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"Professional" as in those with wealth and white-collar jobs usually. Those are the people I often hear decry gentrification the most but as soon as they get money they move out of black neighborhoods to the suburbs. I've seen it first hand in Atlanta. Instead of people improving the neighborhood they're from they move out to South Fulton or Stockbridge and leave the culture of the transit connected urban neighborhoods to completely change and then complain about how white they've become. Yes, we need more affordable housing everywhere but why do we so easily abandon our communities? But that's a conversation for a different thread.
If you want to start that thread ill be there lol.I agree with you 1000%. Its not as uniform a trend across all cities. Lot of variation in that.... but overall yea-that what's been going on sadly.
Those are all cool looking neighborhoods. My fear with DC was that I wouldn't be able to feel comfortable in urban settings as most talk about professional African Americans living far out in Maryland but these neighborhoods feel right to me.
to be fair, DC is quite small so Maryland isn't as "far" as people think. You can live in Bethesda, Silver Spring, or Prince George's County and still enjoy all that DC offers.
to be fair, DC is quite small so Maryland isn't as "far" as people think. You can live in Bethesda, Silver Spring, or Prince George's County and still enjoy all that DC offers.
Yes, there are a lot of parts of Maryland that are adjacent to DC proper. DC itself is only 67 sq mi. I'm further out in Bowie, and if there's no traffic, I can get to Downtown DC in roughly 30 minutes...however, Bowie is very suburban.
Quote:
Originally Posted by demonta4
"Professional" as in those with wealth and white-collar jobs usually. Those are the people I often hear decry gentrification the most but as soon as they get money they move out of black neighborhoods to the suburbs. I've seen it first hand in Atlanta. Instead of people improving the neighborhood they're from they move out to South Fulton or Stockbridge and leave the culture of the transit connected urban neighborhoods to completely change and then complain about how white they've become. Yes, we need more affordable housing everywhere but why do we so easily abandon our communities? But that's a conversation for a different thread.
Americans love their suburbs, and many Black people feel getting a big house in the burbs to show they've "made it" is still a strong appeal for many, especially in places like Atlanta where you have a large contingent of Northeast transplants who may not want to live in dense, close quarters plus your average native southerners and transplants from other southern states who hate dense living, so you have what you have - people play in the big city and move to the suburbs as they get older.
You also have to factor in other things like schools (which can vary so much within an urban district, and some people don't want to deal with choosing charter/magnet/or private schools when they can go to a suburban district which may be more uniform across the board in terms of scores, safety, etc.) and people who might have appreciated city living but their needs and desires changed as they've gotten older - an urban lifestyle that was appealing in your 20s and 30s isn't going to be as appealing to many people in their 40s, especially when many people feel they "need" to get a big house and fill it with 2.5 kids. Having children and thinking about safety and protecting your family becomes a priority for many people when they start having families. I'm a single black male in my late 30s, so my needs and desires will be very different from a married black man with kids my age in terms of where I go home at night.
And in a place like ATL or DC, where you have a lot of middle and upper middle class suburbs with people who look like you, it can be very appealing. Also, urban living in the classic sense is kind of "new" to ATL compared to DC and legacy cities like Chicago and New York, so the desire to stay in an urban neighborhood just doesn't have the cache and appeal that it does in older more legacy cities. They have their black suburb with other black folks doing well adjacent to them, so doing that in a more urban neighborhood isn't as much of an incentive.
Also, there are historical reasons and issues with affordable housing that factor in, but indeed, that is a convo for another thread.
However, to each their own, mileages and experiences may vary since needs and desires are so individual, so I try not to judge others who choose to move out because they may have legitimate reasons that may not apply to me.
Actually Charlotte is becoming a serious contender on the black awareness. It's starting to develop a lot of the amenities that people are used to finding in Atlanta. It's got a stable/growing 35% black population and has overall more black people than the city of Atlanta. It's also seen as a lot cooler than Dallas, another city where blacks seem to be flocking to. It's also pretty close to Atlanta so it benefits from that.
Atlanta's black population (in the city) going down, or at least the percentage is, and it's about to become less than 50% black. I think Washingtons even faster changing in that regard.
