Voting with their feet

What Explains The Middle-Class Black Exodus From The Northeast?

By K. Smith

Middle-class blacks whose forebears fled the South in mid-century are now leaving Northern cities like New York and heading for Dixie. Why ever could that be?

Fear not: The sleuths from The New York Times are on the case. Exploring why some black residents of middle-class Queens might be inclined to uproot their families, turn away from their friends, sell property and start over with new careers or firms 1,000 miles away, the Times discovered such banal and limp reasons as New York City having “lost its cachet with black people,” Atlanta and other Southern cities being less of “a struggle to survive,” the South offering the nourishment of “emotional and spiritual roots,” and a “more relaxed and comfortable life.” Black New Yorkers have even supposedly soured on race relations in the North. (This last reason seems to be the viewpoint of a single interviewee who had an unpleasant run-in with the NYPD and says she is heading to Charlotte, N.C., in search of a more  genial constabulary.)

Of 44,000 blacks leaving New York State in 2009, says a survey conducted on behalf of the Times, more than half have gone to the South. If there is a reverse Great Migration beginning to get underway, though, it is taking place for the same reason blacks flooded to the north in the first place — economics.

The Times story contains only one economic figure, near the bottom. But it’s a whopper: $150,000. This is the price former Queens resident Danitta Ross paid for a seven-room house, including a three-car garage and a piece of land, in Atlanta four years ago. And how nicely does this passage typify economics-based reporting for the Times? “The migration of middle-class African-Americans is helping to depress already falling housing prices. It is also depriving the black community of investment and leadership from some of its most educated professionals, black leaders say.” That’s one way of looking at it, but housing prices are presumably rising, and the black community being reinvigorated with new talent, in the cities that are best able to attract new residents. Why should not cities that are most welcoming to the black middle class be so rewarded?

Mired in its anecdotage, the New York Times doesn’t, or would prefer not to, recognize what is obvious. As northern cities gradually choke themselves with red tape and taxation, southern hospitality toward business becomes increasingly attractive. A 2010 KPMG study reported that among 22 large cities, Atlanta ranks as the second-cheapest place to do business after Tampa (the bottom five are Boston, San Diego, Los Angeles, New York City and, in last place, San Francisco).

This year a CNBC survey said the top four states in which to do business are, in order, Virginia, Texas, North Carolina and Georgia. New York State ranked 26th. A 2010 Forbes survey ranked Atlanta as the 27th best place for business and careers. New York City come in 99th, beat by Worcester, Mass., and Allentown, Penn.

Business leaders doing the hiring are somewhat less dazzled by New York City than journalists, however. A survey of some 500 CEOs declared that the best states in which to do business were, in order, Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee and Georgia. Numbers 46-50 were: Michigan, New Jersey, Illinois, New York and California.

What is most intriguing about the idea of a reverse Great Migration is this: Why are blacks voting with their feet? Wouldn’t it be easier to vote with their votes? No U-Haul necessary in that case. New York City blacks form a reliable voting bloc that invariably backs liberals, and sometimes ultra-liberals, from lowly City Councilmen all the way up to the mayor and the governor.

These politicians tend to rely heavily on the support of unionized public-sector workers and almost always repay the favor by lavishing those same workers with a gravity-defying upward spiral of ever-increasing pay and benefits. Black New Yorkers cheer all of this, perhaps most notably in 2005 when three-quarters of blacks supported a transit union that called an illegal walkout while demanding a 6% annual pay raise on top of its already bulging pay envelope.

Bus drivers, for instance, were earning an average of nearly $63,000 a year, and enjoyed the privilege of retiring on half salary at age 55, after 25 years on the job. Paying all of those civil service pensions means both increasing taxes and declining public services as an ever-higher percentage of each year’s budget is simply unavailable for spending on today’s needs.

Perhaps there is some cognitive dissonance going on here — though one 59-year-old interviewee in the New York Times article seemed to have figured out the secret to harvesting the bounty of both cities. After working as a government welfare-fraud inspector in Gotham for decades, she is now a pension-drawing retiree moving to Atlanta — to open a restaurant. Her mother and son are going too.

If that juxtaposition isn’t savory enough for you, consider this: the Great Migration of blacks to the north was fueled in large part by the promise of unionized jobs in heavy industries hungry for labor. If a reverse migration continues, the right-to-work states will soon have the last laugh.