USA TODAY: Chicago’s population fell by 200,418 from 2000 to 2010, and blacks accounted for almost 89% of that drop. Hispanics surpassed blacks as the city’s largest minority group. Meanwhile, Plainfield grew by 204% overall, and its black population soared by more than 2,000%, the fastest rate in the region…
The trend has broad policy implications: As blacks who can afford to live in the suburbs depart, will cities have enough resources to help the low-income blacks left behind? Will the demand for housing be strong enough to support the revitalization of traditionally black inner-city neighborhoods? How will black churches, businesses and cultural institutions be affected? Will traffic congestion worsen because blacks moving to the suburbs keep their jobs in the city?
Roderick Harrison, a sociologist at Howard University in Washington and a former chief of the racial statistics branch of the Census Bureau, says the changes reflect the improving economic status of some African Americans. “It hopefully does represent people actually being able to take steps that they see as improvements in their lives,” he says… (more)
EDITOR: The flight of middle class African-Americans from cities has been a major source of a breakdown in value, communities, and law and order. The counter trend is the movement up middle class and upper class people back to attractive downtown areas, so called “Gentrification.”
Gentrification was blocked downtown by the construction of the construction center project in the zero block of South Queen Street across from the Lancaster Newspapers, thus creating a dead block and thwarting the natural spread of gentrification southward. In the long run, the mislocation of the convention center will be an ever greater set back for downtown than the wasted tax payer dollars.
