[Clampdown69]

Originally Posted by mjlo

In your original statement you said metro Detroit was 90% white, you mentioned nothing about individual cities. EVERY metro area have some uber white suburbs, that's not something specific to Detroit.

Also Wayne County has 1.7 million people in it Detroit has under 700k, when you do the math outside of the city of Detroit there are roughly 130K AA residents in Wayne County outside of the city of Detroit, when added to other races Non Detroit Wayne County is around 70% white.

Metro Detroit is whiter than New York and LA, but then so are 3/4ths of every other metro out there. That's nothing out of the ordinary for most places.

Now if the point of your statements are to highlight that metro Detroit is "more segregated" than average, your point is taken. I cannot argue with that. If your point is that Metro Detroit is "more white" than average I disagree with you. I don't think statistics support that.

I said metro detroit is 70% white, give or take. There are plenty of burbs that hit 90%. What I am saying is that although most people think Detroit is all black. In the metro area however blacks are outnumbered by Caucasians by a large margin. I'm interested to see the Arabic percentage. Next census they are adding a Middle eastern/North African category and stopping considering all mid-easterners besides Israelis white for census purposes.

[MSwartz]

Saginaw has a geographical boundary in the Saginaw River which splits the city in half. One side, according to what I've been told, was traditionally black. That side is still almost entirely black, but the boundary has become less clear over the past several decades as blacks have traversed the river. I haven't looked at historical racial statistics in the Census, but I think that Saginaw has probably become more black in the past several decades.

What factors led to that initial split? I guess the answer is natural migration patterns. Much the same way that immigrants tend to cluster in localized areas, blacks for one reason or another settled in a lopsided way in Saginaw. It would seem, looking at the race-based map that I am linking at the end of this post, that massive white flight probably did occur on the the east side of Saginaw during initial migrations. The explanation for crime then becomes more straightforward since the black side of town likely faced challenges not faced in white-dominated areas.

Any further decrease in the white population of Saginaw proper during modern times is something you can relate to this bilateral relationship as well. Saginaw's white population dropped from 47.02% in 2000 to 43.5% in 2010. Of course you have to take into account things like older people dying in explaining the decrease, but white people do seem to be moving from the city as it changes. I don't know if I would necessarily call this modern migration "white flight" though as the reasons people have for moving might not be so race-centric. I'd imagine the outflow of the black population is similar in cases where individuals have the means to move.

What I'm getting at is that these trends that led to initial segregation are probably breaking down. More blacks will be escaping generational poverty and moving into more traditionally white areas. I do think that Saginaw proper will probably persist to be less white, but not primarily because of white flight.

Here is a map I found on Mlive:


Compare and contrast the above graph with this visualization of race distribution:
The Racial Dot Map: One Dot Per Person for the Entire U.S.

[MS313]

Originally Posted by usroute10

You bring up a good point, that if a prestigious university had existed in Detroit, then more highly educated, relatively well-to-do people would have lived and stayed in the neighborhoods surrounding the university. Unfortunately, the University of Michigan was founded in Detroit, but moved in the 1840's to Ann Arbor when that town offered the University a ton of land to move there.

The University of Michigan was located smack dab in the middle of downtown Detroit. Very few large, prestigious universities are located in the downtowns of large cities (U of M usually ranks amongst the top 5 public universities with Virginia, North Carolina, UC-Berkeley, and UCLA). It's fascinating to think how U of M would have evolved if it had stayed in downtown Detroit, and what impact it would have had on the development and decline of the city.

I get depressed thinking about if UofM would have stayed in Detroit and grown into the university that it is today. It being downtown, it probably would have spread out, maybe east near the riverfront, that area today would probably be like Ann Arbor or Midtown on steroids PLUS the riverfront and more wealthy neighborhoods. The core would have greatly benefited from being close to UofM and vice versa.

I heard Detroit also used to be the capital of Michigan.

Wow, it's funny how dramatically different things could have been from a decision that was made over 100 years ago.

[animatedmartian]

Originally Posted by MS313

I get depressed thinking about if UofM would have stayed in Detroit and grown into the university that it is today. It being downtown, it probably would have spread out, maybe east near the riverfront, that area today would probably be like Ann Arbor or Midtown on steroids PLUS the riverfront and more wealthy neighborhoods. The core would have greatly benefited from being close to UofM and vice versa.

I heard Detroit also used to be the capital of Michigan.

Wow, it's funny how dramatically different things could have been from a decision that was made over 100 years ago.

Detroit's Capitol Park is where the capital used to be. Thus why it has such a name.

[wanderer74]

I grew up in Saginaw and the poster above was correct with the crime maps. However, over the past 20 years, the entire city of Saginaw has become predominantly black and there has indeed been a great deal of white flight. Middle-class whites are moving to Freeland, Hemlock, Swan Valley, Midland. If you look at the population growth in the surrounding suburbs and compare it to the city's population, it's easy to tell that there has indeed been a lot of white flight from Saginaw.

I don't know as much about Flint, but as far as I know, it's much the same. The white population of both cities has dramatically decreased in recent decades, while their population in the surrounding suburbs has increased.

[Ummagumma]

Wasn't Detroit's white flight in a large part the result of Coleman Young's nearly 30 year reign (among other things) ?

Just compare Dearborn and Detroit.

[WayneCounty]

Originally Posted by Ummagumma

Wasn't Detroit's white flight in a large part the result of Coleman Young's nearly 30 year reign (among other things) ?

Just compare Dearborn and Detroit.

It's way more complicated than that. Coleman certainly didn't help the city but many of things that happened were beyond his control, including decades of racial segregation, the 67 riots, and other issues faced by rust belt cities.

[Ummagumma]

Originally Posted by WayneCounty

It's way more complicated than that. Coleman certainly didn't help the city but many of things that happened were beyond his control, including decades of racial segregation, the 67 riots, and other issues faced by rust belt cities.

Well he - and the way he shaped the city government - certainly let the whites know they had no say in how Detroit was run.

[Michigantown]

Originally Posted by Ummagumma

Wasn't Detroit's white flight in a large part the result of Coleman Young's nearly 30 year reign (among other things) ?

Just compare Dearborn and Detroit.

Detroit started losing population in the 50s.

[animatedmartian]

Originally Posted by Ummagumma

Well he - and the way he shaped the city government - certainly let the whites know they had no say in how Detroit was run.

Not sure how white people could have felt that way when so many whites were still around 10 years after he was elected into office. White flight had its biggest impact during the late 70s and 80s when there were other nationwide changes in how the economy operated which is something outside of Coleman's control.