Monday, January 28, 2002

Donna Terek / The Detroit News Farmington Hills residents in the Barrington Green subdivision attend a holiday hayride together. From left are Alicia Steele, 13, Charles Canty, also 13, and his mother, Debra Canty. The neighborhood is home to many ethnicities and a growing African-American population of about 5 percent.

Diverse, upscale suburbs emerge


By Gordon Trowbridge / The Detroit News

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   If stable, integrated neighborhoods are to arise in Metro Detroit in the next decade, they will probably emerge in the upscale Oakland County suburbs of Farmington Hills and West Bloomfield Township.
   Nearly all the neighborhoods in Farmington Hills now have substantial numbers of blacks, with one census tract in the city reaching 20 percent.
   Several West Bloomfield Township neighborhoods have also gained substantial numbers of blacks.
   Overall, the black population of the two communities more than tripled in the 1990s.
   It's an example of a factor that has reduced segregation in other metropolitan areas: rapid development and population growth.
   More than 7,800 new homes went up in the two communities in the 1990s; experts say new neighborhoods with no established racial identity are more likely to be integrated because they don't have an established racial character.
   "It's almost instant integration," Farmington Hills City Manager Steve Brock said.
   What's less clear is whether integrated neighborhoods will remain so. In neighboring Southfield, neighborhoods quickly turned over from nearly all-white to mostly black, sometimes in less than a decade.
   Brock said the city's Multicultural/Multiracial Community Council has been working for more than a decade to promote racial tolerance, sponsoring an annual festival and working with the Farmington school district on education programs.
   Although he's optimistic, Brock said he understands the forces working against integration. "It's the rare individual that wants to challenge himself to live in a community that's so different from his own," he said.