White flight in Sydney!

Posted by Guest Blogger on Monday, 28 February 2005 11:15.

I’ve just come across an extraordinary research paper. It examines, in a remarkably open and honest way, the reasons why some Sydneysiders are leaving the established western suburbs and moving to “master planned communities” on the urban fringe.

What it finds is that the residents of these new communities are fleeing precisely those suburbs in which there is both a large amount of public housing and a rapid influx of immigrants. The residents are trying to recreate a traditional Anglo-Australian community in which they feel their identity, values and way of life are secure for themselves and their children.

In other words, the paper takes an academic (and surprisingly unbiased) look at the process of white flight.

Harrington Park

One of these new “master planned communities”, Harrington Park, sounds very appealing. This is its description:

“the estate’s single entrance is impressive, with a wide, curving road stretching past tendered agapanthus gardens, parks and the Lake ... Street landscaping, particularly along the main thoroughfares, provides a formal feel, with mature, deciduous trees dominating. Harrington Park has well-resourced playgrounds, and a network of well maintained walkways, bike trails and picnic grounds .... and sports facilities including a cricket ground resplendent in white picket.”

According to the report residents of Harrington Park and nearby Garden Gates are “overwhelmingly Australian born, English speaking and Christian.”

Invasion & succession

Why did the residents decide to move to these new communities? Mostly, according to the paper, because of ethnic changes in traditional western suburbs like Campbelltown, Liverpool and Macquarie Fields.

The paper uses very frank language in describing these changes: it speaks of an “urban process of ‘domination, invasion and succession’ ”. According to the paper, it’s not just a class distinction which marks out these suburbs, because “within the neighbourhoods of western Sydney, invasion and succession, of a racial and socio-economic dimension, is just as significant a feature.”

Public housing

The residents of the new communities were fearful of the mix of public housing estates and non-English speaking migrants in the older western suburbs. The paper found that:

“In the ‘experience’ of many of the informants, crime and social disorder coalesce within these two sites. Two female informants described the insecurity experienced living near the public housing estates in Macquarie Fields ... “There was a lot of violence and that down there, and gangs ... At the Housing Commission. That was Islanders. That was quite scary down there. They would often get on and off the train and they were loud. And they would have a go at you and they were drinking. At Campbelltown, you get it with the Aborigines. And they’re drunk and abusive…”

Ethnic change

The paper also found that the influx of migrants was a significant motivation for the shift away from the older suburbs. It reported that,

“Perhaps even more than the fear of the effects of social disorder symbolised by the public housing estates, racial tension was an underlying motivation behind the move to Camden, and more specifically Harrington Park and Garden Gates. The influx of migrants into the more established suburbs of western Sydney, particularly since 1973, is an example of invasion and succession.”

One informant described the process of “losing the sense of the familiar” through these changes. She spoke about how Liverpool was not only busier, but that “you’ve got all the you know, different types of ethnic people, and it’s just changed. It has grown, but not in a good way. And the type of shops had changed to cater for them, which is the way things go.”

Community

So what are those engaging in white flight looking for? A more settled and secure sense of cultural and communal identity it seems. As the paper puts it,

“As Sydney’s western suburbs have become more ethno-culturally and economically diverse, master planned communities have come to offer middle income households the opportunity to move into estates built specifically to meet their cultural values, aspirations and insecurities.”

Furthermore, residents were responding to a “perceived undermining of a ‘common way of life’ by new migrant settlement patterns” by seeking “the expectation of certainty and trust produced by a socially compatible, like minded resident population.” Residents were “seeking to secure their world”.

Again, the paper concludes that “the planned estates of Harrington Park and Garden Gates currently offer residents a sense of coherence and social order and a degree of control over the physical and social environment; that is, a sense of active engagement, rules of belonging and a code of behaviour that provided an anchor for communal and consequently individual identity, and the feeling of predictability from which residents could plan their life.”

Conclusion

So what do we make of this? First, the research runs directly counter to those who claim that “diversity” is culturally enriching. If this were really so, why would people being fleeing it in order to find a more authentic sense of community elsewhere?

