There is no place like home. And that might be why Black Americans are moving back to the South.
During the Great Migration from the 1910s to the 1970s, an estimated 6 million Black people moved to states in the North, Midwest, and West. They moved to New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Detroit.
One hundred years later, Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston, saw the largest net migration of Black families, according to the Black Wealth Data Center. BWDC is a program spurred by a collaboration between Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Greenwood Initiative and Prosperity Now. It was created to address a lack of sufficient and accessible data on Black wealth.
“There are lots of reasons why people move, and you can’t paint a broad brush on why people move from one place to another,” Doug Ryan, vice president of policy and applied research at Prosperity Now, tells Word In Black. He adds that it could be that Black families are moving back to the South to care for a family member or in search of affordable housing.
However, the South has some of the same issues for Black people as any other region.
Racial Progress
Racial progress may be one reason for this new migration pattern. A recent WalletHub analysis found that Georgia and Texas had the most racial progress since the Civil Rights movement, with Mississippi in third place. They point to a reduced earnings and business ownership gap in Georgia and reduced health insurance coverage and education gap in Texas.
“Georgia, the state with the most racial progress, has reduced the gap between the earnings of white and Black Americans by over 32% since 1979,” Cassandra Happe, analyst at WalletHub, said in a statement. “It has also decreased the gap in business ownership by over 11% since 2002. Georgia has made a lot of progress with reducing the poverty rate of Black residents and increasing the share of Black business executives, too.”
The Homeownership Problem
Even with increased earnings and business ownership, homeownership, one the most popular forms of wealth generation, lags for Black people. Over five years, the number of homeowners increased by just 1.4% in Atlanta and decreased by 3.6% in Dallas and 2.1% in Houston, according to the BWDC.
During that same time frame, the national Black homeownership rate increased from 41.9% in the first quarter of 2015 to 44.1% by the end of 2020. “It’s extraordinarily difficult because these are markets that people want to live in, and to be honest, they just have not built housing to keep up with the demand,” Ryan says.
The BWDC also found a substantial difference in the ratio between median home prices and median income in these popular cities.
“It’s the fact that Black families’ household incomes are considerably lower; therefore, the ratio is worse,” Ryan says. “Until incomes grow and become more equalized, the ratios will be different.”
The larger problem, he says, is that government policies have had “an intentional role in ensuring the inequality of the wealth opportunities through homeownership.” These policy choices created difficulties in accessibility to financing and redlining practices, both of which are problems that still exist today.
To fix this, local and state governments must invest in more affordable housing, better and fairer loan products, and zoning reform to allow more multifamily properties. Without these improvements, Black families may not be able to call the South home for as long as they expected or wanted.
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