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... Even in some parts of Silicon Valley in northern California, whites are beginning to move from heavily Asian populated areas. This one really confounded me since, generally speaking, Asians are well integrated. They do well in school, have high incomes, etc. It's a recipe for a desirable neighborhood, but whites are leaving.
Article: The New White Flight - WSJ.com
My initial thought is that, despite income, crime, and other factors, most people tend to want to live around people that look like them. ...
I remember when that WSJ article was published about Cupertino, a middle class community in Silicon Valley. We lived in Cupertino at the time, and we knew Cathy Gately, the woman interviewed in the article:
Quote:
Cathy Gatley, co-president of Monta Vista High School's parent-teacher association, recently dissuaded a family with a young child from moving to Cupertino because there are so few young white kids left in the public schools. "This may not sound good," she confides, "but their child may be the only Caucasian kid in the class."
We are Caucasian, fwiw.
The community we lived in, Seven Springs (Seven Springs Community) is a planned unit development of fairly dense housing. Here is a home for sale in this community - a 2,445 sq ft two story home on a 4800 sf lot, and it is for sale for $2,000,000. See 11685 Walnut Spring Ct, Cupertino, CA 95014 - Zillow. This is across the street from Gately's residence. Despite the seemingly outrageous price for a house, Cupertino is frequently viewed as the "poor relation" compared to the more upscale neighboring communities of Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Saratoga & Los Gatos.
The local community is heavily 1st generation American -- frequently mom & dad both have PhDs in technical disciplines - EE, ME, ChemE, Chemistry, Physics, Materials Science -- definitely the deep end of the gene pool. They tend to have immigrated to the USA from China or India, although some were elsewhere in the world. Essentially all have become US Citizens. Aging grandparents tended to live with them, and frequently spoke no English. The parent's English was good, although heavily accented and sometimes hesitant. The kids, almost always born in the USA, were as American as Apple Pie, so to speak.
The academic pressure on the children was immense. IMMENSE. A rash of teenage suicides happens every few years in part because of this.
It was common for Dad to work in high tech, and Mom to stay home to raise the kids (at least for a few years prior to returning to the workplace). It was common for Mom to show up at the elementary school just before recess, and during recess take the kids into the library for drill & kill rather than let them play on the blacktop or jungle gym. It was common for parents to complain to the teachers & the Principal that there was not enough homework. That's right -- not enough homework. At the same time, the high schoolers report subsisting on 4 to 5 hours of sleep all year long because they spend the rest of their time studying, studying, studying.
You may recall the controversial article "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" -- about Tiger Moms: Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior - WSJ.com . While the author was referring to her family in Connecticut, it equally describes life in Cupertino:
Quote:
A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:
• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin.
Locally, it was referred to as the HYPS syndrome -- if the children didn't get admitted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Stanford, it was almost viewed as an insult against their ancestors. Teens regularly thought life would be over if they only were admitted to their safety school such as Cal, Northwestern or Duke.
We started our daughter out in the public school system, but after a few years switched her to private school that was better suited to her (kids don't come with instruction manuals, unfortunately). It wasn't about "white flight" as the racial profile at the private school was similar to the public schools. The academics at the private school were, if anything, even more intense -- the year my daughter was graduated, 12% of her graduating class matriculated as freshman at MIT, for example.
At the end of the day, by virtue of where we as parents live, we determine the universe from which our kids will select their friends & peers & role models. While growing up, I'd ask our daughter's friends & classmates "what do you want to be when you grow up?" I'd get answers such as Engineer, Entrepreneur, College Professor, or at the very least a Doctor. All the kids' role models were the parents - successful, educated, professionals.
Once my daughter was in college (an Ivy League School), when I'd visit her, I'd ask her college friends the same question, although phrased differently of course. Her college peers (women) found the question odd. "What do I want to do after graduation? Why, I'm going to marry an Investment Banker, and we'll live on Long Island or Connecticut."
