Return flight
Cheap housing, cost of living drawing whites back to Detroit.
DET ROI T • Whites are moving back to the American city that came to epitomize white flight, even as blacks continue to leave for the suburbs and the city’s overall population shrinks.
Detroit is the latest major city to see an influx of whites who may not find the suburbs as alluring as their parents and grandparents did in the last half of the 20th century.
Unlike New York, San Francisco and many other cities that have seen the demographic shift, though, it ’s cheap housing and incentive programs that are partly fuelling the regrowth of the Motor City’s white population.
“For any individual who wants to build a company or contribute to the city, Detroit is the perfect place to be,” said Bruce Katz, co-director of the Global Cities Initiative at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. “You can come to Detroit and you can really make a difference.”
No other city may be as synonymous as Detroit with white flight, the exodus of whites from large cities that began in the middle of the last century. It moved from being a thriving hub of industry with a population of 1.8 million in 1950 to a city of roughly 680,000 in 2014 that recently went through the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. In those decades, the population has gone from nearly 84 per cent white to a little less than 13 per cent white.
In the three years after the 2010 U.S. Census, though, De- troit’s white population grew from just under 76,000 residents to more than 88,000, according to a census estimate.
The cheap cost of living, opportunities for young entrepreneurs and push by city-based companies to persuade workers to live nearby have made a big difference, experts say.
Simple math convinced music producer Mike Seger to move from adjacent Oakland County into a rented two-storey house on Detroit’s east side that also houses his Get Fresh Studio. Seger, 27, pays US$750 a month in rent, and said he wouldn’t have been able to find anything comparable in the suburbs for that price. Indeed, the average monthly rental rate of a three-bedroom single-family home in Detroit is US$800, as opposed to US$1,100 to US$1,400 in the suburbs.
Blacks appear to be weary of waiting for Detroit to turn things around and have been migrating to nearby suburbs in search of comfort, better schools and lower crime. The city’s black population was nearly 776,000 in 1990. By 2013 it had dipped to an estimated 554,000.
Elizabeth St. Clair, 27, and her family may count themselves among black former Detroiters. The woman and her boyfriend are searching for rental homes in Detroit and several inner-ring suburbs. She has two school-aged children. She acknowledges things are getting better — pointing to a campaign to tear down vacant houses and eradicate blight. But the high cost of car insurance, underperforming schools and the condition of many neighbourhoods are obstacles.
“As I see a resurgence of Detroit, I really want to stay here,” St. Clair said. “I feel there are two Detroits. There’s a Detroit where you are able to go downtown and enjoy, and then in our neighbourhoods there’s not much change.”