White City

No, not the home of the BBC and a long-forgotten dog track, but the exemplar of US urban cool.

As New Geography explains:

Among the media, academia and within planning circles, there’s a generally standing answer to the question of what cities are the best, the most progressive and best role models for small and mid-sized cities. The standard list includes Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, and Denver. In particular, Portland is held up as a paradigm, with its urban growth boundary, extensive transit system, excellent cycling culture, and a pro-density policy. These cities are frequently contrasted with those of the Rust Belt and South, which are found wanting, often even by locals, as “cool” urban places.

But look closely at these exemplars and a curious fact emerges. If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles you will find that the “progressive” cities aren’t red or blue, but another color entirely: white.

In fact, not one of these “progressive” cities even reaches the national average for African American percentage population in its core county. Perhaps not progressiveness but whiteness is the defining characteristic of the group.

The progressive paragon of Portland is the whitest on the list, with an African American population less than half the national average. It is America's ultimate White City. The contrast with other, supposedly less advanced cities is stark.

So what's happening?

As the college educated flock to these progressive El Dorados, many factors are cited as reasons: transit systems, density, bike lanes, walkable communities, robust art and cultural scenes. But another way to look at it is simply as White Flight writ large. Why move to the suburbs of your stodgy Midwest city to escape African Americans and get criticized for it when you can move to Portland and actually be praised as progressive, urban and hip?

Sounds vaguely familiar doesn't it?

Of course,  they will give any number of reasons for this.  A bigger house,  quieter roads,  better schools,  less crime. They will continue to protest their anti-racist credentials,  even as they abandon the inner city for the posh, white areas that they sneered at for so long.

But America's Bens and Chloes (or whatever their US equivalents are) have found an even better alternative. They don't have to move out to the hinterland, they can just migrate to their 'own' hip urban areas.

It gets better still, though, because if Ben and Chloe move to an area with lots of other Bens and Chloes, they can implement the sort of progressive policies that suit people like them, secure in the knowledge that other people with different values won't come along and mess it all up.

In fact, lack of ethnic diversity may have much to do with what allows these places to be “progressive”. It's easy to have Scandinavian policies if you have Scandinavian demographics. Minneapolis-St. Paul, of course, is notable in its Scandinavian heritage; Seattle and Portland received much of their initial migrants from the northern tier of America, which has always been heavily Germanic and Scandinavian.

In comparison to the great cities of the Rust Belt, the Northeast, California and Texas, these cities have relatively homogenous populations. Lack of diversity in culture makes it far easier to implement “progressive” policies that cater to populations with similar values; much the same can be seen in such celebrated urban model cultures in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Their relative wealth also leads to a natural adoption of the default strategy of the upscale suburb: the nicest stuff for the people with the most money. It is much more difficult when you have more racially and economically diverse populations with different needs, interests, and desires to reconcile.

As the Economist said, five years ago:

[T]here is some evidence that diversity has costs. In a recent book, “The Size of Nations”, two economists show that managing ethnic diversity is expensive, as governments must deal with the demands of groups competing for scarce resources. In the United States, a study has shown that people are willing to pay more for services like education if they can live with people more like them in ethnicity and class. In other words, people place a value on being with others like them. Multi-ethnic nations have been breaking apart recently (the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia); few countries have merged during the same period, and those that have were ethnic mates (East and West Germany, North and South Yemen).

A quick look at the Human Development Index (HDI), released each year in the report, seems to support the idea that diversity has its costs. In the bottom 35 countries ranked as having “low human development”, all but three are in vastly diverse Africa, where borders drawn by colonialists showed no respect for tribal, linguistic or religious identities. Meanwhile, while single-ethnicity states are rare (just 30 countries in the world do not have a religious or ethnic minority that constitutes at least 10% of the population), they are strongly represented at the top of the HDI: places like Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Japan, Ireland and Austria.

America's hip young middle-class kids are, it seems, setting up their own little Swedens,where the lack of diversity enables them to create the progressive urban environment they want.

Welfare, fast and clean public transport, walkable communities, free education, free health-care, parks and open spaces; they all seem so work so much better when the people that use them are People Like Us.

Hat Tip for the article and the link: Laban Tall

Comments

[asquith]

Well, that's one of the many reasons why top-ranking US Republicans are as pro-immigration as Democrats, because they rather like having people at each other's throats, also having their cronies make money out of cheap labour.

(Voting base of both parties be damned).

Although it isn't simply & crudely about race all the time- you'll probably find a few wealthy Asians & blacks living there, but you certainly won't find working-class types of any race.

This country is now in the stages of seeing race replace class as an identifier.

[Grant]

Hm. It seems to me that you are making a huge amount out of pretty scant evidence. For no discernibly good reason, the report dismisses Chicago, New York and Los Angeles from its discussion (how convenient), and concentrates merely on a handful of cities that, also conveniently, appear to bolster its conclusions. But I see nothing here to show that the cause and the effect that the author wants to link are actually linked.

