Thread: America's most "Progressive" cities also it's "whitest" cities. Coincidence?

http://current.com/1rf9q4c

What do you think about this?

My classically liberal white suburban brother-in-law just moved to Denver this past year from the South...he's a perfect picture of what this article depicts.

What do you think of the "long depressing history" he shows us?

Where are the black progressives?

07:25 PM CST on Monday, November 30, 2009

Among the media and academia and within planning circles, there's a generally standing answer to the question of what cities are the best, the most progressive and best role models for small and midsize cities. The standard list includes Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis and Denver.
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In particular, Portland is held up as a paradigm, with its urban growth boundary, extensive transit system, excellent cycling culture and a pro-density policy. These cities are frequently contrasted with those of the Rust Belt and South, which are found wanting, often even by locals, as "cool" urban places.

But look closely at these exemplars, and a curious fact emerges. If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles – places no one expects the average U.S. city to be able to imitate – you will find that the "progressive" cities aren't red or blue, but another color entirely: white.

In fact, not one of these "progressive" cities even reaches the national average for percentage of African-Americans in its core county. Perhaps not progressiveness but whiteness is the defining characteristic of the group.

The progressive paragon of Portland is the whitest on the list, with an African-American population less than half the national average. It is America's ultimate White City. The contrast with other, supposedly less advanced cities is stark.

It is not just a regional thing, either. Even look just within the state of Texas, where Austin is held up as a bastion of right thinking urbanism next to sprawlvilles like Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston.

While Austin is far more diverse than a place like Portland, it is still much whiter than other major Texas cities, comparable only to Fort Worth. And while its African-American population lags the national average, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston both exceed it.

This raises troubling questions about these cities. Why is it that progressive urban policy in smaller metros is so often associated with low numbers of African-Americans? Can a city be properly called progressive with only a disproportionate handful of blacks in it? In addition, why has no one called these cities on it?

As the college-educated flock to these progressive El Dorados, many factors are cited as reasons: transit systems, density, bike lanes, walkable communities, robust art and cultural scenes. But another way to look at it is simply as white flight writ large. Why move to the suburbs of your stodgy Midwest city to escape African-Americans and get criticized for it when you can move to Portland and actually be praised as progressive, urban and hip?

Many of the policies of Portland are not that dissimilar from those of upscale suburbs in their effects. Urban growth boundaries raise land prices and render housing less affordable exactly the same as large lot zoning and building codes that mandate brick and other expensive materials do. They both contribute to reducing housing affordability for historically disadvantaged communities. Just like the most exclusive suburbs.

This lack of racial diversity helps explain why urban boosters focus increasingly on international immigration as a diversity measure. Minneapolis, Portland and Austin do have more foreign-born residents than African-Americans, and do better than Rust Belt cities on that metric, but that's a low hurdle to jump. They lack the diversity of a Miami, Houston, Los Angeles or a host of other unheralded towns from the Texas border to Las Vegas and Orlando. They even have far fewer foreign-born residents than many suburban counties of America's major cities.

The relative lack of diversity in places like Portland raises some tough questions the perennially PC urban boosters might not want to answer. For example, how can a city define itself as diverse or progressive while lacking in African-Americans, the traditional sine qua non of diversity, and often in immigrants as well?

Imagine a large corporation with a workforce whose African-American percentage far lagged its industry peers, sans any apparent concern, and without a credible action plan to remediate it. Would such a corporation be viewed as a progressive firm and employer? Could it defend its lack of doing so by retorting that it had lots of Asians on the payroll? The answer is obvious. Yet the same situation in major cities yields a different answer. Curious.

In fact, lack of ethnic diversity may have much to do with what allows these places to be "progressive." It's easy to have Scandinavian policies if you have relatively Scandinavian demographics. Minneapolis-St. Paul, of course, is notable in its Scandinavian heritage; Seattle and Portland received much of their initial migrants from the northern tier of America, which has always been heavily Germanic and Scandinavian.

In comparison to the great cities of the Rust Belt, the Northeast, California and Texas, these cities have relatively homogenous populations. Lack of diversity in culture makes it far easier to implement "progressive" policies that cater to populations with similar values; much the same can be seen in such celebrated urban-model cultures in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Their relative wealth also leads to a natural adoption of the default strategy of the upscale suburb: the nicest stuff for the people with the most money. It is much more difficult when you have more racially and economically diverse populations with different needs, interests and desires to reconcile.

In contrast, the starker part of racial history in America has been one of the defining elements of the history of the cities of the Northeast, Midwest and South. Slavery and Jim Crow led to the Great Migration to the industrial North, which broke the old ethnic machine urban consensus there. Civil rights struggles, fair housing, affirmative action, school integration and busing, riots, red lining, public housing, the emergence of black political leaders – especially mayors – prompted white flight and the associated disinvestment, leading to the decline of urban schools and neighborhoods.