Second, even though white flight doesn’t solve the larger problem of open borders, we shouldn’t view the decision to move out of the traditional western suburbs as an irrational one. As I write this there have been riots over several days in Macquarie Fields, one of the suburbs white Sydneysiders are leaving.

Moving your family to Harrington Park would seem sensible in view of such ongoing violence and disorder.

Tags: Australian Politics

Comments:

Posted by jonjayray on Mon, 28 Feb 2005 11:48 | #

Places like Campbelltown have always been the pits, though. There has to be somewhere for the losers to go

Posted by Geoff Beck on Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:10 | #

American blacks, the descendants of slaves, have every right to live in America - I support that.

The post 1965 invasion of Mexicans and others has destroyed their position in American society. Now, they are not only below whites… but below Asians and often Mexicans. They ought to be outraged. I found this quote from a black radio announcer in L.A.:

“If you ain’t mad, you ain’t payin’ attention!”

...“We, black Americans are being displaced in Los Angeles,” Anderson told an indifferent Congress. “We are being systematically and economically replaced. And the next time somebody tells you that the illegals only take jobs that blacks won’t do, just remember that we were doing those jobs before the illegals got here.”

—Ilana Mercer
http://www.americanpatrol.com/

Posted by Phil Peterson on Mon, 28 Feb 2005 16:37 | #

“If you ain’t mad, you ain’t payin’ attention!”

That should apply to ALL US citizens, not just Blacks!

Posted by Mark Richardson on Mon, 28 Feb 2005 21:36 | #

I’ve just woken up to hear there’s been another night of riots in Macquarie Fields. The rioting has continued now over four days.

No-one in the media is mentioning the ethnic angle, but one Catholic social worker was politically incorrect enough to complain that there are virtually no fathers left in such suburbs.

Unemployment, welfare dependency, fatherlessness and ethnic diversity appear to be a potent enough mix to produce riots even in laid back, casual, relaxed and friendly Australia.

Posted by Geoff Beck on Mon, 28 Feb 2005 23:27 | #

Mark:

Several years ago I remember reading a story about a large shipful of Afgans that was steaming to Australia. Somehow they were steered to an island and kept there. I think there was a blow-up in the Austrialian press about this incident.

As I recall your PM bravely, I might add, denied this rabble entrance into Australia.

Is that right? Where did those people go? Do you remember?

Posted by Mark Richardson on Tue, 01 Mar 2005 11:49 | #

Geoff, as I recall them, the events you are referring to went as follows.

In 2001, our “conservative” Prime Minister, John Howard, was very unpopular and facing electoral defeat. At the same time, there were boatloads of illegal immigrants arriving in the north of Australia mostly from the middle-east.

A boatload of 450 illegals set sail from Indonesia but got into trouble while still in Indonesian waters. They were picked up by a Norwegian ship called the Tampa. The illegals demanded to be taken to Australia and coerced the Norwegian captain to sail for our north coast.

The Howard Government decided to get tough and when the Norwegian captain defied an order preventing him from entering Australian waters, the Australian SAS boarded and took over the ship.

The illegals were put onto an Australian navy vessel and taken to camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea where they couldn’t rort the Australian legal system.

Of course, the left has never forgiven the Howard Government and it’s still often referred to in newspapers.

However, Howard won over the working class voters and turned around a looming electoral loss into a victory.

There have been no boat people arrive since. However, some of the illegals who were processed on Nauru and PNG were later allowed into Australia (though the majority, as I recall, were not found by the UN to be genuine refugees).

Of course, all this shows that the Howard Government does not believe in the idea of open borders. However, this doesn’t make Howard a traditionalist conservative.

Howard has raised legal immigration to record levels and the level of immigration from Europe has dropped to historic lows.

He is, in other words, pushing hard to achieve the ethnic transformation of Australia. He is definitely not a conservative in the sense of wanting to conserve his own ethnic group or his own traditional national identity.

