The movement of white people out of neighbourhoods with black people, and the use of redlining to concentrate a marginalized group within those neighbourhoods led to a disinvestment of both private and public capital in those neighbourhoods, creating and later perpetuating the cycle of poverty that leads people to turn to crime to survive. It does make sense for people with the means to leave a neighbourhood (from a personal safety standpoint) when it starts to have an increased crime problem but that is not what is being described here. Instead, the people left due to the racism that was prevalent in the mid-20th century, well before the rise in crime that resulted from their leaving.
85% of the people in the redlined neighborhoods were white. That was around of half of all urban households. Why didn't redlining lead to the same cycle of poverty and violence for white people?
The majority of people who currently live in the redlined neighborhoods are white. Why didn't redlining lead to the same cycle of poverty and violence for those white people?
What the hell are you talking about? The neighborhoods we're talking about are overwhelmingly Black. You can't have set foot on the south or west sides of Chicago and not know that.
Oh, for fuck's sake. Wicker Park was redlined. Then it was gentrified. Everything on the North Side has been gentrified. You know what wasn't gentrified? West Garfield Park. Miss me with whatever weird next comment you've got locked and loaded about "well why wasn't Garfield Park gentrified".
The redlined neighborhoods on the north side also weren't black (Lincoln Park was Puerto Rican). People have written books about how the gentrification of the north side happened; you can consult them.
The north side was completely white when the redlining maps were made. That was late 1930's, the black population of Chicago even by 1940 was only 8%, almost exclusively on the south side east of State Street. The west side was also almost exclusively white then too, there were a couple of black neighborhoods (not West Garfield Park at that time).
In the 1930's there weren't many Puerto Ricans in Chicago, the ones that were there lived on the south side. They didn't start coming in numbers until the late 1940's, they moved into Lincoln Park in the 1960's.
So, Wicker Park was white when it was redlined, Lincoln Park was white when it was redlined, West Garfield Park was white when it was redlined.
