"The White City" - implications for Detroit

[Onthe405]

None of the cities named in that story were ever industrial enough to draw large numbers of mostly unskilled workers, including many blacks, from the south. In that sense, the "blackness" of less successful cities is really a stand-in variable for the degree of historic economic dependence on heavy industry.

Up until the era of the computer [[beginning around the 1980s), both Seattle & Portland were primarily heavy industrial economies---led by steel, paper/wood products, grain exports, aircraft, and clothing manufacturing. The majority of workers in these industries were not white collar/skilled.

However, two factors differentiate them from the demographic development of rust-belt industrial cities [[as you elude to in your post, Al): one is the actual overall number of jobs. Since the majority of the US population was centered east for the first two centuries, Portland never became a Pittsburgh in steel or offered the sheer number of factory jobs that the auto industry did in Detroit.

Second is the geographic distance for migration required by people of all ethnicities, including blacks, whose majority population was in the south----particularly in the days pre-dating accessibility to air travel, telephone, internet, etc. MI was a long way from MS by train or bus, but practically right around the corner compared to OR & WA.

This is also reflected in the case of Los Angeles. Despite its world renowned image as the entertainment factory of the country, heavy industry & manufacturing were at the core of its economy right up until the 1990-1992 recession. However, as an overall percentage of the city’s population, blacks never exceeded about 12%, reflecting the overall US percentage almost exactly