The South’s Growth Is Increasing Affluence. Could Dallas be a Black Mecca?

The title of Dr. Michael C. Lens’ book is attention-grabbing. Where the Hood At? Fifty Years of Change in Black Neighborhoods is a familiar callback if you’re a diehard DMX fan. “Where the Hood At?” off the late rapper‘s 2003 album Grand Champ is an intoxicating dose of fighting music for “the dogs,” with the video set in his neighborhood of Yonkers, New York.

“DMX’s song plays a very big role in the material,” Lens says. “To me, the substantive double entendre is where is the hood at geographically? So where is it at physically? And then where is it at in terms of its well-being? That’s the double meaning I am going for.”

A professor of urban planning and Public Policy at the University of California Los Angeles Luskin School of Public Affairs, Lens got into his field of work because he was interested in how government and public policy could improve the various challenges people face with low incomes. He says growing up in “relatively segregated environments” got him into housing research, adding to his interest in education, criminal justice policy and labor market policy.

His combined studies fed his curiosity about why people live in different parts of the city and why poverty and race are concentrated, which led him to urban planning.

The story of Earl Simmons, aka DMX, was an appropriate introduction for Where the Hood At? because the artist was the perfect representative for the trajectory of Black neighborhoods and how their conditions changed since the enactment of the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discriminatory practices in housing. Born in 1970 in Mount Vernon, New York, two years after the Fair Housing Act passed in 1968, X grew up in public housing in Yonkers. In the book, Lens cites this as “the country’s most sustained opposition to geographic dispersal of public housing.”

Each chapter hooks you in by discussing the interplay between Black neighborhoods and Black music, centering it on hip-hop. The Bronx, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Compton and Atlanta are used to craft a narrative, reinforcing some of his topics and units of analysis for an informative read on history and urban planning. Lens began working on the book in 2019, drawing inspiration from Lance Freeman’s A Haven and a Hell: The Ghetto in Black America.

“It was a situation where I was looking for this information,” he says. “I have studied segregation, housing issues, race, and cities for a long time, but there just came a point, either from my teaching where I was looking for some more comprehensive data on Black neighborhoods, looking at data on Latino neighborhoods and majority white neighborhoods, and I just never really found what I was looking for.”

That inquiry set the purpose of the book: quantitatively summarizing the characteristics of Black neighborhoods in the U.S. from 1970 to 2020 (roughly 3,000 to 7,000 neighborhoods depending on the year), discussing how these neighborhoods have evolved, identifying which Black neighborhoods are better or worse socially and economically, to provide data and reasons why some Black neighborhoods are flourishing, and to recommend promising public policies to close the gaps and improve Black neighborhoods.

In November 2024, the Russell Sage Foundation published Where the Hood At? Lens revealed new research on Black neighborhoods in the South, stating the U.S. region is experiencing economic growth and increasing affluence similar to the Black meccas in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. He found that other Southern metros like Dallas could have a growing Black population to create “smaller-scale Black middle-class enclaves similar to those in the Black meccas.”

To dig deeper, we asked Lens to define a Black neighborhood.

“In the book, I find a Black neighborhood is one in which Blacks are the largest racial or ethnic group of only four groups,” he says, adhering to the standard census of classifying race as white, Black, Asian or Hispanic. This makeup looks different across the country, as the Great Migration (1916-1970) did not concentrate westward as it did in the Midwest and the North.

“One of the more unexpected and interesting parts of this project for me was just first seeing like, ‘Oh, most of these neighborhoods are in the South more so than any other parts of the country,'” he says. “But then also a lot of the socioeconomic conditions are getting better faster in the South than any other region in the country’s Black neighborhoods. And Dallas is indicative of that.”

While the ups and downs of gentrification have been well-documented in Dallas, Lens has his take on whether the process improves or hinders a Black neighborhood’s growth. He says there’s a lot of variety across the country.

“One thing that I try to delicately emphasize is that gentrification is not the most common problem in Black neighborhoods overall,” he says. “It’s more often that these neighborhoods are high poverty, increasing poverty. [They] are not places where people with higher incomes are tending to move, but there are big exceptions to that.”

He mentions a “rapid exodus” of Black people from South Los Angeles to other parts of California and the gentrification in core Black neighborhoods in central Washington, D.C., namely Shaw-U Street, as examples.

“Dallas and Texas more broadly tend to have more housing opportunities for people than California,” he says. “When a neighborhood’s fortune changes quickly, [housing] changes quickly. It is likely the case that there are neighborhoods in Dallas where gentrification has been or will be a problem. The biggest reason that gentrification tends to play a negative force in Black neighborhoods is that these neighborhoods always have low homeownership rates. If you’re a renter, gentrification usually is going to mean that the cost of your living is going to go up, and in some cases, it goes up past your budget.”

