These 5 Cities Are Growing Faster Than Your Kids

But where are their Black residents?

Phoenix City Center from the North Mountains. Photo by Lisa Campbell on Unsplash.

Is Manifest Destiny permanent?

Are we all going to slide into the Pacific Ocean?

The country is becoming rather lopsided, at least if you look to the West.

Last month I wrote an article titled The Rise and Fall of 5 Great American Cities. Using 1950 as a baseline, the cities in fastest decline are all east of the Mississippi — Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. (OK, so St. Louis is on the Mississippi, let’s not split hairs!) Suburbanization and “white flight” have taken their toll. Here are a few highlights from that story:

Detroit: its decline leads this pack of large cities, with the population down 67%. It was once the country’s fifth-largest city.
St. Louis: the population has declined to the point where only 11% of the metropolitan area’s citizens still live in the city.
Baltimore: once the nation’s sixth-largest city, it‘s plunged to number 31.
Cleveland: hit its peak population in 1950. It’s now slid from seventh to 54th place.
Pittsburgh: a steep fall from the 12th largest city to the 67th.

Where are the people going? Maybe to one of the five fastest-growing cities since 1950. Their increases are meteoric. And coincidentally, all of them are west of the Mississippi.

However, one usually sees more diversity in large cities. If 13.4% of Americans are Black, these cities are coming up way short. They make up a small fraction of the population of these Boomtowns.

Chart by author. Population figures are based on US Census Bureau’s 1950 actuals, and 2019 estimates. Demographic statistics derived from Wikipedia.

Phoenix

Arizona has only been a state since 1912, and it already has the fifth-largest city in the land. By geographical area, it is one of the largest cities in the U.S., which explains part of the growth. Surely enough, the advent of air conditioning post World War II made it more bearable.

Much if not all of the arable land in the city has been developed. Eight of its suburbs have populations above 100,000, with Mesa being the largest. To put that into perspective, Mesa is now larger than most of the top 10 largest cities in 1950.

“There is no black neighborhood in Phoenix,” so says phxcoul.com, an online magazine. In 2016 the Phoenix New Times newspaper ran a story entitled, “Why Does Phoenix Feel So White?”

Because. It. Is. Of the whole state, Blacks make up only 4% of the population.

Tucson

Phoenix’s step-sister, Tucson, was barely a speck on the map in 1950, and it is now the nation’s 32nd largest city — larger than Cleveland, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh. Blacks make up 5% of the city.

“It can be quite tiring to live in majority-white spaces like Tucson, if you’re Black”, explained Debi Chess Mabie, a University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Arizona in an interview on Arizona Public Media.

“If you have never lived in a predominately white setting, you’re going to have severe culture shock”, as the University of Arizona African Studies professor Tani Sanchez put it to Blacks new to Tucson.

Colorado Springs

80.9%. That’s how White Colorado Springs is, making it the ninth least diverse city in the country. It’s a city that has been defined for its military might, as well as a conservative enclave of bible-thumpers, thanks to it being the home of “Focus on the Family” as well as other evangelical organizations.

Stories from some of Colorado Springs’ first Black residents echo those in the rest of the U.S. — difficulty in obtaining homes, being segregated into a certain part of the city, and known as a “sundown town” in its Black area.

So conservative is Colorado Springs that, even though the state legalized recreational marijuana years ago, it still cannot be purchased within the city.

Boise

While the smallest city in this study, (only) 657% growth from 1950 puts it in the top five of the fastest-growing cities. Boise has the lowest percentage Black population at 2%.

Idaho is well known for its Aryan “community,” primarily based in the northern part of the state. The state capital, Boise, suffers from hate crimes particularly aimed against the Jewish and LGBTQ communities.

The River Street neighborhood is known as the center of the Black community in Boise. In the late 1950s, one family moved out of River Street and into an all-white community. Greeting them for the first time as residents was a burning cross in their front yard.

Boise has been cited as one of the most livable cities in the U.S. by many in the media community, most recently at number one by livability.com in 2019.

Austin

With all of the media attention pointed in its direction, Austin is often seen as the liberal Mecca of Texas. Liberal it is, but only eight percent of its residents are Black.

Austin is the fastest-growing large city in the country. It just surpassed the one-million mark to make it our tenth-largest. While the likes of Tesla, SpaceX, Oracle, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon are growing their offices here like wildfire, there is nowhere to live. Prospective buyers wait in line for an hour or more just to get into an open house.

Californians are flocking to Austin for two big, existential reasons: to get away from high taxes and politics. While I assume that most of these are Republican, Gavin Newsome has given some democrats pause to reflect if there might be something better.

Traffic is said to be unbearable at peak hours. The new-ish Bergstom International Airport, which opened in 1999, is already suffering from growing pains. An additional concourse with 32 gates is in the works.

A 1928 ordinance proposal was passed, concentrating all services for Black residents on the East Side. It was called The Negro District. Before that passage, Blacks lived all over the city, but 80% found themselves living within this segregated district within two years.

Now, “east siders” are being priced out of their own neighborhood. As a result, Austin is the only one of the ten fastest-growing cities that has lost Black population.

In the End

This is a tale of just five U.S. cities. There are countless others to be told.

Technology is moving the marketplace, which requires an educated workforce, which requires the means to pay for that education. As we peel the onion layers, we see the lack of capital in the Black population due to decades of mistreatment and inequality.

But the bottom line is that Blacks are left out of the equation when it comes to the opportunities Boomtowns have to offer. Because of systemic racism, many have been left behind in the South and East. Many are trapped in redlined districts of cities that, while now illegal, still exist unsaid. There is no opportunity.

There’s much more to talk about in these ten disparate cities. Homicides are up — way up — in all ten of them, as they were throughout the country, and property crime was way down. While the latter makes sense during the Year of Covid-19, why the increase in murder? And to such an extent. Wasn’t everyone supposed to be home?

Also eating away at much of the West and its cities is climate change and its resultant lack of precipitation. Particularly in the Southwest, drought has been more or less common for the last 25 years. We’ve seen the damage that’s been done to our forests. Lack of water could prohibit future growth of the cities located in that region. The East has the opposite problem: rising ocean levels are threatening the coastline and frequent flooding.

But all is not lost. Experts are studying each of these issues to try to right the wrongs. As we progress in this series, we’ll see where headway is being made and on what fronts.

Come along with me as we look at ourselves in this series.