also experienced their own explosive suburban growth in the same time period Yes, it was exactly my point that Portland was already the whitest metropolitan area in the country. And yes, I am well aware of the extensive redlining (my grandparents lived in Vanport before it was destroyed). And yet they still had people explode out into the suburbs through the 50s and 60s. This is a counter-example to the thesis that urban flight was purely a racist response to "preserve apartheid". No one is arguing that racism didn't exist. But suburbanization happened everywhere around the world where cars were introduced (even places with almost no diversity). To blame suburbanization as a purely racial phenomenon is not true.

▲

hobo123 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm wondering how much of it was racism, and how much was people simply being aware that the "worse" areas of town had lots of crime (which they associated with the color of the people living there, not knowing any better) and they didn't want that crime to come to their area.

If I'm walking a street at night and I see a guy with attributes associated with poverty, I'm more likely to switch to the other side of road than if he's wearing a suit, just saying.