Scope of Housing Blight in Birmingham: Where it’s been, where it is now, and how it got there 

To understand housing blight in Birmingham, we first have to look at white flight.  White flight was very common in the 60’s and 70’s across the country when black people would move into predominantly white neighborhoods.  The white people would flee to outside of the city, making the suburbs rapidly grow and the city neighborhoods to become more and more abandoned.  One can see this very clearly in most of Birmingham’s 99 neighborhoods with the amount of blight that the houses are experiencing.  However, after decades of white people leaving the city, we are seeing a shift.   

White people are moving back into the city, bringing with them a serious concern of gentrification.  The middle to upper class people who are moving into neighborhoods like Avondale and condominiums downtown are bringing with them new businesses that cater to people with similar incomes.  In Avondale, we can see extremely nice restaurants and coffee shops that have appeared over the last decade, along with a very nice park.  However, if one were to venture outside of town into the surrounding neighborhoods, they wouldn’t see a change.  Many of the houses are either blighted, abandoned, or both.  Right across the train tracks and right outside of these new businesses is a completely different world that represents what Birmingham neighborhoods have been put through over the last 50 or so years.  The fear of gentrification is not that residents won’t be able to pay at the businesses that pop up, although that is a problem.  The real concern is that, over time, residents that have long inhabited areas like Avondale will be displaced and run out.  What good is less blighted housing and more businesses if the people who were living next to those houses for so long eventually have to live somewhere else.  That is why gentrification is so scary for residents off Birmingham’s neighborhoods and only time will tell if these neighborhoods progress for the long-time residents or the people who are just now coming in.