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Pittsburgh has some neighborhoods that are somewhat isolated and have an Appalachian company town appearance, but it's more like a dense, yet rural and working class feel. Go to any city of any size throughout the Appalachians and you will see this and sometimes such places will appear in a rural area standing alone.
Cities such as Johnstown and Altoona are not large cities, but they are somewhat dense and predominately working class, white, and poor. Many Pennsylvania cities tend to follow that pattern, with the nicer areas in the surrounding townships. However, the poverty in more diverse in the eastern cities (Reading, Lancaster, York, etc.), with more Hispanics and Blacks included.
Delray is/was another area of SW Detroit with a relatively high White population.
SW Detroit has had a good sized Black population for a while too.
The schools in that area of the city had Black, White and Hispanic students, which I believe it still does to some degree.
Yes, definitely. It was traditionally a white area, but also one that had blacks. Never had an exclusionary feel, but was (and is) very tough.
Also, it's not really a white ethnic area. It's Appalachian whites or super poor whites who never left for the burbs. Not similar to the Irish or Italian enclaves common in the East Coast cities. SW Detroit never had that ethnic solidarity thing going.
Detroit did have tough white ethnic neighborhoods too, including some that were racist, but they're long gone. The East Side of Detroit was mostly white ethnic (usually Polish, Italian or German) and strongly resisted integration. At some point in the 1970's, though, there was a tipping point, and the East Side basically went from white to black in about five years.
Pittsburgh has some neighborhoods that are somewhat isolated and have an Appalachian company town appearance, but it's more like a dense, yet rural and working class feel. Go to any city of any size throughout the Appalachians and you will see this and sometimes such places will appear in a rural area standing alone.
I know what you mean to a certain extent. A lot of the hilly neighborhoods which have become blighted, losing much of their housing stock, have heavy forest growth and feel like they're in the middle of nowhere now. These can be black, white, or mixed neighborhoods. Somewhere like this is a good example.
Since Detroit has declined drastically in recent decades, more so that almost any other large city, I would expect radical change.
Yes, good point. The reason I was a bit surprised for SW is because it hasn't changed that much, at least in terms of appearance. Most of Detroit has changed radically over the years, but SW is kind of isolated and off the grid.
SW was already very "ghetto" 30 years ago, with abandonment, decay, gang problems and the like. There were interracial (but mostly white) gangs roaming the Springwells corridor.
The shift from majority white to majority Mexican was very gradual. Really the only obvious visual change is that the retail corridors (Vernor and Springwells) shifted from shady old man bars to cheap taquerias (but the old man bars are still around) and the dumpy groceries became dumpy supermercados.
Indianapolis has plenty of low income white neighborhoods in the city, though not urban by the standards of many metros.
In the mid 1960's, a horrible crime occurred on 3850 E. New York in Indianapolis in a deplorable house. It was the Sylvia Likens crime where Gertrude Baniszewski along with her own children and some of the neighborhood children tortured Sylvia to death.
That area was described as very poor in the 1960's and many broken homes and stories of despair. Gertrude's family was from rural Illinois and Iowa but she grew up in that area of Indianapolis. I looked up the demographics of that area of Indianapolis and still seems to be very poor and predominately white. I did a Google search of that area and looks very depressed, more so than places in the poorest sections of the South.
Btw, the two poorest census tracts in South Boston have median incomes of $16k/year and $27k/year. The third poorest, $83k/year. The projects drag two census tracts down; but back in 1980 the difference between the project wasn't quite as stark. The big east-west contrast in wealth in South Boston (with a big increase in income going east) is mostly gone. % with children has steeply declined as well, but even in 2000 pre-gentrification it was lower than demographically similar Quincy / Braintree / Weymouth.
Yes, good point. The reason I was a bit surprised for SW is because it hasn't changed that much, at least in terms of appearance. Most of Detroit has changed radically over the years, but SW is kind of isolated and off the grid.
SW was already very "ghetto" 30 years ago, with abandonment, decay, gang problems and the like. There were interracial (but mostly white) gangs roaming the Springwells corridor.
Yea, I don't know much about Detroit. I did a few random streetviews of the area. Most blocks looked intact but often a bit rundown, though there was sometimes a few houses missing. Clearly less dense than South Boston in built form, but without abandonment and housing fully occupied it would be somewhat dense, those houses looked packed together and there's some 2 family homes mixed in.
My interpertation, is that both South Boston and SW Detroit declined in the 1970s and were at nearly the same level in 1980. South Boston stabilized, SW Detroit continued to decline. One big contrast between the two cities in 1980 was that the greater downtown area of Boston was among the wealthiest parts of the city 1980; in Detroit, among the poorest.
I know what you mean to a certain extent. A lot of the hilly neighborhoods which have become blighted, losing much of their housing stock, have heavy forest growth and feel like they're in the middle of nowhere now. These can be black, white, or mixed neighborhoods. Somewhere like this is a good example.
One block over looks like it's ok shape. Though the houses are surprisingly new looking. Or is it just the vinyl siding?
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