Complex systems rarely have mono-causal sources of change.

From The Truth About White Flight by William Voegeli.  The discussions of White Flight and Gentrification are two sides of the same coin - most people are more apoplectic about one or the other but they both are the same phenomenon: demographic change in quick order.

Most discussions of white flight is in terms of an assumed racism but neighborhoods often transition in one or two decades for multiple reasons including an aging demographic replaced by young families, old religious/immigrant concentrations replaced by other or secular groups, rich replacing poor, higher education replacing lower education, high income replacing low income, high status replacing low status, one ethnic group replacing a different ethnic group (i.e. not a race issue per se), etc.

All these different drivers are in play and it is a mere matter of ideological blinkers to focus on a singular potential driver at the expense of others.  

Between 1997 and 2003, when we were away from Atlanta, there were many examples of this changeover of demographics.  Our immediate neighborhood went from a strongly Jewish community to a secular or multi-religious community, from older generation to young families, and from middle class to upper middle class.  A couple of neighborhoods over, the area went from lower income African-American to lower income Hispanic.  Yet another went from low income native born renters to Asian-American immigrant renters.  

Gentrification is shoe-horned into race but it is a fascinatingly more complex phenomenon than usually represented.

It is very easy to see established older communities as being ripped apart by predatory developers and speculators but that really doesn't capture the actual causes.  

In my researches over the years, I discovered a couple of key attributes which fundamentally changed my understanding of gentrification.  The first is that gentrifying neighborhoods tend to have high turnover rates.  Sure, there might be a substrate of 20% of neighbors who have been there forever, but it is not uncommon that there is, in any given year, 20-30% resident turnover.  People aren't being turfed out of their old homes.  They are leaving for a plethora of reasons.  Usually because they were short term renters with no intention to reside in the neighborhood long term.  The high turnover rate is in part why neighborhood transformations can occur so quickly, frequently in less than a decade.

The high turnover of residents is usually linked to a separate causal attribute.  Often, gentrification occurs in neighborhoods with low home ownership.  It is not uncommon for 70-90% of residences (whether single family or multi-unit) to be owned by property companies rather than resident property owners.

Again, this is somewhat at variance to the traditional predatory property developer's story.  People are not being forced to give up their homes due to fraud or menace.  They are leaving one location to live in another, opening up an opportunity for a newcomer to come in and take up residence.  First time home buyers, students and artists seeking cheap accommodations, suburban residents seeking shorter commutes, etc.  

The owners of these properties being sold may or may not be resident in the neighborhood.  Rental management is hard, hard work and a sudden desirability of a neighborhood can facilitate people reaping a windfall in place of grueling hard work.  

Gentrification is not the evil that it is often represented to be.  It is a societal emergent set of desires and trade-offs which lead to a different clearing point of the market where, on balance, everyone is better off than before.  It is the very personification of change with both its benefits and its disruptions.

And without gentrification, stagnant communities typically continue a decline.

The opposite of gentrification is white flight, a story of legend.  Among the most brutal examples of inherent and systemic racism.  But as with the mismatch between gentrification in ideological legend and the actuality, so too is the legend of white flight different from the narrative when it is examined in detail rather than related as an assumed belief. 

Hence the interesting article by Voegeli.  One of the few I have ever seen which moves past urban legends into the data to understand what was actually happening.  Voegeli's basic argument is:

But the contention that white racism caused white flight, which then caused disinvestment, leaving behind devastated majority-black communities, is suspiciously tidy. Rather than being a single result derived from a single cause, this social transformation, unfolding over decades, involved decisions and actions by millions of people in dozens of metropolitan areas—and almost certainly had multiple causes, interrelated in ways too tangled for simplistic explanations.

As an argument, that is a reasonably credible assertion.  But how true might it be?  What is the supporting data?  Read the whole thing for the empirical information supporting his argument.  His basic argument is that white flight was a phenomenon of the 1950s to the 1970s - a period of time when the middle class ballooned, when household incomes made everyone dramatically more prosperous, when the national highway system was built bringing distant land within commuting distance, when households went from no cars to two cars, when civil rights legislation and cultural norms began to move beyond group or racial identities towards greater tolerance and openness, etc.  In such an environment of change, ascribing a complex phenomenon such as urban growth and neighborhood construction and decline to single causal explanations is almost certainly wrong.

I found this insight particularly interesting.

Suburbanization was a phenomenon even in metropolises that saw little demographic change from the Great Migration. Boustan cites Minneapolis–St. Paul, which, after World War II, saw only a small increase in the number of black residents but rapid growth of its suburbs. The “newly prosperous families,” she writes, were “seeking larger houses and more open space.” In Lost Cities (1995), Alan Ehrenhalt discusses Elmhurst, a Chicago suburb 16 miles west of the Loop. The newcomers who bought its new ranch houses and split-levels were “refugees from Chicago apartments,” he writes, “fleeing all the things suburbanites fled in the 1950s: landlords and cooking smells, neighbors one flight above or uncomfortably close next door, physical surroundings that carried indelible reminders of hard times years ago.” One new resident told the Elmhurst Press, “It is wonderful to be able to see grass and trees, instead of hallways and speeding automobiles.”

It is indisputable that there are racists out there and predatory developers and con artists etc.  But it is also indisputable that complex social conditions usually arise from multiple and complex sources.

It is a disgrace to try and accord mono-causal sources to complex social systems and such an approach frequently drives us towards bad assumptions and worse treatment choices.  The sooner we focus on facts rather than ideological belief systems, the better for everyone.