Posted by Effra on Tue, 01 Mar 2005 14:47 | #

Are there any large multiracial cities on the planet where this kind of polite, unadmitted, gradual but inexorable assortation by race does *not* occur?

In London the vectors of white-plus-honorary white flight down the main commuter rail lines are blatantly obvious and widely admitted by estate agents to clients, telling them that in Suburb X ‘the schools are better’ (less disrupted by non-white kids who can’t speak English), ‘the shopping centre is quieter’ (not so many truanting black teens hanging around in bunches, shouting and playing boom boxes), ‘there’s no graffiti/vandalism’, ‘the streets are less crowded’, ‘the crime rate is low’, etc, etc. Everybody knows what the property men mean, and nobody ever tells.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 01 Mar 2005 15:42 | #

“Everybody knows what the property men mean, and nobody ever tells.” —Effra

<u>Here’s</u> an example, right in front of our eyes, of the really and truly loathsome kind of hypocrite who also knows exactly what they mean but won’t admit it because he lacks the intellect to know how to tackle this delicate question and the moral fiber to face up to the fact he must tackle it. This liar grew up in New Jersey, he says. Well, I grew up right on the other side of Manhattan from there, in Queens County, New York City (and I also know New Jersey quite well—lived a year in the suburbs of Trenton), and I can affirm this pathetic dissembler knows precisely what’s going on race-wise. The guy just absolutely makes me sick—makes me want to vomit.

Posted by ben tillman on Tue, 01 Mar 2005 17:28 | #

Are there any large multiracial cities on the planet where this kind of polite, unadmitted, gradual but inexorable assortation by race does *not* occur?

The mechanics of this phenomenon are interesting. If each person wishes to have as few as two out of four of his nearest neighbors be of the same race, then neighborhoods will quickly segregate. The computer modeling is discussed, with illustrations, in this April 2002 Atlantic Monthly article:

http://www.theexperiment.org/articles.php?news_id=1757

In the first frame blues and reds are randomly distributed. But they do not stay that way for long, because each agent, each simulated person, is ethnocentric. That is, the agent is happy only if its four nearest neighbors (one at each point of the compass) include at least a certain number of agents of its own color. In the random distribution, of course, many agents are unhappy; and in each of many iterations . . . unhappy agents are allowed to switch places. Very quickly (Frame 2) the reds gravitate to their own neighborhood, and a few seconds later the segregation is complete: reds and blues live in two distinct districts (Frame 3). After that the border between the districts simply shifts a little as reds and blues jockey to move away from the boundary (Frame 4).

Because no two runs begin from the same random starting point, and because each agent’s moves affect every subsequent move, no two runs are alike; but this one is typical. When I first looked at it, I thought I must be seeing a model of a community full of racists. I assumed, that is, that each agent wanted to live only among neighbors of its own color. I was wrong. In the simulation I’ve just described, each agent seeks only two neighbors of its own color. That is, these “people” would all be perfectly happy in an integrated neighborhood, half red, half blue. If they were real, they might well swear that they valued diversity. The realization that their individual preferences lead to a collective outcome indistinguishable from thoroughgoing racism might surprise them no less than it surprised me and, many years ago, Thomas Schelling.
***
Schelling’s model implied that even the simplest of societies could produce outcomes that were simultaneously orderly and unintended: outcomes that were in no sense accidental, but also in no sense deliberate.

Posted by Effra on Wed, 02 Mar 2005 00:47 | #

When you consider the non-fungibility of owner-occupied property, the financial seriousness and transactional costs of the decision to relocate, it is amazing how quickly districts can change colour in a city where so many homes are owned, not rented. Proof, if more were needed, that it’s not just birds of a feather that flock together.

Multiracialism: everybody says it’s great, but nobody who can afford not to practises it.

The British Commission for Racial Equality was shocked, shocked, to find recently that few whites have any close “ethnic” friends. TV producers will just have to go on pretending that every social gathering of more than two people contains at least one “ethnic”, until we poor bigots start apeing the screen’s colour-blindness.