By the mid-1970s, upwardly mobile middle-class African Americans were increasingly departing neighbourhoods like Glenville, Mount Pleasant, and Lee-Harvard for a number of nearby bona fide suburbs. As a result, such former “surrogate suburbs” began to lose their lustre, although a core (generally elderly), home-owning black middle class still remains in these outlying city neighbourhoods to this day. Starting in the 1990s, Cleveland experienced a wave of predatory lending that culminated in the 2008 foreclosure crisis. Although middle class blacks in Cleveland as elsewhere have been disproportionately impacted by this trend, they have continued their historic strategy of outward geographic mobility in search of acceptable living conditions, even to the farthest metropolitan limits.
Book Review: The Cosby Cohort: Blessings and Burdens of Growing up Black Middle Class