When Caleb Roberts moved from Milwaukee to Texas, he knew the story of Black people in Dallas being pushed out for generations.
In Milwaukee, he helped to stop a $1 billion highway project that threatened to gentrify his neighborhood after he had already seen it happen across the country.
During the 20th century, across Dallas, communities founded by formerly enslaved people were carved through by highways, and asphalt plants and railyards were planted around them like walls. It hollowed out the neighborhoods and made it harder for low-income people to thrive. But for working and middle class families, it directed them to the suburbs.
They went to DeSoto, Lancaster, Cedar Hill, and Duncanville — southern suburbs where the Black middle class tripled between 1990 and 2000. There, they finally had access to sufficiently funded schools, newer homes, and some distance from violence and pollution.
They thought, somehow, they had found a way out of the cycle. Then gentrification followed them to the suburbs.
A sweeping new study mapping neighborhood change across 56,000 neighborhoods found that in metro areas like Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and New Orleans, gentrification is now happening more intensely in the very suburbs Black families built after being pushed from their cities. It is a second wave of displacement, but with a twist that researchers call “gentrification of color.”
In many of these suburbs, displacement is not being driven by white newcomers. It is happening within Black communities themselves, as higher-income Black households outpace those with fewer resources. At the center is a growing divide: income inequality.
Today, the gap between poor Black Americans and their middle- and upper-income counterparts is larger than within any other racial group in the U.S.
“It is so disheartening that Black people who live in these communities have to trade off: do we want better things, or do we want to be able to afford where we live? Even having to think about that is something America designed,” said Roberts, who moved to Dallas to work for Texas Housers in 2018. The nonprofit group “supports low-income Texans’ efforts to achieve the American dream of a decent, affordable home in a quality neighborhood.”
Since 1980, no racial group has been pushed from their homes by gentrification more than Black people.
Roberts, an urban planner working on environmental issues across the Dallas area, said the region has “a tradition of valuing new shiny things.” So when he moved to the city he was “really intentional about finding a place that didn’t chase any of the trends of where to move or that was gentrifying.” He ultimately settled in South Oak Cliff, a historic Black neighborhood near Downtown.
Yet “in a 10-year period, you have major restaurants, multifamily, mixed-use developments,” he said. “Now there are no three generations of families living in that area anymore.”
He is fearful that it could mean he or his neighbors might be pushed out into the suburbs.
With gentrification now rising faster in the suburbs than in the city, as Roberts put it, there is nowhere for low-income Black people left to go. “If you can’t live in the city and the suburbs are too expensive, what is next?” he said.
“Black people are the ones who have to pay the cost of segregation in the front and in the back half of this long-standing issue.”
What happens when gentrification is driven by Black people?
On any given morning within 50 miles of Dallas, a subdivision is being framed on land that was a soybean field in 2010. The fastest-growing cities in the U.S., like Celina, Princeton, Melissa, and Anna, are all Dallas suburbs, adding thousands of residents a year.
The numbers behind that growth tell a story that demographers have been tracking for decades, and that is only now beginning to reshape how we understand race, class, and belonging in America.
In 1970, most Black Americans — roughly 58% — lived in large cities. Today, that number has fallen to about 25%. The share living in suburbs has climbed to 36%, meaning, for the first time, more Black Americans live in the suburbs than in urban cores.
And wherever Black families have concentrated in enough numbers, the market — and gentrification — has often followed. But people now moving into DeSoto and Lancaster outside of Dallas — or South Fulton and College Park outside of Atlanta — today don’t look the way gentrifiers once looked. They are not, in many cases, white. They are younger, college-educated Black professionals.
Many of them are part of the “new Great Migration,” the decades-long reversal that has brought Black Americans back to the South in numbers that have reshaped suburbs outside of major cities. They are chasing the same things the families before them chased, and in doing so, some of them are pricing those families out.
Historian Beatrice Adams, who studies Black migration, framed it as inseparable from a class story that most historians still haven’t reckoned with.
“It intersects with the growth of the Black middle class and at the same time the growth of the Black lower class,” she said. “The current migration movement and gentrification is disproportionately of educated and middle-class people.”
