What was left to the city was that community which never had the financial capacity to suburbanize -- nor the right skin color. For suburbanization was a decidedly white experience, enforced by blatant racism, unequal access to economic opportunity, and restrictive housing covenants.
Black migration to Northern cities first began at a significant scale around World War I, but became epochal only after World War II. Combining this with the post-war return of soldiers put extraordinary pressures on housing markets. Where, as we have seen, suburbanization alleviated those pressures for millions of whites, blacks faced an entirely different situation. One of the earliest effects of black migration to cities was the practice of "blockbusting." As blacks, extremely segregated geographically from every other community, saturated the housing stock that was made available to them, they pushed their way through the fringes of the community. As in Chicago, or Los Angeles, or dozens of other U.S. cities, this put them in conflict with lower class whites on the fringes of the black community. Where blacks did manage to get a foothold, real estate speculators preyed on white racism by alerting white owners that their neighborhood was about to "tip" -- that is, be inhabited by blacks. Fearful whites jettisoned their homes at fire-sale prices and headed out to Levittowns or to white areas of the city, while the real estate speculators turned around and sold the homes to blacks at tremendous profit. In this scheme, which came to be known as "blockbusting," title on the homes was kept by the speculators, who used a single missed payment as incentive to foreclose on the black would-be homeowners, keep their down payment, and restart the scheme all over again.
	Facing a "color line" that severely limited economic and residential opportunity, blacks were frequent victims of all sorts of exploitative arrangements. Blacks were kept almost entirely out of suburbs, and highly segregated in the cities. White-flight in the face of black in-migration tipped the color balance in many inner city neighborhoods to almost entirely black. Since blacks were denied the economic opportunities that whites had access to, they hardly constituted a consumer base; thus, their communities lost retail and entertainment functions to the suburbs, further contributing to the loss of economic opportunity. With most industry already having left the cities, blacks had virtually no chance for capital accumulation; with that gone, their communities collapsed at the same time as white capital was pouring out of the city to the suburbs. All of this fed into a vicious downward spiral of capital flight, de facto segregation, and increasing poverty, ad infinitum.
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