The black flight.
Was in NYC this weekend for a friend’s wedding and walking round downtown, my wife was struck by the whiteness of the people on the street. Later, at the wedding one of my friends who is black, told me he’s leaving the East Village and moving to Brooklyn because his neighborhood is too homogeneous.
I was intrigued because this is exactly what started happening in San Francisco when I lived there. The rising costs of housing forced out everyone except upper middle class professionals, who tend to be white. I think the city suffered as a result. It became less interesting, and it was one of the things that made it easier to leave and move to Minneapolis. USA Today recently ran a story about city officials trying to reverse this.
The Times has recently started covering this in NYC. Here they talk about the rise of rich white kids and here they talk about black families leaving NYC and other cities too.
Obviously this is a very troubling trend. Cities, which ought to be centers of invention, places where different ideas and cultures rub together and fuse, depend upon diversity. It also compounds the U.S. problem of on the one hand an aging population and on the other hand more restrictive immigration policies, which all together seem to me to deal a big blow to America’s ability to produce innovative ideas.
Software and services have long been an area where the U.S. has dominated but stories like this, talking about software innovation in China (a bittorrent client that runs at 50X speed), are proof that this can’t last forever.
On a brighter note, Minneapolis is looking more diverse every day!