This is one of those issues that has (largely) gone away in Southern California. Non-hispanic whites are now less than 50% of the area as a whole, at least as far as I know, and even neighborhoods like Beverly Hills have their quota of Hispanics, a few blacks, and the occasionaly very wealthy Asian “ghetto”. Here in Glendale (where I live for another week; I’m moving to the S.F. Valley) the majority minority group is Armenians, who comprise just about half the city’s population. Glendale is supposedly the second-largest Armenian city in the world, after Yerevan, the capitol in Armenia.
Anyway, few of the cities up here are all-white any more. The interesting thing would be to see if diversity in skin-color is all that HUD is interested in. Expensive neighborhoods, in California or anywhere else, are expensive because the riff-raff, of any color, doesn’t live nearby. You can’t imagine a wealthy homeowner finding a homeless alcoholic on his doorstep and saying to his wife: “Well at least he’s white!” I seriously doubt that the homeowners in Marin would object to a black CEO of some major corporation moving in next to them. In fact, they probably would be relieved in some way, because this would prove they weren’t being racist. It’s the lower income people, regardless of color, that terrify them. Their children might be tempted to steal a car or two, and they might have even lower-income relatives who would come to visit and perhaps engage in further mayhem…
