Above: a map of Detroit showing the percentage of occupied housing units by census tract in 2022. Tracts with no highlighting have less than 64 percent occupied housing units. Major parks (dark green) and major cemeteries (light green) are shown for clarity. Source: detroitography.com

Fellow Substacker Bill Fulton of The Future of Where has been on point with his recent posts on “garlic knot” cities — places that have increasingly successful downtowns and growing suburbs, but many distressed and struggling neighborhoods in between. It’s something I’ve written about extensively, and I commend Bill for taking the subject on.

Four years ago I wrote about this in terms of the life cycle of such neighborhoods. Please check this out. Tomorrow, I’ll show some examples of “garlic knot” development patterns in other cities, which makes it clear that Black avoidance is still an enduring feature of American society.

Originally posted: February 7, 2021

Without a great deal of thought put into it, most urban observers can rattle off what can be considered a reasonable life cycle for neighborhoods – a growth phase, a stable peak or plateau, a period of decline, a phase of accelerated decline, then ultimately a chance at renewal. It’s a familiar pattern, not unlike the four seasons most of us experience every year. What distinguishes cycles in neighborhoods within and between cities is usually the height of their growth phases, the depths of their declines, and the overall duration of all cycles.

But Black urban neighborhoods in American cities seem to have a life cycle all of their own. The process in Black neighborhoods deserves keen understanding.

First of all, I think it’s important to note that the life cycle of Black neighborhoods usually starts well before any Black residents live in them. Indeed, in my view the growth phase of neighborhoods has almost always taken place without Black involvement. Historically the housing and commercial infrastructure of urban neighborhoods were created to appeal to specific market segments – working class laborers, office and administrative workers, upper middle class professionals. Such neighborhoods often had an immigrant or native component to them. However in 19^th and 20^th century America, that did not include Blacks, unless segregated areas were purposely developed to exclude Blacks from other parts of a city. Blacks have rarely gotten in on the ground floor of neighborhood growth.

After a certain period neighborhoods reach a level of stability. Whether they’re comprised of small workingmen’s cottages, walkup apartments or spacious homes, they reach a point when they’ve maximized their growth potential and the focus shifts toward maintenance. How long a neighborhood remains at this stable phase depends on who is permitted to live within it. There are neighborhoods that have been relatively stable for a half-century or more, because they continually appeal to and attract a market segment fairly consistent to what was attracted to it in its early days. But it’s often at this point that Black residents move in. But reactions to our arrival disrupts the trajectory of the cycle.

The Great Migration saw millions of Blacks move from rural locations in the South to urban neighborhoods across the nation. They were seeking the economic opportunity presented to them by the promise of well-paying manufacturing jobs, but they were also seeking the social opportunity to escape racial violence and dehumanizing second-class citizenship in the Jim Crow South. The economic importance of Blacks at the time was recognizable. But White society in Northern cities wasn’t any more interested in integration than their Southern peers.

Swift Transition

That created the “vacuum” – the White flight that precedes Black neighborhood residency, and continues to occur as Black neighborhood residency expands. This happens when a neighborhood reaches its peak, but there’s an uncertainty among White residents as to how long it will stay at that level. If White residents believe their stability is threatened, they’ll move – whether the move is viewed as a lure to greener pastures, or an outside force that compels them to do so.

My parents bought their first house, in Detroit, in the summer of 1968. I was almost four years old at the time and my sister was coming up on her first birthday. The house was a two-story, three-bedroom, one-bath brick Colonial style built in 1950. Probably about 1,800 square feet in size, with a half-finished basement. It was located on a 50-foot wide lot in a solid single-family residential neighborhood on the city’s Northwest Side. It’s still there.

Our house was one of maybe twenty on our Manor Street block. My parents told me we were the fourth, maybe fifth, Black family to move onto the block. If I remember correctly, they bought the house from another Black family that owned it for maybe five years or so. Being just short of four at the time I don’t recall many details, but I vaguely remember a White family living next door to us with a son about my age. I don’t remember any other White families from that time. What I do know is that by the time I started first grade two years later, there were no more White families on the block to remember, with only one elderly White couple across the street that remained through the ‘70s.

The change from mostly White to mostly Black was swift.

Black residents initially moving into new neighborhoods generally equal, and often exceed, the socio-economic standing of the White residents they replace. They enter with good families making good incomes. But by the time the vacuum kicks in, the forces are too strong against it to forestall eventual decline. How so? When White residents move, they take the community infrastructure with them. Small businesses, local banks, key institutions leave as well, leaving little behind for the new Black residents to build upon. A lack of access to credit among Blacks begins to show up as fewer and poorer quality retail in neighborhood commercial districts first, and then as deferred housing maintenance.

Race to the Bottom

After a point, Black neighborhoods arrive at one of two states of existence. Some neighborhoods enter an uneasy equilibrium state, looking virtually unchanged for decades – the same people, the same stores, the same institutions – but without the energy or economic security you can see in other neighborhoods. Their notable for their tenuousness and insecurity. That’s my old Detroit neighborhood. Perhaps more common, however, is that the vacuum that started the process continues to pull energy away from the neighborhood. It accelerates. Middle class Black residents elect to move, often selling their homes to working class Blacks. New residents move in but now there’s even less local capital available for neighborhood revitalization. Home prices and rents fall, more homes and businesses become vacant. The downward spiral continues until the neighborhood is a shadow of its former self. It hits bottom and stays there for quite some time.

