White Flight

In The New Urban Crisis, white flight names the abandonment of central cities — the exodus of people, companies, and stores that hollowed out places like Newark and tipped them into “steep decline.” Richard Florida frames it through his own boyhood haunting: “What was causing people, companies, and stores to abandon Newark? Why had the city exploded into racial turmoil and entered into such a steep decline? Why had the factory where my father worked closed down?” That “original urban crisis” — racial turmoil, deindustrialization, and the flight of capital and residents from the urban core — is the historical backdrop against which Florida sets the new urban crisis of inequality and unaffordability. The concept sits alongside suburban sprawl and gentrification in the book’s vocabulary of how cities lose and recover their centers.

Context: “White flight” is the standard sociological term for the mid-20th-century migration of white residents out of racially diversifying American urban centers into suburbs, driven by a mix of housing policy, racial anxiety, and disinvestment, and a major cause of the postwar decline of cities like Detroit and Newark.

Where this appears

• The New Urban Crisis — invoked in Florida’s account of Newark’s collapse, paired with suburban sprawl and gentrification as forces that emptied the urban core.