It is true that, since 2000, Blacks are gradually moving away from large cities, reversing a trend from the prior several decades.
The rapidly unfolding dispersal of Blacks from the cities, like the white invasion of the surrounding hinterlands in the previous era, is the result of deliberate state policies, dictated by finance capital. But, this time, the demographic makeover has been effectuated and politically finessed with the active collaboration of a Black misleadership class that, paradoxically, owes its existence to the concentration of Black populations during the Sixties and Seventies.True to form, Mr. Ford sees it as a giant conspiracy, where some all-powerful racist/capitalist/government yokel has, for mysterious reasons, decided to depopulate America's cities.
He cites no real data, so I'll take data from Chicago, which I have close at hand. According to the Chicago Tribune, the city lost 186,000 Black residents between 2000 and 2010. The same article reports that the Chicagoland area lost 46,000 Black residents since 2010.
Mr. Ford speculates this is due to the destruction of housing projects. He writes
The de-Blackening of urban America is a wrenchingly painful and bloody amputation-in-progress. In a frenzy of demolition, the U.S. has lost a quarter-million units of public housing since the mid-1990s, only a small fraction of which has been replaced with new public housing, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Black mayors and heavily Black city councils have, typically, bought into the notion that concentrations of poor Black people are, by definition, vectors of pathology, while concentrations of affluent whites are the indispensable ingredients of urban “renaissance.” It is the logic of apartheid, cloaked in phony economics.Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes were the infamously inhumane high-rises alongside the Dan Ryan Expressway, containing 4,415 units. They were demolished between 1998 and 2007, replaced by 2,300 low-rise homes and apartments. (Wikipedia) So while Mr. Ford is correct that on net public housing was destroyed, the fraction that was replaced was more than 50%. Not really a "small fraction," especially if you consider that many apartments in the original towers weren't habitable.
Does Mr. Ford really think Chicago's Black citizens were better off living in the Robert Taylor Homes? The crime was building them in the first place--not their destruction.
He claims that Blacks have been forced out of the cities into the suburbs. "No mayor has been more intent on driving Blacks from his city than Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel," he says. But I think he's wrong.
1) Like whites, Black folks are richer than they were 40 years ago--they have more choices. Nobody with any money at all is gonna want to live anywhere close to the Robert Taylor Homes. Much better is a house and yard in the 'burbs. Like whites before them, Blacks want to lead civilized, suburban lives.
2) We're all getting older, and Black demographics are only slightly younger than us white folks. Old people, living on social security, want low prices, low crime, and quiet neighborhoods. One can live in Mississippi or Alabama quite comfortably on social security and a small pension. No wonder folks are leaving Illinois in droves (and not just Blacks).
3) Chicago has the highest sales taxes of any jurisdiction in the nation. And the city is so hard-up for revenue that they've resorted to stupid things, like soda taxes and red-light cameras. Of course these penalize poor people more than rich ones. Again, for people of modest means the suburbs or Mississippi look really good by comparison.
Then Mr. Ford condemns the city for closing 50 public schools. He never tells us about the drop in enrollment, described by the Sun-Times.
Chicago Public Schools on Friday announced another five-figure enrollment drop, counting 371,000 students in the country’s third largest school district. ...
CPS has lost about 21,000 students from its rolls in the last two years and now has just about 26,000 more students than the fourth largest, Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida.Why should schools stay open when the district is losing 10,000+ pupils annually? Mr. Ford gives us a really silly reason.
The result [of school closings--ed] was catastrophic, as students were forced to transit unfamiliar gang turf to attend schools that were often no better than the shuttered ones in the old neighborhoods. Many kids died. “What people don’t understand is that if you are 16 years old and get on a bus, when you get off that bus you are gang-affiliated whether you are gang-affiliated or not,” said activist Jitu Brown.Mr. Brown is certainly right--we whites don't understand that. I've never been in a gang, nor do I have any friends who have ever been in a gang. Gang membership is just one of those things we white people don't do (mostly). But now Mr. Ford will have the government enforce turf boundaries established by street gangs! Is that supposed to be the job of the school district? Are we taxpayers (people in housing projects don't generally pay taxes) now required to subsidize gang warfare by keeping unnecessary schools open?
Mr. Ford will likely respond by saying that gangs are the result of poverty/racism/capitalism, etc. He's sorta right, but he's got the causal arrow backwards. By coincidence there's an article in The Atlantic about "Brastell Travis, a 21-year-old who lives in the city’s Englewood neighborhood." He did all the things a young man is supposed to do--went to school to learn a trade: welding. But he can't find a job, "...because of where he went to high school, he can’t apply for jobs in certain neighborhoods, because he could become a target of violence if he goes to the wrong areas of town, he said." So in this case gangland crime causes poverty, not the other way round.
Mr. Travis should move to the suburbs. To do that he'd need a car (which he doesn't have) and money for a deposit on an apartment (which he doesn't have). His parents apparently have saved up zero capital to help get him started on life. And that's the real problem--no capital accumulation by Black families. (I'm not talking millions here--a couple thousand dollars would solve a lot of problems.) So he's screwed.
Mr. Ford's real concern is to maintain a majority Black population in large cities, such as St. Louis, where Blacks became a minority this century. He wants to use this majority to enact far-reaching reforms, one of which is the "Right to free education through post-graduate level."
I can't think of a stupider idea. Surely more education is not something that Mr. Travis, for example, actually needs right now. At best it would be a waste of time. And nothing is more a waste of time than "post-graduate" schooling. All it does is postpone becoming an adult until one turns 30. I think we're already waaaay over-invested in education at all levels. But apparently Mr. Ford thinks higher sales taxes and soda taxes are a fair price to pay for yet more silly schoolwork.
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