Breaking Down New Migration Trends
The waves of migration that brought Black Americans to many northern cities are reversing, I wrote with colleagues last week in The Wall Street Journal. Click here to read the article.
Departing residents are heading everywhere from nearby suburbs to high-growth areas in the southern U.S., such as metro Atlanta, according to demographers, real-estate agents and public officials.
The latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates, released Thursday, indicate Black residents are continuing to leave many urban centers in the North and elsewhere, adding to decades of decline. These losses have hit many major cities with historically large Black populations, including Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Oakland, Calif.
The outflow marks a reversal of the Great Migration that began in the early 20th century as millions of Black Americans left the South looking for more economic opportunities and to flee racial violence. Much of the current shift is driven by younger, college-educated Black people who are relocating from northern and western places to the South, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. Some are motivated by rising housing costs and worries about safety.
Nationwide, Black people haven’t suburbanized at the same level as the broader population, but the share of the Black population living in metropolitan-area suburbs reached 44% by 2020 from 33% two decades earlier. Over the same period, the percentage of the Black population living in central cities declined to 47% from 53%.
At the same time, Black populations in some southern metro areas have increased. Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston, added about 18,000 non-Hispanic Black residents between mid-2021 and mid-2022, according to the census estimates.
I reported on this article with my colleague Jon Kamp, who’s based in Boston, as well as two colleagues who do data reporting in the Journal’s Washington bureau: Paul Overberg and Jack Gillum. While I normally focus on New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, for this article I was making calls to Philadelphia and Detroit.
While the Black population in Detroit’s Wayne County again ticked down, the share of Black residents in neighboring Macomb County, which includes the city of Eastpointe, increased to an estimated 13.5% last year from 2.7% in 2000, the new census estimates show.
Eastpointe changed its name from East Detroit in the early 1990s, hoping to avoid associations with the Motor City, according to Kurt Metzger, a demographer who founded the nonprofit Data Driven Detroit. Many Black Detroiters moved to Macomb County in the first decade of the century, despite a history of racism, to take advantage of low home prices during the 2007-09 recession, he said.
Mary Hall-Rayford moved to Eastpointe from Detroit in 2012. The 71-year-old retired teacher sits on the school board and is running for mayor.
“I wanted some peace and quiet. I was tired of the gunshots, the sirens,” she told me. “Eastpointe was a nice little city.”
Kevin Lancaster, a former Ford Motor employee, has run the Love Life Family Christian Center in Eastpointe since 2008. It now occupies a former elementary school, and Lancaster estimates about 30% of his predominantly Black congregation moved from Detroit.
“I’ve been pulled over in Eastpointe. I’ve gone through a lot of stuff in Eastpointe,” Lancaster said. “Now you’re seeing more minorities coming into prominence and coming into positions—which we need to see.”
THE QUESTION: Which major (100K+) American city lost the biggest percentage of its population between 1950 and 2000?
Have an answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: The cash toll (for fools like me who refuse to get E-ZPass) to cross the Hudson River in the Lincoln Tunnel, Holland Tunnel or George Washington Bridge is $17.