It was and still is shocking to me -- these bright women viewed their future in the context of their own role models -- their own mothers & the mothers of their own friends while growing up. What did these moms do? They were married to Wall Street captains of finance, and the moms shopped & went to Pilates & Yoga and had Tennis lessons and had personal trainers. That's what successful women do, they reasoned. I contrast this with my own daughter -- her mother definitely is a high powered captain of Silicon Valley, shops only at discount & off-price stores (and then only on the marked-down rack), never has taken Pilates or Yoga or Tennis, and regularly (prior to retirement) negotiated billion dollar deals with Heads of State around the world.
... Much of what was called "White Flight" in the 1960s was the children of immigrants having more money than their parents and so having the ability to choose to have more space around them...
Perhaps.
I suspect a lot of it was Rational Expectations. Rational expectations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . For several generations, the most valuable asset in a family's portfolio was the home they lived in. If they expected that the value of this asset would decline over time for whatever reason (including racial diversity), it makes economic sense to sell. This doesn't have anything to do with being racist or choosing space - it has to do with future expectations of the value of the asset.
Not all cultures are the same and diversity or multi-culture society is just nonsense. If you look at many of the major cities in the North they were over run with poor blacks from the South that just never did adapt or change their culture or value system once they arrived. The whites for the most part could see it was time to leave and did which you can't blame them. Who wants to be around people with totally different culture, values etc...There is nothing wrong with this since most people like to hang out with people with the same values, culture etc...
In the past, "white flight" was greatly influenced by the transfer of economic opportunities; businesses moving, spreading, also the economic spread to suburbs, the invention of highways, etc. Racial tension certainly didn't help matters, but it wasn't the sole reason for white, educated families leaving urban centers for further away suburbs. It's something that was bound to happen as population spread, highways were built and people saw opportunities to make a living further from urban areas.
You get so use to being in a close neighborhood where it takes you 20 minutes to walk a block. You feel like you belong to one big family and so does everyone else.
When a neighborhood begins to change, it is very sad. Strangers who speak another language and live a different way are now "the neighborhood".
It almost feels like a death, what you loved is gone and you know it will never be back.
In the outer Chicago suburbs (and some are so far I hesitate to call them suburbs) there are 2 flight patterns going on.
In affluent suburbs like Naperville, whites are fleeing "the Indians." It is actually a mix of Indian, Pakistani, Afghani, and variety mix Muslims. The reason white and affluent blacks are fleeting that is because for whatever reason, that mix of immigrants treats everyone (including each other) like dirty pieces of garbage. My kid works at a grocery store in Nville and regularly has items thrown in his face, etc. Although affluent, that particular hodgepodge knows how to work our IL welfare system, because the majority shopping at his store (surrounded by some of the most affluent real estate in the western suburbs) pay with LINK cards (food stamps).
In less affluent/more mixed suburbs like Aurora, whites and black are fleeing Hispanics. When I first moved out this way in the early 90s, black gang crime was a problem in Aurora, there were just places you didn't go. Within 5 years or so between 93-98 when the building boom occurred, probably 90-95% of the black neighborhoods in Aurora were simply taken over completely by Hispanics. Blacks and Hispanics hated each other, there was lots of violence, they would go gang-for-gang, but Hispanics had the numbers and those numbers simply won out. Then in the 98-2008 years, Hispanics moved on to better neighborhoods and surrounding towns, but brought their social problems with them. Again, in the case of the Naperville example, they are hotheaded, treat each other and everyone else like crap, suck entitlements like crazy, and have kid after kid after kid. I work at a national department store where customers (mostly Hispanic) regularly attempt to pay for their purchases with their LINK card. They won't speak English and are abusive when it's clear you don't speak Spanish.
