Ken Cowan grew up black in inner-city Omaha, surrounded by African-American doctors and lawyers who took pride in their community and were "the kind of people you dreamed of growing up to be."
That childhood molded him into the person he is today, he says, now a success in his own right. After the birth of their first child, Ken and his wife moved to the Houston suburbs and fell into that mind-set: "young couples with two kids, a dog, and an SUV. But after living there for seven years, we had a strong sense that we wanted to get back to areas that were similar to where we grew up."
Mainly, he says, it was for their children's sake. Now the 6- and 8-year-olds swing on century-old trees, play with kids who look like them, and listen to stories from their 90-year-old neighbor, one of the first African-Americans to move to the area, known as the Third Ward.
The Cowans are part of a growing number of affluent and middle-class African-Americans moving back into traditionally black inner-city areas across America. It's a dramatic reversal from the days when when many African- Americans believed a home in the suburbs was a measure of "making it."
| Continue Kris Axtman's Christian Science Monitor article "After years in the burbs, many blacks return to city life"
posted in articles on April 28, 2004 6:37 PM | t (0)
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Interesting article, in particular about how the loss of one neighborhood to steamroller-style gentrification has spurred interest in more careful redevelopment of another.
I used to live in Houston and I remember the battles of the early nineties over the fate of the Fourth Ward. The neighborhood advocates had a couple of major disadvantages. One, of course, was that they were fighting on behalf of the poor, pretty much the least powerful constituency in the city. (Maybe prisoners and the mentally ill come in even lower.) Another was that the Fourth Ward had become so blighted that it was largely depopulated -- a trend encouraged by officials who would use safety ordinances and drug laws to board up or raze buildings at every opportunity -- so by the end the activists were fighting to save a ghost town. I don't know that the Third or Fifth Wards have been in the same position as the Fourth, but upper-middle-class African-American families moving back in would surely strengthen the hand of the neighborhood advocates -- assuming the returnees and the traditional neighborhood advocates end up on the same side.
I started to write a counterpoint paragraph wondering what a campaign to sell only to "people who will make this community better by becoming part of its fabric, not by changing its fabric" means, whether it's strictly racial code or, worse, code for "sell only to the developer enmeshed in my political machine, not the white developer from across town". But here's a sympathetic Houston Chronicle article about the campaign which convinces me that it's legit, or at least as legit as Houston politics ever is.
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