real life wrote:
This being 2008, you might want to avoid inferring that someone today means what you assumed[/u][/i] they meant over 40 years ago.
Movement from the inner cities to the suburbs has been taking place since wwwwaaaaayyyy before the 1960's. Cheap land for building homes and ease of transportation to work by car are the two primary enablers.
The term 'white flight' was cooked up by those who assumed a racist motive for everyone's actions.
I did not infer anyone had the earlier meaning in mind when the terms "good" and "bad" neighborhoods were used. I choose not to use those terms, since they did tend to have a racist meaning originally, as I knew its use in NYC.
And "white flight to suburbia" is not what I said. I said "white flight." That includes the older generation of a neighborhood that was just moving to another urban neighborhood that was still predominantly white. This white flight would dramatically hasten as a "tipping point" (a standard sociological term for such changes) of a minority population was reached in a previously predominantly white neighborhood.
You need not think the motives were strictly racial, since those "old" neighborhoods tended to have a specific ethnic flavor, and functioned for about 60 years as a village with a specific demographic. People might have just moved since they wanted to recapture the ethnic flavor they enjoyed for two to three generations in one neighborhood. But, since the 1960's included de-segregation, and John Kennedy needing to allay fears about his Catholicism, it is quite possible that that era had a fair amount of prejudice within society.