I grew up in Waukegan and my husband grew up in Irving Park and we huddle together with the couple other white families, a mixed white-black family, and a couple black families in our neighborhood. Our neighborhood is otherwise 100% Hispanic with the requisite number of teenagers having babies, families living 10-15 to a (small) duplex house, dozens of cars on the streets, etc. They don't pay their HOA fees and as a result, nobody who lives in our neighborhood can sell their house because the HOA is so upside down no bank will issue a mortgage, it would have to be cash. And no cash buyer is going to buy a home where every night and 24/7 on the weekends it is Cinco de Mayo.
Anyway in Nville and out by me, it was more of a locust effect. It wasn't white flight out so much as a type of invasion in.
In the outer Chicago suburbs (and some are so far I hesitate to call them suburbs) there are 2 flight patterns going on.
In affluent suburbs like Naperville, whites are fleeing "the Indians." It is actually a mix of Indian, Pakistani, Afghani, and variety mix Muslims. The reason white and affluent blacks are fleeting that is because for whatever reason, that mix of immigrants treats everyone (including each other) like dirty pieces of garbage. My kid works at a grocery store in Nville and regularly has items thrown in his face, etc. Although affluent, that particular hodgepodge knows how to work our IL welfare system, because the majority shopping at his store (surrounded by some of the most affluent real estate in the western suburbs) pay with LINK cards (food stamps).
In less affluent/more mixed suburbs like Aurora, whites and black are fleeing Hispanics. When I first moved out this way in the early 90s, black gang crime was a problem in Aurora, there were just places you didn't go. Within 5 years or so between 93-98 when the building boom occurred, probably 90-95% of the black neighborhoods in Aurora were simply taken over completely by Hispanics. Blacks and Hispanics hated each other, there was lots of violence, they would go gang-for-gang, but Hispanics had the numbers and those numbers simply won out. Then in the 98-2008 years, Hispanics moved on to better neighborhoods and surrounding towns, but brought their social problems with them. Again, in the case of the Naperville example, they are hotheaded, treat each other and everyone else like crap, suck entitlements like crazy, and have kid after kid after kid. I work at a national department store where customers (mostly Hispanic) regularly attempt to pay for their purchases with their LINK card. They won't speak English and are abusive when it's clear you don't speak Spanish.
I grew up in Waukegan and my husband grew up in Irving Park and we huddle together with the couple other white families, a mixed white-black family, and a couple black families in our neighborhood. Our neighborhood is otherwise 100% Hispanic with the requisite number of teenagers having babies, families living 10-15 to a (small) duplex house, dozens of cars on the streets, etc. They don't pay their HOA fees and as a result, nobody who lives in our neighborhood can sell their house because the HOA is so upside down no bank will issue a mortgage, it would have to be cash. And no cash buyer is going to buy a home where every night and 24/7 on the weekends it is Cinco de Mayo.
Anyway in Nville and out by me, it was more of a locust effect. It wasn't white flight out so much as a type of invasion in.
This is basically what happened to my family in Phoenix, AZ.
In 1994 we moved into a nice diverse neighborhood. Our street was long and we knew quite a few of the neighbors... and, as was said earlier, sometimes it would take 30 minutes to reach the end of the street.
The neighborhood started to change the day our next door neighbors painted their house this Pepto-Bismol pink. (It was a drop house... easy to find because it was the only pink house on the street.) This was in 1996.
When we moved in 2004 we were (seriously) the last white family to leave. I refused to let them run us out. We left because of them, but mostly because my mom died and my son and I were left destitute and had no choice but to leave.
We did meet a lot of the neighbors in the two months before we left. We had a huge yard sale and had lots of problems with those who only spoke Spanish. Fortunately, it was easy enough to wait for another neighbor to come by to interpret. They were some nice people, but their lifestyles clashed with ours and they made living there a nightmare for my son. (His bed was just feet from pink house and their music room. Poor kid endured 9 years of constant wall thumping.)
This is basically what happened to my family in Phoenix, AZ.