Put another way: The distance between the wealthiest and poorest Black Americans is larger than between any other race. As the middle class has expanded and produced a class of mobile, college-educated Black professionals with enough resources to move, the poor have only gotten poorer. It has granted some Black people enough market power to inadvertently push out the families already there.
Studies going as far back as to Harlem in the 1970s have documented the pattern where middle- and upper-class Black residents move into lower-income Black neighborhoods. Afterward, property values rose and poor people were squeezed out.
But this wave has a key structural difference from the Great Migration. When Black families poured into Chicago, Detroit, and New York, white flight drove housing prices down — low enough that even poorer Black families could afford to stay. This time, white residents largely aren’t fleeing the suburbs as Black families arrive, which means housing prices are staying high. And lower-income Black households are losing footing with nowhere affordable to land.
“One outcome is that the suburbs look a little bit more diverse and are more representative of the country than they used to be,” said economist Evan Mast of the University of Notre Dame, who has studied the growth of Black suburbs. But this has “prevent[ed] suburban neighborhoods from becoming affordable for lower-income Black households and help[ed] to sustain income segregation.”
The result, increasingly, is displacement — of a particular, painful kind because it is sometimes the product of Black people displacing other Black people.
In Atlanta’s northern and southern suburbs, city officials have spent years bulldozing aging apartment complexes to attract higher-income Black buyers and have replaced apartment complexes with condominiums. In Pittsburgh, as Black families were priced out of the gentrifying East Liberty neighborhood, they moved to Penn Hills, the inner-ring suburb next door — only to watch investment and rising costs follow them there, too.
A cultural divide: Black city neighborhoods versus Black suburbs
The first families who moved to the suburbs were chasing upward mobility. The families now being pushed out of those same suburbs often are, too — except there are fewer jobs and fewer affordable housing options.
“Those opportunities that created the mushrooming of the Black middle class are gone,” Adams said, “and what does that mean for how we think about this movement and the way it’s changing and shaping space as those opportunities are foreclosed?”
Research has shown that over two generations, Black people living in the suburbs and those within the city stopped functioning as parts of the same community. This separation between the suburbs and the city has equaled a growing cultural gap within the larger Black community.
As Black middle-class families moved to the suburbs, they took with them the tax dollars that funded schools and much of the civic presence that shaped local politics. The neighborhoods they left behind lost all of it, and Black neighborhoods within big cities became more isolated and disinvested.
The distance between the wealthiest and poorest Black Americans is larger than between any other race.
In Dallas, the dispersal has been so complete that it has fractured the idea of a Black community itself, Roberts said.
“A lot of times when people say Dallas, they’re not really talking about the city,” Roberts said. “They’re talking about this amorphous area that has a lot of different cities combined. You’ll see suburbs that have a strong Black population — Lancaster, DeSoto, Duncanville — but what does that really mean for community? What does that really mean for school systems, when you have this culture that’s no longer fixed on one place, that’s kind of spread out?”
The suburban Black experience is organized around homeownership, school district reputation, and what sociologist Karyn Lacy called “script switching.” This is the practiced ability to code-switch between Black identity and the norms of predominantly white professional and civic spaces. Urban Black culture, which has been forged through generations of segregated living and structural neglect, is more organized around communal spaces and the collective knowledge of how to navigate hostile neighborhoods.
Over two generations, these two worlds have developed different political instincts, anchors of belonging, and definitions of what “the community” even means. And as research has found, suburban Black residents now perceive racial inequality in institutions like policing and schools at lower rates than their urban counterparts, a gap that widens the further from the city center they live.
As the gap within Black America widens, it can feel like there is nowhere for Black folks to make a home between the city and suburb, Roberts said. He said he can’t help but be fearful for the next generation, and wonders if it is pushing more people toward racially hostile places.
“If you move to the suburbs, they’re less accountable because they have less attention on them than the city. There’s less news, less coverage. And so what happens to these people if a suburb decides they want to change the look and feel of their community?” he said. “Do they move back to the city, or do they move further away into rural Texas — where we don’t know what’s happening to these Black residents, and if they’re being supported the way they need to be?”
You can see if your neighborhood or suburb is currently gentrifying via this map.
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