On Urban Exodus

Urban Exodus is an interesting and reasonably compelling book about the causes of “white flight” in Boston. In writing this text, Gamm makes two arguments: first, that the era of suburbanization needs to be seen as emerging among Protestant white ethnics in the 1920s (not the 1940s-60s); second, the difference in choices made by Catholic and Jewish communities boil down largely to the nature of their religious institutions.

I’ll discuss the second argument first, as it seems more important to the text as a whole. Gamm argues that Catholic institutions have a long sense of rootedness, to the point where developers often welcomed Catholic churches (even if they were politically opposed to Catholics) because it was a sign of the neighborhood’s permanence. This is, in large part, due to the nature of church parish claims over territory. Inclusion in a given Catholic church is based, above all, on the criteria of where one lives. If you live a few blocks away, you may be forced to attend a different church, with a different, unfamiliar congregation and a new priest. Moreover, church authority lies in the hands of priests, bishops, archbishops, etc., meaning that Catholic congregations themselves had little voice. Jewish synagogues, on the other hand, were not necessarily assembled around physical space. Any Jewish person may attend any synagogue, and the identity of a synagogue is not rooted in physical space (like the building itself), but in the congregation. While rabbis are surely important, the identity of the congregation is fundamentally about the congregation itself. As a result, synagogue congregations are far more transient and capable of moving.

Thanks to the differing natures of religious institutions, Jewish Americans were more willing to leave their neighborhoods when things changed, while Catholics dug their heels in and often became violent when challenged. To me, this aspect of the book makes a lot of sense, and I don’t a large number of criticisms of it, except perhaps to ask about the transformation in America’s religious landscape in a period where both Catholics and Jews were increasingly likely not to attend church or a synagogue, potentially weakening the importance of those institutions.

The first argument, I have far more trouble with. In fact, it almost acts as a sort of response to critics—like me—who ask “if Jewish synagogues and Protestant churches so similar, what happened to white Protestants?” White Protestants surely still lived in the cities in the 1960s-70s, although nowhere at the same rates as Jews or Catholics. Gamm recognizes this and argues that white Protestants, broadly, left the cities decades earlier toward newly constructed suburbs. This guides him into a more subtle argument: that “white flight” hardly existed. While racism was certainly an important part of urban change, it certainly was not the most important aspect. He asks: “How could integration be the cause of white flight when most black Americans could not afford to buy housing or rent in these neighborhoods?”

There might be something here, but I’m not so sure. Property values dived in the 1960s out of mere fear that black people might move in, and when a black person did move in, property values dived more precipitously still, hence the phrase “there goes the neighborhood.” From what I know, it still seems apparent that racism was the single most important aspect driving “white flight” in the 1960s-70s.

Gamm’s arguments about Catholic resilience in their residential spaces make sense and is welcome, but his larger contribution to the conversation on the transformation of urban areas in the post-war years do not seem to hold up to scrutiny.