There's a long, depressing history here.

In Texas, California and south Florida, a somewhat similar, if less stark, pattern has occurred with largely Latino immigration. It can be seen in the evolution of Miami, Los Angeles and increasingly Houston, San Antonio and Dallas. Just like African-Americans, Latino immigrants also are disproportionately poor and often have different site priorities and sensibilities than upscale whites.

This may explain why most of the smaller cities of the Midwest and South have not proven amenable to replicating the policies of Portland. Most Midwest advocates of, for example, rail transit, have tried to simply transplant the Portland solution to their city without thinking about the local context in terms of system goals and design, and how to sell it.

Civic leaders in city after city duly make their pilgrimage to Denver or Portland to check out shiny new transit systems, but the resulting videos of smiling yuppies and happy hipsters are not likely to impress anyone at the local NAACP or in the barrios.

We are seeing this script played out in Cincinnati today, where an odd coalition of African-Americans and anti-tax Republicans has formed to try to stop a streetcar system. Streetcar advocates imported Portland's solution and arguments to Cincinnati without thinking hard enough to make the case for how it would benefit the whole community.

That's not to let these other cities off the hook. Most of them have let their urban cores decay. Almost without exception, they have done nothing to engage with their African-American populations. If people really believe what they say about diversity being a source of strength, why not act like it? I believe that cities that start taking their African-American and other minority communities seriously, seeing them as a pillar of civic growth, will reap big dividends and distinguish themselves in the marketplace.

This trail has been blazed not by the "progressive" paragons but by places like Atlanta, Dallas and Houston. Atlanta, long known as one of America's premier African-American cities, has boomed to become the capital of the New South. It should come as no surprise that good for African-Americans has meant good for whites, too.

Similarly, Houston took in tens of thousands of mostly poor and overwhelmingly African-American refugees from Hurricane Katrina. Houston, a booming metro and emerging world city, rolled out the welcome mat for them – and for Latinos, Asians and other newcomers. They see these people as possessing talent worth having.

This history and resulting political dynamic could not be more different from what happened in Portland and its "progressive" brethren. These cities have never been black and may never be predominately Latino. Should every city have the same demographic makeup? Probably not. But nor are Portland and company the model other average-size American cities should feel obligated to imitate. And nor should they feel superior about the urban policies a relative lack of diversity has enabled.

Aaron M. Renn is an urban affairs thinker and writer based in the Midwest. He blogs at urbanophile.com, and his e-mail address is arenn@urbanophile.com. A version of this essay originally appeared at NewGeography.com.

My gut reaction is that skin color is likely to be incidental. Personal wealth and income are more likely to be the cause here.

....I'm afraid to post in this thread



That's what I think

This article seems to say that some loosely defined "second tier" liberal cities in the country do not in fact "walk the walk" of having ethnically diverse residents. How do they determine what cities are most liberal? Does anyone have an actual list based on some actual statistical analysis? They list 5 Midwest and Northwestern cities as though they are the central bastions of liberal thought.

Based on voter registration disparities, in 2005, a nonpartisan group called the Bay Area Center for Voting Research made a list of the most liberal and most conservative cities in America. I'm posting freep's quoting of them because it's one of the few times in my life that I can reference freep, and because the link I had to their site was bad (they were subsumed by the Hall Institute of Public Policy and the CA webpage is not up yet). Maybe it means that they weren't really as nonpartisan as they claim and that this is all bogus data, and if someone has something that more accurately gauges "liberalness" and "conservativitude" of a city then have at it.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2276165/posts

If we're talking about "what cities well-to-do young people with liberal ideas want to move to" then yes I'd say Seattle/Denver are up there, possibly those other cities. Not too sure about Minneapolis... it gets pretty cold there and fuck that. The fact that the number of African Americans in the group of "well-to-do young people" does not show what we'd expect to get if we looked at it purely in terms of how many young people there are of each ethnicity... well damn that's not exactly a ringing condemnation of popular progressive principles.

A new nationwide study released by the nonpartisan Bay Area Center for Voting Research (BACVR) ranks the political leanings of every American city and finds that Detroit, Michigan is the most liberal and Provo, Utah the most conservative.

In all, the BACVR researchers examined voting patterns of 237 American cities with populations of over 100,000 and ranked them each on liberal and conservative scales.

The list of Americas most liberal cities is dominated by cities with large African American populations that are concentrated in the Northeast, Midwest and California.

Conversely, the study found that the staunchest conservative cities are clustered in the South and interior West and have extremely low numbers of African American residents.

