To longtime residents, the doors mean higher home prices ahead, more investors knocking, more white neighbors.
Here, and in the center of cities across the United States, a kind of demographic change most often associated with gentrifying parts of New York and Washington has been accelerating. White residents are increasingly moving into nonwhite neighborhoods, largely African-American ones.
In America, racial diversity has much more often come to white neighborhoods. Between 1980 and 2000, more than 98 percent of census tracts that grew more diverse did so in that way, as Hispanic, Asian-American and African-American families settled in neighborhoods that were once predominantly white.
But since 2000, according to an analysis of demographic and housing data, the arrival of white residents is now changing nonwhite communities in cities of all sizes, affecting about 1 in 6 predominantly African-American census tracts. The pattern, though still modest in scope, is playing out with remarkable consistency across the country — in ways that jolt the mortgage market, the architecture, the value of land itself.
In city after city, a map of racial change shows predominantly minority neighborhoods near downtown growing whiter, while suburban neighborhoods that were once largely white are experiencing an increased share of black, Hispanic and Asian-American residents.
In South Park, a neighborhood with picturesque views of the Raleigh skyline, the white homebuyers who have recently moved in have average incomes more than three times those of the typical household already here. Whites, who were largely absent in the neighborhood in 2000, made up 17 percent of the population by 2012. Since then, they’ve gotten nearly 9 in 10 of the new mortgages.
In neighborhoods like this, white residents are changing not only the racial mix of the community; they are also altering the economics of the real estate beneath everyone.
“That’s what finally came to me — it’s not just the fact that the neighborhoods look different, that people behave differently,” said Kia E. Baker, who grew up in southeast Raleigh and now directs a nonprofit agency, Southeast Raleigh Promise, that serves the community.
Some of that change can be positive, she said. This realization was not: “Our black bodies literally have less economic value than the body of a white person,” she said. “As soon as a white body moves into the same space that I occupied, all of a sudden this place is more valuable.”
The Value of Place
White flight and white return are not opposite phenomena in U.S. cities, generations apart. Here they are part of the same story.
In the places where white households are moving, reinvestment is possible mainly because of the disinvestment that came before it. Many of these neighborhoods were once segregated by law and redlined by banks. Cities neglected their infrastructure. The federal government built highways that isolated them and housing projects that were concentrated in them. Then banks came peddling predatory loans.
“A single-family detached house with a yard within a mile of downtown in any other part of the world is probably the most expensive place to live,” said Kofi Boone, a professor at North Carolina State University’s College of Design.
Here, because of that history, it’s a bargain.
South Park grew up around Shaw University, a historically black college founded in 1865, and in the early 20th century, it was home to black professors and doctors who trained there, and to dozens of black-owned businesses.
With time, the disinvestment happened here, too: Two major roads severed the neighborhood; absentee landlords came in; a cherished park built in the 1930s began to deteriorate. Middle-class black families who’d previously been excluded from the suburbs began to move there.
Longtime residents who have remained now fear that the area’s sudden reinvention will erase the last remaining signs of its history.
“We don’t want to feel like everything is so bad you’ve got to tear it down,” said Lonnette Williams, 72, who lives in an elegant two-story home built by her godfather’s family in 1922. “We want people to value our neighborhood.”
Her sense of value, however, is different from — and often at odds with — the rising value of real estate. Her own home is appreciating, but that means little to her because she has no intention of selling.
As the pace of home construction has increased, so, too, has the volume of mailers to longtime residents: “We pay $CASH$. As is! No cost or fees!”
In the frenzy, a real estate agent once told Rosalind Blair Sanders that she wasn’t using her land to its full potential. She runs a child development center on the edge of downtown.
“Everyone has a price,” she was told.
She is baffled over the math of what the children are worth.
The Rise of a New Market
African-Americans have remained so segregated in American cities in large part because white people have avoided living in black neighborhoods and seldom even considered buying a home in one. What changed, then?
How did the first developer to renovate a home know a new market would be waiting for it?
“I guess the answer is I didn’t know,” said Jason Queen, a 39-year-old developer in Raleigh. “But I did know that I wanted to be in downtown.”
Queen, who had worked in historic preservation, has rehabilitated or built about 100 homes in the historic corridor just east of downtown Raleigh, starting with a house that he and his wife lived in and renovated on the edge of South Park a decade ago. Queen was his own market: This part of the city was more affordable than anywhere else near downtown. And he wanted diversity.
“What I didn’t want to do is move to a neighborhood where all the kids look exactly the same as my kids,” said Queen, who is white. “I didn’t think that was the right thing to do.”
Andrew and Kelly Hudgins, a white couple, purchased a home in 2017 in South Park, but they worried about furthering gentrification themselves.
“We struggled with that for a long time,” said Andrew Hudgins, 29, who works for two faith-based nonprofits. The couple made peace with it this way: “If we didn’t, somebody else was definitely going to buy that home,” Hudgins said.
Seeking Stable Diversity
The Ship of Zion Church operates a small grocery store and a weightlifting gym in South Park. The church’s pastor, Chris Jones, has occasionally tried to flag down white residents jogging by. He wants to show them what the church has built and invite them to use the gym. So far, he has been unsuccessful attracting any of them inside.
Here, integration is not going very well. Jones expects that will be the story of the neighborhood: “You have a half-million-dollar home next to a home that’s maybe $20,000. I wish that could stay. I wish those families could get to know each other,” he said. “But because of economics, that can’t happen.”
Eight blocks away, Queen recently opened his largest project yet, a food hall that will eventually have a full-service grocery store next door. The project also aspires to serve everyone: shoppers with food stamps or those seeking high-end snacks; diners who want oysters on the half shell or $6 fish sticks.
This, too, faces uncertain prospects. The development was designed to make viable the grocery store the community wanted, Queen said. But some residents are waiting to see the prices. The food hall is trying to signal that longtime neighbors are welcome, too — one painting inside shows a pair of African-American teenagers from the neighborhood — but they must walk past the new $700,000 rowhomes outside to get here.
In so many ways, good intentions are insufficient to manage this change; they often wind up contributing to it. The food hall will make the area still more desirable. More fly-by-night flippers and property scouts will come.
Baker, the 36-year-old nonprofit director who grew up in Southeast Raleigh, recently bought a home in a suburb just east of the city. She calls her neighborhood extremely diverse, and she has no reason to suspect that the diversity there today will tip into segregation of a different kind tomorrow.
Ideally, said Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor at New York University, America could get to a place where the real estate market in any location isn’t so sensitive to signals about race.
“We made some progress by getting to a point where the entry of one black family did not signal that, ‘Oh my god, this is a neighborhood that’s going to fall apart,’” Ellen said. “Maybe we can get to a point where the entry of one white family is not a signal that, ‘This is a neighborhood that’s immediately going to have million-dollar condos.’”
Near downtown Raleigh, something like that signal has already been sent. The home next to Williams’ has been replaced by two far more expensive ones. The lot next to Jones’ weightlifting gym is for sale. The rented duplex next to the Hudginses’ has morphed into a newly remodeled single-family home with a bright yellow door.
The lot next to Sanders’ child development center is for sale, too, by the city. She has wanted to acquire it for years. But now she is in a bidding war for 0.17 acres of land that previously held a gas station, and the price is up to $390,000.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.