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Most of California's cities and metros are pretty evenly spread aside from certain ultra high income neighborhoods that exist in LA, SF and SD. They manage to an acceptable job evenly distrubuting poverty across the metro, atleast the LA metro. Now Detroit, Michigan today still sound like what Los Angeles used to be in the last century but maybe I'm off on that but the poll would agree.
Which metropolitan area do y'all think have the biggest contrast between the central city and its suburban and exurban areas? Culturally, politically, demographically etc? There is always a rural-suburban-urban divide in every metro area and this isn't just about strained relations between the city and suburbs though this can be a factor.
Most of California's cities and metros are pretty evenly spread aside from certain ultra high income neighborhoods that exist in LA, SF and SD. They manage to an acceptable job evenly distrubuting poverty across the metro, atleast the LA metro. Now Detroit, Michigan today still sound like what Los Angeles used to be in the last century but maybe I'm off on that but the poll would agree.
I think you are unintentionally mischaracterizing LA's hyper-segregation. Poverty is absolutely not "evenly distributed". There are just multiple pockets of concentrated poverty in different locations across a massive area. I think what you mean is that every sub-region of LA metro has its own share of wealthy and poor enclaves. But that doesn't mean that LA "evenly distributes poverty". LA very much concentrates poverty...in multiple locations.
I think we're on the same page, but it's worth clarifying.
New Orleans, Baltimore, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, Memphis, and St. Louis all have majority black city propers and majority white suburbs.
The City of Philadelphia currently has a plurality Black population. This figure has fluctuated between plurality Black and plurality white for the last three Censuses. Take Hispanics out of the white population figure and Blacks become a clear plurality, but they're still not a majority. Leave them in and the white and Black populations are nearly the same.
Asians, who account for nearly 8 percent of the population, and mixed-race individuals, who make up almost 3 percent of the population, make up the remainder of the city's population.
Something that I consider interesting of my hometown of Kansas City is that its older (pre-WW2) built-up portion and its post-WW2 neighborhoods, especially those North of the River, are political opposites, and, of course, most of the city's Black population (about one-fifth of the total) lives in the older built-up part of the city. Were the Jackson County portion of the city separate from the portion in Clay and Platte counties, the pattern you describe would hold.
I think the more typical case is that of a very liberal city, with moderate to very liberal suburbs and very conservative to moderate far-flung exurban and rural areas. Usually the city and suburbs make up a minority of the land area but the majority of the population base of the metro region. Therefore, usually even in cases where the city and the metro area could be seen as very different, they are not really that different at a population level, since the biggest fraction of the population usually resides in the inner suburbs, with the next biggest fraction in the city itself, and the smallest fraction in the parts of the metro which are most different from the city.
This would be the situation in Atlanta or Austin. I think NOLA and Memphis might be the biggest exceptions. Saint Louis and KC probably are too but I don't know that much about them. Detroit maybe next up and Baltimore is up there too. In some sense Detroit and especially Baltimore I think of as places where demographically the city is different, but politically it's not really that different. Philly is another example of this where the demographics racially and economically are really different outside the city, but the political presentation is less starkly different.
(those other places you mentioned, I don't consider them to be major metros)
A metropolitan area of 2.8 million isn't major?
That's how many people live in metropolitan St. Louis.
BTW, I misspoke: When you include Hispanic whites in the total, according to current Census Bureau estimates, 44.8 percent of current Philadelphia residents are white and 43.6 percent are Black. Non-Hispanic whites account for 34.3 percent of the population. I'm assuming that the percentage of Black residents would also fall if you took Hispanics out of the mix, for they make up 15.2 percent of Philadelphia's population right now.
I think the more typical case is that of a very liberal city, with moderate to very liberal suburbs and very conservative to moderate far-flung exurban and rural areas. Usually the city and suburbs make up a minority of the land area but the majority of the population base of the metro region. Therefore, usually even in cases where the city and the metro area could be seen as very different, they are not really that different at a population level, since the biggest fraction of the population usually resides in the inner suburbs, with the next biggest fraction in the city itself, and the smallest fraction in the parts of the metro which are most different from the city.
This would be the situation in Atlanta or Austin. I think NOLA and Memphis might be the biggest exceptions. Detroit maybe next up and Baltimore is up there too. In some sense Detroit and especially Baltimore I think of as places where demographically the city is different, but politically it's not really that different. Philly is another example of this where the demographics racially and economically are really different outside the city, but the political presentation is less starkly different.
Actually, that's a relatively recent development in Philadelphia's case.
When I moved here in 1983, three of Philadelphia's four "collar counties" in southeastern Pennsylvania were reliably Republican; only Bucks fluctuated between Republican and Democratic.
But over the subsequent decades, as college-educated whites have become more liberal, so have the collar counties. Montgomery, the most populous of the four, was the first to flip to solidly Democratic; Chester was next to go, though it still elects Republicans at the local level in some areas. Delaware County, home to "the last Republican machine in America" (edited to add: and the most blue-collar of the four, and also home to Pennsylvania's oldest and poorest municipality, Chester), turned all-blue in the 2018 election, when Democrats swept all seven seats on the County Council.
It used to be that in statewide elections in Pennsylvania, the huge Democratic majority in Philadelphia was pretty much canceled out by the Republican margins in its suburbs, and who won depended on whether more Greater Pittsburghers and Lehigh Valley residents turned out to vote or more of the rest of the state did. Now Philly and its suburbs amplify one another while the counties surrounding Pittsburgh, but not Allegheny itself, have swung to the right. So there's still a similar statewide electoral dynamic here; it's just that its geography has shifted.
Last edited by MarketStEl; 03-13-2021 at 11:55 AM..
New Orleans, Baltimore, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, Memphis, and St. Louis all have majority black city propers and majority white suburbs.
Where are you getting this info from?
Chicago majority black city limits
Are Atlanta and DCs suburbs even majority white when taken as a whole?
Are Atlanta and DCs suburbs even majority white when taken as a whole?
DC, definitely: the overwhelming majority of Black DC suburbanites live in one county, Prince George's (MD), the most affluent majority-Black jurisdiction in the United States.
The other three Maryland counties and the four Virginia counties and four cities that make up the rest of the metro DC suburbs are definitely overwhelmingly white.
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