As for Ben and Chloe in the UK - again, I can't see the link that you are making. I know plenty of Bens and Chloes - now all with children, and all, without exception, living in diverse neighbourhoods, as they have since leaving university (Brixton, Deptford and Harringay, to be precise). They grew up, and their parents still live, in leafy Home-County comfort. What does this prove? Nothing much - it's just anecdotal, as is your original post on Ben and Chloe. But it is my strong impression from living in places as diverse as London and Manchester in the UK and New York in the States, that there are far, far more Bens and Chloes living in such diverse areas now (both with and without children) than there were in my parent's generation.

I don't disagree with your point that such people can choose where they live, whereas many in the poor working class cannot - but it's a stretch to make the point, as you seem to, that 'progressives' as you put it are merely a bunch of cosseted hypocrites ready to move to Saffron Walden as soon as parenthood strikes.

[Mark]

Grant- how many of the Ben & Chloe types that you know have kids of secondary school age ? In Haringey, for instance, the Ben & Chloe types so predominate in certain areas (Muswell Hill, Crouch End) that the primary school catchment areas reflect their values (and have a demographic to match, ie sharply at odds with other areas of the borough).

The crunch for B&C types usually comes when the eldest kid gets to 10 (and not 'when parenthood strikes' as you put it).Then they look at the secondary schools, and often take flight. If they aren't within commuting distance of a good, usually faith, school (Lady Margaret C of E, London Oratory,JFS etc)they either move out or, if the kids are bright enough, enter them for the 11+, which still operates in some outer boroughs.

The New Geography article overall suggests that John Derbyshire's observation about American social geography is basically correct.Namely, its defining characteristic is the desire of American whites (and middle class blacks)to live as far away as possible from ghetto blacks and hispanics.

[Grant]

Mark

I don't necessarily disagree with you (although I'd love some more actual hard facts in this debate - at the moment it seems to be little more than stating the bleedin' obvious; people with money tend to use that money to live in nice places). My point is that affluent white professionals currently seem far more likely to live and bring up children in diverse and 'challenging' neighbourhoods than they have been at any time in my lifetime (or ever). Of course, many, many do not. But the trend is that Ben and Chloe seem more likely to do so than their equivalents in previous generations, so it's stretching the argument beyond the facts to castigate them as hypocrites. Some are, many are not.

[Mark]

As an addendum to my last comment the 11+ option was of course the one famously chosen by Harriet Harman & Jack Dromey, who got their son into St Olaves grammar in Bromley via this route. Entrusting him to the local Peckham comp was an option they would taken only at the point of a sharp bayonet.

[bodo]

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/

The downside of diversity
A Harvard political scientist finds that diversity hurts civic life. What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth?

By Michael Jonas | August 5, 2007

IT HAS BECOME increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite.

[Michael]

Grant,

Those who stay are so few. Even my media B&Cs who a few years ago couldn't possibly live away from town and still earn a crust have chosen a 20 hour-a-week commute rather than that fugee-camp of a GP surgery in Stockwell.

I came clean years ago and, whether because of my estuary elocution or the words themselves, was the pariah of the orthodox parddie-pee-pol of 'surf-lenden' (they never could get it right).

When I now meet them for Christenings, weddings or - more usually, leaving parties -they encourage me to shoot from the hip and then delight in my boring, prosaic, hackneyed observations as if they were new wisdom.

But they still can't allow themselves to admit that they were not only the architects of that far-out public convenience in Angell Market, but of that political correctness in Islington Town Hall.

[icr]

"For no discernibly good reason, the report dismisses Chicago, New York and Los Angeles from its discussion (how convenient),..."

When out-of-towners visit Chicago they seldom stray beyond downtown and the North side lakefront entertainment zone inhabited by non-reproducing young SWPL's (what used to called Yuppies) and the wealthy. Whites have been cleansed from the rest of the city-except for a few areas on the edges populated by police and firefighter families who must live there due to residency requirements-and the white percentage in the public schools is in the single digits.

Likewise, in NYC the last bastion of working and middle-class whites is Staten Island-whites in the rest of the city being overwhelmingly young,childless SWPL's , the rich and the elderly.

Los Angeles, of course, is basically a Mexican city due to a generation of unchecked illegal immigration.

[icr]

"public schools" = government schools

[chachi]

So whites who live in white ghetto's, run down, high crime level estates with the worst antisocial behaviour in britain, when those whites who do become wealthy or better off, do they not move away from the white areas they grew up in?
Yes they do move to wealthier areas which are predominantly white but its not mostly to do with the fact that their new neighbour will probably be white but the fact that they will be wealthy & have the same lifstyle that they also moved there to have, if the country was majority non white & most of the wealthy people also were non white then the culture difference would not stop wealthy white people moving to wealthy non white areas, the deciding factor is the fact that becoming wealthy in a poor area makes you a target, & people move to areas where they will be no more of a target than those around them...other wealthy people.