White flight

White Flight is a demographic trend that has been taking place in many American cities, especially in the Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western sections of the United States since the 1950s. The predominantly wealthy Caucasian populations started leaving the inner core cities for newer suburban communities to escape the increasing crime and racial tension that plagued inner cities throughout the region.

The effects of white flight have been devastating for the cities that have been hit by this phenomenon, especially Detroit, Michigan, Saint Louis, Missouri, Chicago, Illinois, Cleveland, Ohio, and Los Angeles, California. The former two have lost more than half of their 1950 peak populations due largely to white flight.

As wealthier white residents abandoned the inner city neighborhoods, they ultimately left behind increasingly poor ethnic populations whose neighborhoods rapidly deteriorated, beginning in the 1950s and especially in the 1960s. Jobs and businesses disentegrated along with the neighborhoods and ultimately turning the increasingly poverty-stricken areas into crime-ridden slums. These areas are often populated by African Americans and Hispanics. Much of Detroit, the Greater Los Angeles Area (e.g., Compton and Inglewood), large areas of the West and South Sides of Chicago and Saint Louis are prime examples of this phenomenon.

Many whites once lived in urban neighborhoods in Los Angeles before departing the city in large numbers after the 1965 Watts Riots (a trend that acutally began before the riots but accelerated after them). The Watts neighborhood is now thoroughly African American and Hispanic.

White flight continues in some areas to this very day but has taken on a new trend as some of the older suburbs have been experiencing similar urban decay similar to their parent cities especially in some of the southern suburbs of Chicago adjacent to the city itself. East Saint Louis, and many of the neighboring communities on the Illinois side of the Saint Louis metro area have also suffered from urban decay with the decline of the manufacturing industries that powered the economies of the region. Other examples include the suburban region of San Gabriel Valley in Southern California as many working class Hispanics began moving into the area. The exodus of white Americans in this particular region occurred during much of the 1980s and 1990s.

The population decline of some Midwestern, Northeastern, and Western cities has either slowed down and/or even reversed but some areas remain economically devastated due to seemingly-permanent economic shifts and job losses. The future of this trend remains to be seen.

The opposing social trend of wealthy social groups moving into an inner city area and displacing the indigenous minority groups is called gentrification.