White flight or flight from poverty?

Abstract

The phenomenon of White flight is often illustrated by the case of Detroit whose population dropped from 1.80 million to 0.95 million between 1950 and 2000 while at the same time its Black and Hispanic component grew from 30 percent to 85 percent. But is this case really representative? The present paper shows that the phenomenon of White flight is in fact essentially a flight from poverty. As a confirmation, we show that the changes in White or Black populations are highly correlated which means that White flight is always paralleled by Black flight (and Hispanic flight as well). This broader interpretation of White flight accounts not only for the case of northern cities such as Cincinnati, Cleveland or Detroit, but for all population changes at county level, provided the population density is higher than a threshold of about 50 per square-kilometer which corresponds to moderately urbanized areas (as can be found in states like Indiana or Virginia for instance).