Yeah, nothing makes a body feel more welcome than being called a gentrifier. Ask me how I know. The several nearby homicides that occurred within the week after we closed on the place really helped make us feel at home, too. And I really miss sitting out on the back stoop for a late-night smoke to the sound of sporadic pistol fire in the middle distance. There are places in Baltimore you can go if you want to live around nothing but white people. I didn't leave East Baltimore for any of them. But I sure did leave East Baltimore.

It's very easy and very comforting to say that maps like the ones you linked are just a result of white people not wanting to live around black people, because white people are racist. I get that. Who wouldn't rather believe a just-so story than acknowledge that not everything is simple and not every problem has an easy solution? Just don't make the mistake of confusing a just-so story with reality, or imagining that by doing so you're very likely to be of benefit to anyone.

It's odd, but while I don't disagree with those stats, as someone who grew up in philly->baltimore then moved around the country for work, I had a FAR more integrated friend group in either of those two cities than anywhere else, where it's almost purely indian+asian+white. (in that order, actually).

Likely due to net-population-availability of minority groups, and I won't disagree that many neighborhoods are almost entirely black (stayed with a friend living off diamond st one time), but I will say that one shouldn't then draw that to mean everyone in those cities also lives along the lines of such segregation. (To try and explain why the parent, and myself, had an experience that didn't always align intuitively with those articles)

What I'd also call out though that I wouldn't have noticed outside of having grown up there, is that I'd draw the lines there FAR more aggressively along socioeconomic boundaries, which just so happen to correlate with race. Not even starting to turn this into a discussion about which direction the correlation moves in, but I'm always hesitant to paint it soley it as a racial problem.