>>514074938
This was the case country wide, but before the mall, they killed the downtown first. Take Augusta, GA for example. Prior to 1970,downtown was the place to be on the weekends- parades, shopping, lunch counters, beautiful area. Blacks were allowed to shop in a limited capacity; they couldn't sit at the lunch counter for example. Blacks got mad, started a riot in 1970, integration was forced on the south and downtown started going down hill as customers and business fled elsewhere. People moved away not wanting to deal with the crime, decline and occasional black riots any longer leaving downtown Augusta, all its history and heritage to the black people.
1976 rolls around, there are revitalization efforts made by bringing in world renowned architects, but it was already too late. The Regency Mall and Augusta Mall open on the edges of the city, far away from downtown in 1978. Most of the downtown businesses move to the malls. Regency mall, being further south and closer to the blacks, starts going downhill as the crime makes it a less desirable place to shop. It shutdown in 2002 and remains an abandoned property to this day surrounded by black neighborhoods and dying businesses. Downtown became blighted, run down and avoided through out the 90s and 00s.
Today, Augusta mall is where the blacks are shopping and the random shootings continue to drive white people further into the suburbs of neighboring Columbia County. Downtown is coming back to some degree as more liberal white people try to gentrify it, but its growth potential is limited as its surrounded by burned out neighborhoods occupied by poor black people and literal faggots not going anywhere. White families won't occupy the area any time soon, so its long term prospects for growth appears doubtful.
This isn't unique, its a common refrain in just about every major American city. Desegregation produced the exact results its detractors said it would.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhP1rJ-375M
