Census 2000 and red-green politics

John Gulick jlgulick at sfo.com
Tue Apr 3 14:30:37 PDT 2001


Hi Kelley,


>interesting, but i think you're just seeing a lag with the south catching
>up to the exurban sprawl that went on in the north already. also, the
>notion that the south is more racist is unsupportable by many measures.
>
>kelley

I definitely pitched my hypothesis at a high level of abstraction, as they say. I think your point about timing makes a good deal of sense, but I'd bet that recently fast-growing cities of the Deep South have more sprawl than recently fast-growing cities elsewhere. For example, as bilious as Las Vegas is, there isn't that much leap-frog development -- it's mostly wall-to-wall gated communities and casino-anchored shopping malls, kind of like Southern California. From what I know about the Deep South there's a lot of leap-frog development of large-lot "colonial style" subdivisions, in part b/c the "upper middle class" more desperately wants to get out of anything remotely resembling a dense urban environment (which signifies the antithesis of "family values"). My remarks about racism are admittedly very casual in a thousand or more ways, but wouldn't you agree, everything else being equal, that your average white Southerner with, say, a B.S. in engineering is more likely to prefer to live in the suburbs _because_ the suburbs are "code white" than is your average white Seattleite of the same pedigree ? (Beyond caricaturing white Southerners as a bunch of crackers, which as you know I am loath to do, there are a bunch of other problems with this formulation -- such as the history of white flight in the non-Deep South, the racial composition of such "progressive" cities as Minneapolis, etc. -- nonetheless I still think there's something to it).

Best,

John G.



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