Quote:
Originally Posted by CleverOne
Its really about having a choice. Their arent a lot of black communities thriving like this. When they happening they are special. These neighborhoods are all over America but white whether intentionally or not they are what they are.
The black neighborhoods that are thriving tend to have a higher white percentage of residents than poor black areas which are usually almost 100% black and Latino.Even here in Castleberry its at least 15-20% white
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Unfortunately, I can't find statistics that combine Germantown's east and west sides; if you look at the city map that defines city neighborhoods, you will find that the two are one, but all the data reporting sites, including this one, publish data for (West) "Germantown" and "East Germantown" separately. The east sides of all three of the neighborhoods that comprise pre-1854-consolidation Germantown Township and Borough (Germantown [the borough], Mt. Airy, Chestnut Hill) are poorer than their west sides.
But here are the demographics and median household income data from C-D for Germantown and East Germantown; Germantown Avenue is the dividing line between the two (all figures 2019 estimates):
Germantown (26,590 residents)
Demographics: 62.5% Black, 18.5% White, 5.4% American Indian/Alaskan Native, 5.2% Hispanic/Latino, 3.6% two or more races, 2.9% Asian, 1.8% some other race
MHI: $57,136, above the citywide median of $47,474 but below the statewide median of $61,744
East Germantown (36,938 residents)
Demographics: 77% Black, 6;8% some other race, 5.8% White, 3.1% Hispanic/Latino, 2.4% American Indian/Alaskan Native, 1.9% two or more races, 1.6% Asian, 1.4% Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander
MHI: $45,773, below both medians. The section of East Germantown I live in (east of Chew Avenue, south of Chelten is the lowest-income part of the neighborhood
ZIP code 19144, which includes all of Germantown west of Chew Avenue, is often used as a proxy for the neighborhood as a whole, though it leaves out its easternmost and poorest Census tracts and includes a few of East Falls' easternmost and most affluent ones. Here are the stats for the ZIP code:
43,884 residents
Demographics: 76.47% Black, 17.2% White, 3.95% Hispanic/Latino, 2.44% Asian, 2.27% two or more races, 1.2 percent some other race, 0.41% American Indian/Alaskan Native
MHI: $34,075
C-D's definition of East Germantown includes a small slice of East Mount Airy's southern end, the part south of Upsal Street between Germantown and Chew avenues. (Johnston Street is the Germantown-Mt. Airy border west of roughly Musgrave Street and Washington Lane is the border east of it.)
Overall, however, I'd say that the stats for Germantown (Philadelphia's most populous neighborhood, btw) bear you out. Yet the outside perception of it is that it's poor and crime-ridden. Granted, it's not that affluent, especially not its east side, but it has a decent number of middle-class residents who love and care about it a great deal. (And, as I noted before, a few of them really are affluent: according to the income distribution, a little more than 10 percent of the residents of the ZIP code have household incomes above $125k/year. I can think of very few "poor" or "low-income" neighborhoods in any American city that have that high a percentage of affluent residents.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by MDAllstar
Gentrification can be good in this case if Black people are buying becoming owners so the culture doesn’t change. I think the issue people have with gentrification is the race of the gentrifying new comers. Speaking from experience, when I bought my house, it was twice the price of everything on the street years ago. Because I’m Black, I was accepted by the neighborhood even though I raised the value of all the houses around me. If I had been White, the reception would have been completely different even though I made the same financial impact as a White person.
People don’t complain about rich Black people buying mansions in Woodmore in Prince George’s county either. They don’t complain about mansions in Cascade down in Atlanta either. It’s racial, not income.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutiny77
Generally speaking, most residents in Black gentrifying neighborhoods don't have an issue with new non-Black residents who get to know their neighbors, understand the local culture, and work with longtime neighbors to make the neighborhood better. They simply dislike folks who move in, act as if the neighborhood is a blank slate, make no attempts to form genuine relationships with existing neighbors, and try and impose their will and preferences on the neighborhood without regard to the local culture that was already in place before they moved in. Typically new residents aren't going to act in brazenly anti-social ways and deliberately attempt to antagonize longtime residents, but it seems that misunderstanding and attempting to eliminate certain preexisting cultural practices or subvert unspoken norms by new residents most often become sources of tension between them and longtime residents. There's the infamous incident involving go-go music blasting out of the speakers from the local mobile phone store I believe it was in DC that a new resident tried to get shut down which longtime residents didn't like. I'm not sure if it was DC or NYC where there was an incident involving the drum circle on weekends, and I read about an incident in Oakland where new residents complained that a local church was too loud. In all of these incidents, it was just one or a few new residents that transgressed but oftentimes media appeared to depict all new White residents as responsible which wasn't the case.
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I think what I boldfaced in
Mutiny77's reply is what makes the difference. The trouble is, many non-Black residents — especially higher-income white ones — who move into a neighborhood act like they're settling undiscovered territory and immediately proceed to put their stamp on it, regardless who's living there already. The white progressive types have a word for this: "Columbusing." This is what happened in Point Breeze, a low-income Black neighborhood in South Philly, when younger, more affluent white residents began moving into its eastern reaches, closer to the Broad Street Line subway. They even gave the area they settled in a new name — "Newbold" — and that also pissed off the existing residents. (The people who founded the Newbold Neighbors Association have at least atoned for that, renaming their group East Point Breeze Neighbors, but the damage had already been done.)
Generally speaking, the whites who moved into Germantown in the 1970s and 1980s (when many of the existing white residents fled) were of a more countercultural bent, and they gave the neighborhood a boho vibe that persists to this day (the surviving members of the Sun Ra Arkestra still live here, in a house whose back recently collapsed; there's a fundraising campaign going on to rebuild it). But as a result, both the whites who remained and those who moved in were thus a little more conscious and a little less colonizing, and that makes a difference too. (Actually, one of the institutions that reflects this difference is First Presbyterian Church in Germantown. Founded in 1811, the church considered relocating out of the neighborhood in the 1960s, but it decided to stay instead and welcome Blacks into the congregation. Today, it's one of an extremely small number of Protestant churches with a racially integrated congregation (I'd estimate the Black:white ratio as about 50:50).)
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