Funny that you say that. I was born and raised in D.C. and moved to Charlotte my junior year of high school. After graduating college(Greensboro,N.C.)I moved to Atlanta for 7years and then back to Greensboro,N.C. and then back to Charlotte in 2018. I thoroughly enjoy all three cities and they are the best to me when it comes to African Americans. D.C. offers the best Urban footprint and of course being my hometown I am extremely partial too. Northwest( U street/ florida ave/ Howard has entertainment options for days. Atl is ATL. Midtown, Little 5Points, Decatur,....etc is cool. While not as classically Urban as D.C. there are pockets of urbanism around. You can definitely see and feel that you are in a big city. Now living in Charlotte even though it is smaller than the other 2 you can definitely see that it has come into its own in the last 20 years. The African American feel is definitely vibrant and you can tell it's only going to get better. We live in the Wesley Heights area. To me you cant go wrong with any of these great choices.
You probably missed it when I explained it before, but here was what my experience was...
Charlotte in many ways is a mini-Atlanta, but what it has an advantage in is it's less pretentious, which I saw at every turn. There isn't the level of keeping up appearances, too many people in Atlanta are focused on looking a certain way to impress other people who are doing the same thing to impress them. This dynamic exists everywhere to some degree, but it's at a disgusting level in The A, never seen anything like it...
It's easier to avoid the minstrel show in Charlotte. In Atlanta if you go damn near anywhere it's like a gotdamn Love & Hip-Hop show, I have no desire to see my people feeding stereotypes or be a part of it myself, completely flagrant and open with it. I hated that...
The other thing is because I lived in Charlotte first, then went to Atlanta, as well as having also seen and lived/spent time in DC and LA, and connected to people in all of those places, going to Atlanta and seeing widespread black achievement and success wasn't as big a deal as if I'd never seen it before. I have no clue if that's a selling point today, but ~7 years plus ago when I went there, that was one of the major selling points in popular conversation about Atlanta..."we eating down there in a major way, it's a chocolate city, etc"...
The imagery of Atlanta was that it was blackness paved with gold, and because I regarded these other cities highly, I had high expectations of Atlanta. Literally did not see anything greater except there are MORE of us there than most places, but the quality of life didn't seem discernible greater. When you add in the things that are drawbacks for me, the minstrelsy factor as well as the pretentiousness, widespread suburbia, horrible weather, difficult interracial politics, etc, Charlotte is beating Atlanta in a landslide in comparison...
It has the similar widespread suburbia but without the negatives of Atlanta and a realer salt-of-the-earth vibe. Note, for people such as my good friend Dr Literal (Mutiny LOL), I'm just shedding light on why Charlotte appeals more to Atlanta to me, and possibly some reasons why others do as well. Shouldn't have to be stated that I'm not saying everyone experiences Atlanta the same or has the same takeaways, but for people like the good Doctor I'll add this anyway hahaha...
Pretty strong language here. Question: is the "minstrel show" criticism primarily about fashions? That's my takeaway but correct me if I'm wrong.
I actually find it pretty fascinating how people's experiences living in the same city/metro can differ so greatly depending on certain factors. Honestly, most of your criticism seems to be rooted in the circles you ran in more than anything. I mean if you mostly hung out with the College Park/Riverdale crowd, then your perspective is somewhat understandable. That wasn't my crowd; I resided in the northern 'burbs when I lived in the Atlanta area to be within closer proximity to my job so my day-to-day life was lived in a more diverse context (actually a Whiter context my first year as I lived in Cherokee County) and my social circle consisted mainly of people I went to undergrad with and other members of BGLO's, and a few people I met through them. I've come to believe that in most instances (not all, but probably most), the quality of someone's experience with a city will be 50% +/- attributable to their social environment and as I previously stated, metro Atlanta's Black population is definitely large and varied enough that it contains different scenes, so you have a greater degree of control over your social environment compared to so many other metro areas.
