

The White City (2009) - rbranson
http://www.newgeography.com/content/001110-the-white-city

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pwim
The article would be better title "the not black city", as it goes on to use
the African American population as the demographic for the cities 'whiteness'.

The article goes on to use Portland as "America's ultimate White City".
However, looking at demographics, it is 78.6% white
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland,_Oregon#Demographics>) compared to the
average of 75.0%
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity)).
This isn't nearly as striking as the 6.0% vs 12.8% African American
demographic in the article.

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mkramlich
Agreed. Some of the cities shown that had low black percentages also had
higher-than-average percentages of asians or hispanics. Overall, I'd say it's
a combination of wealth factors, education/intelligence factors, and
behavioral/cultural factors -- not any single one thing.

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miloshh
A much simpler explanation would be - people that are wealthy enough to choose
where they would like to live are predominantly not African-American.

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muyyatin
It seems they hand-picked all of their "progressive" cities, and pointed out
excluding "tier one" cities. I too could pick my "progressive" cities to
isolate a particular statistic.

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crystalis
They also managed to hand-wave "progressive city" into "diverse city". Once
they did that, it would have been nice if they compared the sum of black and
immigrant populations as a somewhat more reasonable measure of diversity. Even
better, they could have done some income level or cost of living analysis to
see how much that explains the statistics.