Detroit, MI, and Provo, UT, epitomize Americas political, economic and racial polarization, says Peter Thai, a BACVR researcher. As the most conservative city in America, Provo is overwhelmingly white and solidly middle class. This is in stark contrast to Detroit, which is impoverished, black and the most liberal.

Gary, Indiana, a rust belt former steel town, comes in as Americas second most liberal city, followed by Berkeley, California, which ranks third. Washington, D.C. comes in as the fourth most liberal and Oakland, California comes in fifth.

On the list of the nations most conservative cities, Texas cements its reputation as Americas most rock-ribbed state, having three cities in the top five. Lubbock and Abilene, Texas rank as the second and third most conservative cities, respectively, followed by Hialeah, Florida in fourth place and Plano, Texas in fifth.

BACVR researchers found a direct correlation between a citys political ideology and its racial makeup. The great political divide in America today is not red vs. blue, north vs. south, costal vs. interior or even rich vs. poor it is now clearly black vs. white, says Phil Reiff, a BACVR director.

While there are a few liberal cities without large African American populations, these wind up being the exceptions. College towns like Berkeley and Cambridge have modest black populations but remain bastions of upper middle-class, white, intellectual liberalism. These liberal white communities, however, are more reminiscent of penguins clustering together around a shrinking iceberg than of a vibrant and growing political movement, Reiff says.

The Bay Area Center for Voting Research is a nonpartisan think tank based in Berkeley, California. A full copy of the report and the complete list of rankings for all 237 cities are available at http://www.votingresearch.org

Americas 25 Most Liberal Cities (in descending order)
Rank City State
1 Detroit Michigan
2 Gary Indiana
3 Berkeley California
4 Washington, D.C. Dist. of Columbia
5 Oakland California
6 Inglewood California
7 Newark New Jersey
8 Cambridge Massachusetts
9 San Francisco California
10 Flint Michigan
11 Cleveland Ohio
12 Hartford Connecticut
13 Paterson New Jersey
14 Baltimore Maryland
15 New Haven Connecticut
16 Seattle Washington
17 Chicago Illinois
18 Philadelphia Pennsylvania
19 Birmingham Alabama
20 St. Louis Missouri
21 New York New York
22 Providence Rhode Island
23 Minneapolis Minnesota
24 Boston Massachusetts
25 Buffalo New York

Americas 25 Most Conservative Cities(in descending order)
Rank City State
1 Provo Utah
2 Lubbock Texas
3 Abilene Texas
4 Hialeah Florida
5 Plano Texas
6 Colorado Springs Colorado
7 Gilbert Arizona
8 Bakersfield California
9 Lafayette Louisiana
10 Orange California
11 Escondido California
12 Allentown Pennsylvania
13 Mesa Arizona
14 Arlington Texas
15 Peoria Arizona
16 Cape Coral Florida
17 Garden Grove California
18 Simi Valley California
19 Corona California
20 Clearwater Florida
21 West Valley City Utah
22 Oklahoma City Oklahoma
23 Overland Park Kansas
24 Anchorage Alaska
25 Huntington Beach California

consultant you have a big stick and you are stirring a big ol pot...

Toad, Liberal != Progressive.

And that goes for Hawg too - Chicago is a melting pot, to be sure - and traditionally very liberal...but I would not classify their policies or politics as "progressive" as places like Portland, Seattle, or Denver.

You are a product of your environment no matter what your race. I consider myself a good example of that theory.

Under the law of stereotypes I should be vato loco with a bald fade and listen to chingo bling screwed in my 1980's oldsmoblie.

Instead I am who you see today.


Even when at the gym I see these small gangbangin wannabe's walking around all short with their bald fades blasting rap in the mini headphones.

If they only knew how stupid they really look. When most hispanics see other hispanics act this way I guess they want to fit in so they give in?
Fuck that, that mentality is for the weak.

I blame the parents, mtv, and people's ignorance on accepting their racially assumed social norms.


Maybe that is just here in houston? It was a hell of a lot different when I went up north for a week to WI


It really did not surprise me to learn that Denver, CO was at the top of the list. That city is full of win.

Diversity is nothing more than a fact.....and not some ideal to be achieved. As long as we are free to live where we want,who cares what the color of our skins are? Is it really a mystery why more people of a Latin descent choose to live in places like Florida,or people who come from Northern Europe choose to live in cities further North whos climates are a bit closer to what they are used to?

I live in Minneapolis....because I love it here. Not because there are x number of Whites,or x percentage of anything else. A city with more "X",is no better or worse than a city with less "X".

Sometimes I think we put too much emphasis on the value of diversity. Judging an area by the number of "X" people is silly,and racist.

Originally Posted by Consultant

Where are the black progressives?

DC