Consider Chicago’s Grand Boulevard neighborhood, also known as Bronzeville. The 1.73 square mile neighborhood on the city’s South Side is well-known for being an entry point for Blacks coming to Chicago. Its transition from White to Black began more than a hundred years ago; there had been a small Black community beginning in the 1890’s, but by 1920 Blacks constituted 32 percent of Bronzeville’s population of nearly 77,000 people. Just ten years later in 1930 Blacks were 94 percent of more than 87,000 people.

The stifling segregation imposed on Black residents led to extreme overcrowding in the neighborhood. In 1950 there were more than 114,000 residents – 66,000 people per square mile, or 104 people per acre – and 99 percent of them were Black. It was a vibrant community. But once new neighborhoods opened up to Black residents, it was virtually emptied. Bronzeville’s population fell by more than half by 1980, to 54,000 people. Population continued to slide; by 2010 Bronzeville’s population was under 22,000, an 81 percent decline since its 1950 peak.

What’s distinctive about Black neighborhoods is evident when they reach this phase. In the best cases they can be frozen in time. In the worst cases they can see unimaginable decline – outright abandonment – with little hope for renewal. Non-Black neighborhoods can and do decline. But Black neighborhoods often reach depths other neighborhoods rarely see.

What’s next for Black neighborhoods? Mostly, the pattern holds but with a very important caveat. Many Black neighborhoods will continue to decline, perhaps to the point of near abandonment. And then, only then, will others on the outside look at what used to be a thriving community as a blank slate waiting for renewal. A phoenix rising from the ashes. I call it displacement by decline, or maybe even passive-aggressive displacement. Don’t directly confront the people of the neighborhood you wish to change; wait until 80 percent of it is cleared and then revitalize it. It’s an emerging pattern in the many of the so-called “legacy cities” of the Midwest. At its heart, its core, is Black avoidance.

Look at cities like Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Buffalo. They’re not booming in the way that any of our nation’s “superstar” cities are, but there are pockets of renewal in all of them. Curiously, where the pockets of renewal occur rarely touch or extend into Black neighborhoods, despite all talk about gentrification displacement. Why? Because I’ve consistently witnessed in cities across the country that former low income, working class White neighborhoods are first in line when it comes to revitalization. When that inventory is exhausted, attention often gets turned to Latino neighborhoods. Only when a city is booming at an extraordinary rate, or is somehow geographically constrained, does attention turn to Black neighborhoods.

But I’m reminded of a neighborhood like Detroit's Midtown, a veritable hotspot in an otherwise still struggling city. I remember it as the Cass Corridor. The area is known for being where Wayne State University and the Detroit Institute of Art are located, but it was also one of the areas that emptied first in the famous way that Detroit's become known for abandonment. Cass Corridor was rebranded as Midtown and did indeed make an astounding comeback – but only after its Black residents had been gone for decades.

Related to that trend will be the acceleration of the process in suburbia. Middle class Blacks have been flocking to suburban communities for decades now. Some are living in stable multiracial, multiethnic communities and are contributing to the diverse surroundings. Many more Black residents are residing in living in suburban communities that are following the same segregation patterns as their city cohorts.

I used to believe that Black people had to accept a good deal of the culpability in the quality of our communities. We, I thought, hadn’t made the investment we needed to make to maintain our homes. We didn’t embrace entrepreneurship to start small businesses that would populate neighborhood commercial districts. We didn’t develop the necessary institutions (beyond churches) to contribute to our social well-being.

I don’t believe that anymore. I believe we’ve done the best we could with the resources available to us. Our neighborhoods suffer not from inaction, but disconnection. Segregation continues to underscore everything about our neighborhoods. Segregation creates inequality.

And I don’t mean simply interpersonal segregation. I mean systemic and structural segregation that results from Black avoidance. It’s evident in how in how Black homeowners almost never see the housing value appreciation that White homeowners experience, which limit both neighborhood revitalization and generational wealth. It’s evident in how obscenely high property taxes are reflective of the disparate impact of manufacturing and commercial development losses. It’s evident in how even today banks refuse to lend money in Black neighborhoods.

Exactly seven years ago I wrote a story about the decline of East Cleveland, and used the analogy of an oxbow lake to describe some Black urban neighborhoods. Oxbow lakes are formed when the main stream of a river meanders from its original channel because of flooding or bank erosion. The oxbow lake left behind becomes stagnant and never again benefits from the constant flow of the river. Another term for it is backwater, long used as metaphor for places that have been bypassed.

Tell me there’s a better analogy for how a neighborhood, community, city or even region can be starved of the necessary, life-sustaining nourishment that places need. I want Black neighborhoods to be a part of the mainstream. We need to find a way to restore the flow.