White flight

White Flight was and still is an urban trend that has been taking place in many American cities especially in the Northeast and Midwestern sections of the United States since the 1950s where the predominantly wealthy white populations started leaving the inner core cities for newer suburban communities to escape the increasing crime and racial tension that plagued inner cities throughout the region.

The effects of white flight have been devastating for the cities that have been hit by this phenomenon especially Detroit, Saint Louis, and Chicago. The former two have lost more than half of their 1950 peak populations due to this.

As wealthier residents abandoned the inner city neighborhoods, they ultimately left behind increasingly poor ethnic populations whose neighborhoods rapidly deteriorated in the 1960s through the early 1990s in many places. Jobs and businesses disentegrated along with the neighborhoods and ultimately turning the increasingly poverty-stricken areas into crime-ridden slums. Much of Detroit, large areas of the West and South Sides of Chicago and Saint Louis are the greatest examples of this.

White Flight continues in some areas to this very day but has taken on a new trend as some of the older suburbs have been experiencing similar urban decay similar to their parent cities especially in some of the southern suburbs of Chicago adjacent to the city itself. East Saint Louis, and many of the neighboring communities on the Illinois side of the Saint Louis metro area have also suffered from urban decay with the decline of the manufacturing industries that powered the economies of the region.

The population decline of some of the Midwestern and Northeastern cities has either slowed down and/or even reversed but some areas remain economically devastated from the loss of jobs from the neighborhoods. What may occur with this trend remains to be seen in the foreseeable future but for now, white flight remains a major issue for many of the inner-cities.

The opposing social trend of wealthy social groups moving into an inner city area and displacing the indigenous minority groups is called gentrification.