In Chapter 7, “The Rise of Black Middle-Class Neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. and Atlanta,” Lens writes about how Atlanta was steadily producing just as many rappers as New York and the growing popularity of trap music, citing examples such as the street party Freaknik, which helped lay the foundation for Atlanta’s later dominance in hip-hop in the 21st century. Atlanta has an infrastructure for the music industry, home to Babyface and LA Reid’s LaFace Records, which earned it the reputation as the “Motown of the South.”

Lens says that Atlanta’s first source of strength was the plentiful number of Black neighborhoods contributing to its political power. As Atlanta expanded into a sprawling metropolis, it had a strong regional economy and “a long-established Black elite” that created the city’s prosperity. While Atlanta is unique enough that it’ll be hard to replicate, he argues in the book that cities such as Dallas offer “different mixes of higher educational institutions, large and highly productive regional economies, low unemployment, large Black populations, and low poverty rates in Black neighborhoods.”

With that in mind, could Dallas become a Black mecca?

“The thing [that] will likely continue to be different than D.C. and Atlanta is the share of the city that identifies as Black,”  Lens says. “Dallas is unlikely to be a Black city, or close to the majority being a Black city.

“It’s strength in numbers in Dallas that’s different than Atlanta and D.C. That same economic opportunity exists in Dallas, as in Atlanta and D.C. Economically, those various Black neighborhoods and households have more opportunity than they are likely to have elsewhere.”

Where the Structure At?

Dallas is not built with the same support system to be known as a significant music industry hub like Los Angeles or New York. If it were possible to build up homegrown talent and create another movement, could Dallas be a Black mecca? Lens thinks it is improbable.

“I think it is probably more often the other way around,” he says. “The Black social, political, and economic clout is a precondition for the industry, rather than the industry being something that can create that level [of growth] and move the needle in the community’s social clout or political clout or economic clout. It is just one industry, and it is an industry that still has a lot of actual wealth concentrated in pretty corporate hands that is not necessarily localized. Atlanta has been able to localize that.”

In his research, he shares that compared with Atlanta, the relative size of Houston’s and Dallas’ Black populations is smaller (23% in Houston, 24% in Dallas). Dallas is also one of the cities with a lower poverty rate and a significant number of Fortune 1000 companies contributing to the diverse economy. The last chapter of Where the Hood At? offers recommendations to eliminate the gap between Black and non-Black neighborhoods. One of those priorities is regional focus, finding that there are more options for a Black family to live in a stable Black neighborhood with high-income neighbors in the South than stagnating or disappearing Black neighborhoods in the West. The Black neighborhoods in the Midwest and Rust Belt also face severe disadvantages.

The South has a stigma of being a cultural backwater to some people, but Lens’ data gives a clue that white racism is not holding back Black communities in the South.

“Have various communities and actors, particularly in the South, become more enlightened over time in ways that the rest of the country doesn’t really appreciate? Probably,” he says. “Just like Minnesota isn’t the same racially as it was in 1985. Neither is Atlanta. I think the rest of the country gets a lot wrong about what it’s like to actually live as a person of color in the South, either in terms of economic advancement or social interaction.”

Lens leaves you thinking about why Black people should migrate back to the South. He wasn’t the first to make this proposal, as Charles Blow argued the same case in his 2021 book The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto.

“He argued that this would make Blacks a lot more politically powerful,” Lens says. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, that might be true. But people don’t migrate thousands of miles because they are thinking of the Electoral College.

“But people do make moves for economic opportunity, right? Black people, when they’re surveyed, they don’t desire to live in like 100%, 90% or 80% Black neighborhoods. But they do desire to live in integrated neighborhoods where they are the biggest group or close to it,” he adds. “On average, Black people want to live in Black neighborhoods. Certainly, people want to live in neighborhoods where they think they have the best circumstances and the best economic opportunities. And those places are largely in the South.”

When you move within your city, he says, you tend to make shorter distance moves that don’t change your neighborhood circumstance much. He says only a small share of us are making a big move to another part of the U.S., and those who do have made an impact.

“Migration across the country has been in decline for a couple of decades,” he says. “But Black people are moving to the South more than any other region. It’s kind of two things going on at once.”

For a hip-hop fan interested in picking up Where the Hood At? Lens says there’s always more you could learn from your favorite artists and the places they come from. A place can teach us about our day-to-day lives, the arts and culture we consume, and what makes ours the most enriching city.

“I think music helps make more sense of where we live, and it instills civic pride,” Lens says. “It allows us to enjoy where we live, just like a museum does.”