 | | Athenia Rodney at her new home in Snellville, Ga., with her husband Kendall and three children. They moved away from New York City last summer.Nicole Craine for The New York Times |
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The Continuing Loss of Black New Yorkers |
Athenia Rodney is a product of the upward mobility New York City once promised Black Americans. She grew up in mostly Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn, graduated from public schools and attended a liberal arts college on a full scholarship. She went on to start her own event-planning business in the city. |
But as Mrs. Rodney's own family grew, she found herself living in a cramped one-bedroom rental, where her three children shared a bunk bed in the living room. It was hard to get them into programs that exposed them to green spaces or swim classes. As she scrolled through friends' social media posts showing off trampolines in spacious backyards in Georgia, the solution became clearer: Leave. |
Last summer, the family bought a five-bedroom home in Snellville, Ga. |
"I felt like it became increasingly difficult to raise a family in New York," Mrs. Rodney said. |
The Rodneys are part of an exodus of Black residents from New York City. From 2010 to 2020, a decade during which the city's population showed a surprising increase led by a surge in Asian and Hispanic residents, the number of Black residents decreased. The decline mirrored a national trend of younger Black professionals, middle-class families and retirees leaving cities in the Northeast and Midwest for the South. |
The city's Black population has declined by nearly 200,000 people in the past two decades, or about 9 percent. Now, about one in five residents are non-Hispanic Black, compared with one in four in 2000, according to the latest census data. |
The decline is starkest among the youngest New Yorkers: The number of Black children and teenagers living in the city fell more than 19 percent from 2010 to 2020. And the decline is continuing, school enrollment data suggests. Schools have lost children in all demographic groups, but the loss of Black children has been much steeper as families have left and as the birthrate among Black women has decreased. |
The factors propelling families like the Rodneys out of the city are myriad, including concerns about school quality, a desire to be closer to relatives and tight urban living conditions. But many of those interviewed for this article pointed to one main cause: the ever-increasing cost of raising a family in New York. |
Black families drawn to opportunities in places where jobs and housing are more plentiful are finding new chances to spread out and build wealth. But the exodus could transform the fabric of New York, even as Black political power surges. It has alarmed Black leaders, as well as economists who point to labor shortages in industries like nursing where Black workers have traditionally been overrepresented. |
 | | Alisha Brooks moved with her family to Charlotte, N.C. They were attracted both by the city's affordability and diversity.Nicole Craine for The New York Times |
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The filmmaker Spike Lee, a longtime New York booster, said he worries about the city becoming more expensive and less accessible to people of color in particular, who have contributed so much to the city's culture, from the birth of hip hop in the South Bronx to artists like Alvin Ailey and Jean-Michel Basquiat. |
"It's really sad because the reality is New York City is not affordable anymore," Mr. Lee said. And if Black people can't afford to live in the city, "you could seriously say New York City isn't the greatest city in the world," he said. |
Eric Adams, New York's second Black mayor, has vowed to create a more affordable city to stem the "hemorrhaging of Black and brown families." Mr. Adams's own bid for mayor was partially built on a biography that reflects the Black community's roots in the city: His parents traveled north from Alabama during the Great Migration, climbed their way from poverty in Brooklyn to middle-class homeownership in Queens and relied on public schools and colleges to lift their children to greater success. |
Younger Black families say that trajectory has become more elusive. High inflation and a turbulent rental market as the pandemic has subsided have hurt New Yorkers across the board. But Black families lag far behind white families in homeownership and in building wealth. Black households have a median income of $53,000, compared with roughly $98,000 for white households, according to the most recent census data. |
Ruth Horry, a Black mother who bounced through cockroach- and rodent-infested Brooklyn apartments for years, has repeatedly been priced out by rising rents. Eventually, Ms. Horry, 36, and her three daughters, landed in the shelter system. At a shelter in Queens, the sink was so small Ms. Horry washed her children's hair in the bathroom at a nearby McDonald's. |
"The conditions for what you could afford were mind-blowing," she said. "I was just so tired of that." |
In late 2019, Ms. Horry moved to Jersey City through a New York City voucher program, known as the Special One-Time Assistance program, which relocates vulnerable families into permanent housing with a full year's rent upfront. The drop in living costs has been life-changing, Ms. Horry said, and she is considering moving to the South to save even more. |
"I have no food stamps, no welfare, no rental assistance," said Ms. Horry, who now lives in a two-bedroom apartment and pays the $1,650 monthly rent through her earnings at a nonprofit that helps families in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood. "I don't qualify for those programs, and that is an amazing feeling." |
Still, Regine Jackson, a professor at Atlanta's Morehouse College who studies migration patterns, said that as more Black Northerners make what is often a bittersweet decision to leave, it remains unclear whether the South will ultimately provide the greater opportunities they seek. |
They may have become disillusioned with life in the North, said Ms. Jackson, but in the South, "there's still problems." |
"There's been a lot of progress since the civil rights movement, yet there's still a lot left to do," Ms. Jackson said. |
Read the rest of the story here. |
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