In 1994 we moved into a nice diverse neighborhood. Our street was long and we knew quite a few of the neighbors... and, as was said earlier, sometimes it would take 30 minutes to reach the end of the street.
The neighborhood started to change the day our next door neighbors painted their house this Pepto-Bismol pink. (It was a drop house... easy to find because it was the only pink house on the street.) This was in 1996.
When we moved in 2004 we were (seriously) the last white family to leave. I refused to let them run us out. We left because of them, but mostly because my mom died and my son and I were left destitute and had no choice but to leave.
We did meet a lot of the neighbors in the two months before we left. We had a huge yard sale and had lots of problems with those who only spoke Spanish. Fortunately, it was easy enough to wait for another neighbor to come by to interpret. They were some nice people, but their lifestyles clashed with ours and they made living there a nightmare for my son. (His bed was just feet from pink house and their music room. Poor kid endured 9 years of constant wall thumping.)
The neighborhood I lived in was mixed, but middle class. It was older houses but kept up. People were respectful in a socal way. Then the housing boom took off and older houses were bought up for rentals. The barrio types started moving in in droves as everyone else moved, including the hispanic families who didn't want to raise their kids in a new barrio. There were gang tags all over the place and empty houses broken into and vandalized and the 'mini' gang of ten year olds who followed people not them on the street with their bicycles and threw rocks at people.
Some of them didn't speak English or wouldn't speak English. My son got rocks thrown at him when he and his non-hispanic friend walked around the corner.
If there any question why when the ghetto or the barrio moves in and brings their culture those who do not wish to share it, of all ethnicities, get out of town? Would you like to have to watch out for your kid just so he can walk down the street?
I think 'white flight' is really far more about class and is improperly called 'white' flight since many more than whites flee a taken over neighborhood.
I too lived through the forced busing era. Those who say it was because whites were racist and wanted to move away from blacks totally ignore the real life experiences of those who went to those schools. I was lucky. In middle school, I was able to walk to school. HUD housing was added to the subdivision I lived in. Instantly, crime in our subdivision went up. Children's bicycles were being stolen and repainted, homes in the older section were vandalized and robbed, and cars were vandalized. My parents moved to the country before it got worse. Now that old neighborhood is majority black and is a high crime area in the town. My cousins weren't so lucky. They had blonde hair, blue eyes, and fair skin and were riding on a bus that was all black, including the driver. Every day they rode the bus was a fight for their lives as the driver laughed at the "cracker boys" getting beat up. They couldn't afford to move so their parents did what they could to drive them to school to avoid the beatings. As the schools we went to had an increased black student population, also increasing was the crime going on at the school. Vandalism (spray paint, broken windows, etc), drug dealing, theft, assaulting teachers, and other crimes became more and more common. Out of concern for their children's safety, their parents went house shopping. The home they choose depends on the school district their children would have to go to. When schools redrew school district lines again to try to racially balance schools again, the parents who could afford to would then go house shopping again. I know of families who've moved three times because of this very reason. They moved to get away from the crime, violence, and racism of blacks towards other races while the liberal press constantly claimed "white flight" was about "white racism".
I think probably the root causes would be perception. I think people some times have preconceived ideas about other groups and when the other groups move in and take over, for lack of another way of saying it, it makes them feel uncomfortable.
It used to be called white flight, but I think it can extend to any group.
Like the OP mentioned, this is happening in many parts of LA area, take Compton for example, it was in the 50's and 60's mostly white then the blacks started moving in, now the Hispanics are going there and now the black are experiencing a "flight".
I think in general, people prefer to be around people that are similar them, I don't mean this in a racist way and people can and do live in mixed groups, I'm just saying this on a very generic level.
I live in a very diverse area so don't have an issue with it, as long as they are good law abiding citizens and good neighbors, it's all good to me.
My condo for example, has whites, blacks, Asians, Latinos, it's like a regular united nations around here....
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