As far as the other drawbacks you mentioned go, I think pretentiousness kind of falls into the category that I just described in the previous paragraph. Even so, to the extent that I had to encounter it, I suppose it wasn't a big deal to me; same goes for the strain of pretentiousness that exists here in the DC area. At least I get to see some well-dressed and stylish Black people. Widespread suburbia is something you'll have to deal with in every major metropolitan area and I think they all have redeeming features. In suburban Atlanta, that includes the second-most affluent predominantly Black county in the nation (and several other solidly middle/upper middle class Black neighborhoods in other suburban counties), the most diverse county in the Southeast (Gwinnett), a poor rural county that used to be known as a Klan stronghold which is rapidly diversifying and is now one of the most affluent in the nation (Forsyth), two of only seven large counties in the nation that are >5% Black with a higher Black median household income than White median household income, lots of tree cover, rolling terrain (especially in the northern 'burbs), several historic and newer mixed-use town centers, notable recreational features (Big Creek Greenway, Stone Mountain, Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, Kennesaw Mountain, etc.), an increasingly large number of Black elected officials, positive QOL metrics for the suburban Black population, etc. I would also note that many of the things I just mentioned are what sets the Black metropolitan population apart from most other metros, but those aspects aren't highly visible. Overall, I think suburban Atlanta has more interesting characteristics than suburban Charlotte but I give suburban Charlotte credit for its lakes being closer to the city. Also you can live most of your life within the I-285 Perimeter and not have to deal with all that suburbia on a regular basis if you so desire. To me, the worst feature of suburban Atlanta is actually the absence of a feature, namely the subpar road network which is the biggest reasons for its crazy traffic. I don't quite get the horrible weather criticism though, unless you don't really care for the weather of the Piedmont in general. The racialized regional politics really is a thing ('mainstream' resentment of Black success is a long-running theme in American history), and on top of that, the tensions are just as much about differences in political ideology also which is evident in the high-profile culture wars legislation that the conservative state legislature passes every now and then. Charlotte has gotten a taste of those tensions that revolve around ideology with the HB2 debacle and the airport takeover attempt (in Atlanta, the airport takeover attempts is all about race though) and it will be interesting to see what the future holds there with increasingly Black and Democratic local leadership taking root. So far, the closest thing to regional tensions that exist in metro Charlotte revolves around companies jumping the state line from Mecklenburg to York and Lancaster counties in SC and that's not even a big deal and regional attitudes concerning transit are much more progressive compared to Atlanta historically. But I do wonder how some of the suburban counties will deal with increasing diversity as Mecklenburg County continues to build out and fill up, although I don't expect any will undergo rapid demographic shifts anytime soon.
Now of course metro Atlanta has its issues and there's absolutely no denying that. Charlotte has the benefit of being a younger city and having witnessed Atlanta's missteps in managing growth and development, it actually learned a few lessons and didn't make some of the same mistakes. The historic trajectories of their Black populations are pretty different for sure, but Atlanta's metropolitan Black population is overall a bit more diverse and well-rounded which reflects the diversity of the local economy. There's definitely more good than bad to be found there, and the fact that Atlanta itself holds the unique distinction of being the only truly self-governing major city in the country to have been under continuous Black leadership since the 1970s and prosper, including the achievement of significant milestones such as overseeing Hartsfield-Jackson's growth to become the world's busiest airport and landing the centennial Summer Olympics, is very notable and I don't think many people even know that, or at least they don't think of it in those terms.
Pretty strong language here. Question: is the "minstrel show" criticism primarily about fashions? That's my takeaway but correct me if I'm wrong.
I actually find it pretty fascinating how people's experiences living in the same city/metro can differ so greatly depending on certain factors. Honestly, most of your criticism seems to be rooted in the circles you ran in more than anything. I mean if you mostly hung out with the College Park/Riverdale crowd, then your perspective is somewhat understandable. That wasn't my crowd; I resided in the northern 'burbs when I lived in the Atlanta area to be within closer proximity to my job so my day-to-day life was lived in a more diverse context (actually a Whiter context my first year as I lived in Cherokee County) and my social circle consisted mainly of people I went to undergrad with and other members of BGLO's, and a few people I met through them. I've come to believe that in most instances (not all, but probably most), the quality of someone's experience with a city will be 50% +/- attributable to their social environment and as I previously stated, metro Atlanta's Black population is definitely large and varied enough that it contains different scenes, so you have a greater degree of control over your social environment compared to so many other metro areas.
