To Do List. Detroit’s white population rises. Detroit’s white population rose by nearly 8,000 residents last year, the first significant increase since 1950, according to a Detroit News analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. The data, made public Wednesday, mark the first time census numbers have validated the perception that whites are returning to a city that is overwhelmingly black and one where the overall population continues to shrink. Many local leaders contend halting Detroit’s population loss is crucial, and the new census data shows that policies to lure people back to the city may be helping stem the city’s decline.
“It verifies the energy you see in so many parts of Detroit and it’s great to hear,” said Kevin Boyle, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian who studies the intersection of class, race, and politics in 20th-century America. The Northwestern University professor grew up on Detroit’s east side. “I think it’s a trend. The influx of whites helped slow Detroit’s population decline last year. Crimes and Commissions. History may or may not repeat itself, but crisis-stricken politicians certainly do. Two weeks ago, Governor Jay Nixon, of Missouri, announced the swearing in of sixteen members of a commission to examine police procedures and community relations in Ferguson. The announcement was made in advance of the grand-jury decision in the death of Michael Brown, which resulted in renewed rioting in the city and demonstrations across the country. Nixon, whose handling of the situation had already been severely criticized, holds the distinction of creating a commission whose existence preceded the unrest that it will presumably be charged with addressing.
This was a sign of either governmental prescience or resignation—or, possibly, both. In 1967, in the wake of riots that had scorched several American cities, Lyndon B. Today, whites tend to exaggerate how well and quickly they escaped from poverty. Documenting Detroit. I was born and raised in the city of Detroit, and the only place I’ve ever seen that physically reminds me of the city’s most desolated stretches is the Lower Ninth Ward, in New Orleans, post-Katrina. In both cities you can find blocks and blocks with only one or two houses still standing in a sea of tall grass, where once there was a busy neighborhood. But Detroit wasn’t hit by any hurricane. It’s getting swept away in slow motion, block by block, house by house. Detroit’s current mayor, the former N.B.A. player Dave Bing, can do little but dismantle the city he presides over.
He’s promised to demolish ten thousand abandoned houses over the course of his four-year term—only ten per cent, he says, of the hundred thousand that need to come down. Detroit lost a quarter of its population over the past decade alone, dropping from the tenth to the eighteenth most populous city in the country. “Detropia” runs through Thursday at Manhattan’s IFC Center, and opened today in Detroit itself. Donald Trump and the White Nationalists. On July 23rd, Donald Trump’s red-white-and-navy-blue Boeing 757 touched down in Laredo, Texas, where the temperature was climbing to a hundred and four degrees.
In 1976, the Times introduced Trump, then a little-known builder, to readers as a “publicity shy” wunderkind who “looks ever so much like Robert Redford,” and quoted an admiring observation from the architect Der Scutt: “That Donald, he could sell sand to the Arabs.” Over the years, Trump honed a performer’s ear for the needs of his audience. He starred in “The Apprentice” for fourteen seasons, cultivating a lordly persona and a squint that combined Clint Eastwood on the high plains and Derek Zoolander on the runway. Once he emerged as the early front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination, this summer, his airport comings and goings posed a delicate staging issue: a rogue wind off the tarmac could render his comb-over fully erect in front of the campaign paparazzi.
Trump gave a tight, concerned nod. “When?” “No, no. What Social Scientists Learned from Katrina. The first time that David Kirk visited New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was at the end of 2005. His in-laws were from the city. Kirk and his wife visited them at Christmas, just four months after the storm hit, and then went back again on several more occasions throughout 2006. New Orleans was devastated. Thousands had fled. “I’ll admit I’d drive around the Lower Ninth, taking it all in, feeling a little guilty about being the gawking tourist,” Kirk said not long ago. Kirk is a sociologist at the University of Oxford. “I worked my connections to see who would talk to me,” Kirk went on.
“This was December, 2006,” Kirk recounted. “This spring, I was on a radio talk show in Houston, Sunday morning,” Kirk said. New Orleans is a city framed by two major bodies of water. The most affluent parts of the city are on the river side: the Garden District, Uptown, the St. What Campanella was describing in New Orleans is the classic pattern of African-American demographic mobility. City Life. Somewhere between the ball game played to an empty stadium and the arrest of six police officers on charges including manslaughter and murder, somewhere around the time that a leaked document suggested that a man who suffered a catastrophic spinal injury while in police custody had died of a self-inflicted wound, events in Baltimore slipped into the realm of the surreal.
It was not a particularly unfamiliar journey. For a long time, our domestic affairs, or at least the portion of them most explicitly tied to race, have resembled a nightmare doomed to be repeated until the underlying conflict is resolved. President Obama addressed that recurrence in a press conference at the White House last Tuesday, when he spoke about the death of Freddie Gray and what has euphemistically been called the “unrest” in Baltimore: Midway through the twentieth century, cities—especially those, like Baltimore, which were sustained by ports—connoted a kind of American swagger. Drop Dead, Detroit! For the past twenty-one years, L.
Brooks Patterson has governed Oakland County, a large, affluent suburb of Detroit. Oakland County embodies fiscal success as much as Detroit does financial ruin, and Patterson, the county executive, tends to behave as though his chief job in life were to never let anyone forget it. One week in September, he gave me an extended tour of his empire, in a chauffeured minivan.
Near the end of the first day, we headed toward Lake St. Clair, at the mouth of the Detroit River, for a party on a yacht. The landscape slid past, a jumbled time line of American suburban innovation: big-box districts, fuel megacenters, shopping malls, restaurants with the interior acreage of a factory. Patterson told me, “I used to say to my kids, ‘First of all, there’s no reason for you to go to Detroit. “That’s true,” his driver, a retired cop named Tim, muttered. Patterson just turned seventy-five. Still, he is best known for his big mouth. “I’m just readin’ the clouds, Brooks.” The Gentrification Effect. Using data from 1990, 2000 and 2010, Maciag found that in four major cities 50 percent or more of poor census tracts gentrified from 2000 to 2010: Portland, 58.1 percent; Washington, 51.9 percent; Minneapolis, 50.6 percent; and Seattle, 50 percent. Other cities experiencing substantial gentrification were Denver, 42.1 percent; Austin, 39.7 percent; New York, 29.8 percent; Philadelphia, 28.7 percent; San Diego, 27.5 percent; Baltimore, 23.2 percent; and Boston, 21.1 percent.
The migration of professionals, often with advanced degrees, into the core of the nation’s cities is graphically illustrated in a study conducted at the University of Virginia. Luke Juday, a research and demographic policy analyst at the University of Virginia, found striking changes between 1990 and 2010 in income and education patterns in Charlotte, N.C. In 1990, as shown in Figure 2, the highest level of education was found in the suburbs, seven to eight miles distant from the heart of Charlotte. ‘White Flight’ Has Reversed, Census Finds. The proportion of New York City residents who are white and non-Hispanic rose slightly last year, reversing more than a half-century of so-called white flight from the city, according to census figures released on Tuesday. The share of non-Hispanic whites in the city had been shrinking since at least 1940. As the overall population grew, their ranks declined by 361,000 in the 1990s alone. Since 2000, though, their number has increased by more than 100,000.
Half of that increase was recorded from 2006 to 2007. “The fact that it is not going down is the news,” said Joseph J. He described the turnaround as a testament to the city’s “diversity and ethnic heterogeneity” and said it “sets New York apart from many other older cities where this is not the case.” Andrew A. But he cautioned that it could be short-lived given the turmoil on Wall Street, because “a lot of the non-Hispanic whites are plainly associated with the financial community.”
Dr. Jeffrey S. Continue reading the main story.