Availability of large, cheap housing may have driven the Great Migration of African Americans to the South from 1990 to 2000

Throughout the study of economics and race in America, report after report has dissected the wealth gap in the country during any given timeframe in an attempt to explain racial disparities plus perhaps to level the playing field between, primarily, whites and blacks. Rather than continue to hash out differences in earning potential and other parenthetical issues around whether one race has more favorable public policy laws enacted on their behalf than the other, this report seeks to gain an understanding of the key economic considerations that led a sizable migration of African Americans back to Southern states over a ten year period from roughly 1990 to 2000. The focus of this research is with an eye toward comparing overcrowding and lack of affordable housing in Northern, urban communities with overdevelopment and an abundance of cheaper homes in Southern states. Through my research I will show how policy leading to a boom in housing sprawl in the South led African Americans to leave the North in mass; and the role a readily availability of jobs served in facilitating these efforts. Given the large economic success of the 1990's, this author felt that it was an ideal period in which to study the mass movement of African American in two key population centers -- Atlanta and New York City, to ascertain these answers.