As far as the other drawbacks you mentioned go, I think pretentiousness kind of falls into the category that I just described in the previous paragraph. Even so, to the extent that I had to encounter it, I suppose it wasn't a big deal to me; same goes for the strain of pretentiousness that exists here in the DC area. At least I get to see some well-dressed and stylish Black people. Widespread suburbia is something you'll have to deal with in every major metropolitan area and I think they all have redeeming features. In suburban Atlanta, that includes the second-most affluent predominantly Black county in the nation (and several other solidly middle/upper middle class Black neighborhoods in other suburban counties), the most diverse county in the Southeast (Gwinnett), a poor rural county that used to be known as a Klan stronghold which is rapidly diversifying and is now one of the most affluent in the nation (Forsyth), two of only seven large counties in the nation that are >5% Black with a higher Black median household income than White median household income, with lots of tree cover, rolling terrain (especially in the northern 'burbs), several historic and newer mixed-use town centers, notable recreational features (Big Creek Greenway, Stone Mountain, Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, Kennesaw Mountain, etc.), notable ethnic diversity in certain places (Gwinnett, north Fulton, south Forsyth), an increasingly large number of Black elected officials, positive QOL metrics for the suburban Black population, etc. I would also note that many of the things I just mentioned are what sets the Black metropolitan population apart from most other metros, but those aspects aren't highly visible. Overall, I think suburban Atlanta has more interesting characteristics than suburban Charlotte but I give suburban Charlotte credit for its lakes being closer to the city. Also you can live most of your life within the I-285 Perimeter and not have to deal with all that suburbia on a regular basis if you so desire. To me, the worst feature of suburban Atlanta is actually the absence of a feature, namely the subpar road network which is the biggest reasons for its crazy traffic. I don't quite get the horrible weather criticism though, unless you don't really care for the weather of the Piedmont in general. The racialized regional politics really is a thing ('mainstream' resentment of Black success is a long-running theme in American history), and on top of that, the tensions are just as much about differences in political ideology also which is evident in the high-profile culture wars legislation that the conservative state legislature passes every now and then. Charlotte has gotten a taste of those tensions that revolve around ideology with the HB2 debacle and the airport takeover attempt (in Atlanta, the airport takeover attempts is all about race though) and it will be interesting to see what the future holds there with increasingly Black and Democratic local leadership taking root. So far, the closest thing to regional tensions that exist in metro Charlotte revolves around companies jumping the state line from Mecklenburg to York and Lancaster counties in SC and that's not even a big deal and regional attitudes concerning transit are much more progressive compared to Atlanta historically. But I do wonder how some of the suburban counties will deal with increasing diversity as Mecklenburg County continues to build out and fill up, although I don't expect any will undergo rapid demographic shifts anytime soon.
Now of course metro Atlanta has its issues and there's absolutely no denying that. Charlotte has the benefit of being a younger city and having witnessed Atlanta's missteps in managing growth and development, it actually learned a few lessons and didn't make the same mistakes. The historic trajectories of their Black populations are pretty different for sure, but Atlanta's metropolitan Black population is overall a bit more diverse and well-rounded which reflects the diversity of the local economy. There's definitely more good than bad to be found there, and the fact that Atlanta itself holds the unique distinction of being the only truly self-governing major city in the country to have been under continuous Black leadership since the 1970s and prosper, including the achievement of significant milestones such as overseeing Hartsfield-Jackson's growth to become the world's busiest airport and landing the centennial Summer Olympics, is very notable and I don't think many people even know that, or at least they don't think of it in those terms.
I will say that I'm slightly familiar with Charlotte as I have family in Union County but I'm not sure if there are many government jobs. Does Raleigh have a large and active African American community? I really just don't want to go to a place where I can't work with and see people who look like me on a daily basis. I also don't want to live in a place where I could get shot for simply existing and jogging in my neighborhood.
Charlotte really only has local government, a smattering of state government, and a relatively small subset of federal government jobs. The federal positions are mainly with the IRS, Customs and Border Control, VA (a big new VA hospital was recently constructed), and airport-related agencies like TSA and FAA. Out of those, any policy jobs will most likely be tax policy-related positions with the IRS and few and far between. The city works from a Black cultural perspective, but government isn't one of its economic fortes.
Raleigh, along with neighboring Durham, absolutely has a large and active Black community due to being the state capital and having several HBCUs, including the oldest in the South (Shaw). Not only that, but a healthy share of the Black workforce is college-educated and professional/white-collar. The policy analyst positions in the area will mostly be scientific-, healthcare-, and fiscal-related.
I am a person that wants to retire in either Atlanta or DC after my time in the Air Force, so I'll give you my viewpoint based on my familiarity with both cities.
Urbanity: DC is the more urban city by a good margin, Atlanta is improving in that department, but it's not there with DC.
Amenities: Assuming you're speaking for Black Americans, Atlanta is currently considered the black capital to most people. It's in a tier by itself when it comes to activities, events for blacks, although I would put DC in the top 5.
Occupation/Salary: Atlanta will give you the best bang for your buck...no other explanation needed.
Location: DC is in a better location and closer to other major cities.
Nightlife: Atlanta is better overall although I think DC's nightlife is more centralized.
Overall, I can't tell you which one to pick, but expect a better urban experience in DC. On the other hand, expect more excitement and a better COL in Atlanta.
DC over ATL for your criteria, its going to be more expensive in DC but well worth it with the number of amenities in close reach, the public transportation is also substantially better and you will experience more authentic city living vs Atlanta.
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