Poverty Is a Bigger Problem Than Gentrification

First, the good news. More white Americans want to live in heavily black neighborhoods. A 2016 paper by the National University of Singapore’s Kwan Ok Lee found that since 1990, neighborhood segregation by race declined. Even better, mixed white-black neighborhoods have tended to stay mixed, instead of resulting in white flight or displacement of black residents. This trend isn’t true in every area of the country, but it’s quite a change from the mid-20th century, when whites fled mixed neighborhoods en masse to more segregated suburbs.

Now for the not-so-good news. A recent investigation by the New York Times confirmed the trend of white people moving into black neighborhoods. But it also found a disturbing pattern. When a neighborhood is diversified by an influx of nonwhite people, the newcomers’ incomes tend to be about average for that neighborhood. But when white people move into a mostly nonwhite neighborhood, their incomes tend to be much higher than the local average.