They left due to a rise in crime and other low trust behaviors exhibited post desegregation.
That trend persists today - look at crime rates by race especially the white on black vs black on white crime rate. Controlling per capita shows an enormous disparity. And that’s just the extreme end of low trust behaviors and certainly indicating a litany of other reasons one would want to move away. It only takes 1 instance of being a victim to realize it’s not worth the risk.
No, I think you have the timeline backwards. Crime didn’t rise before white flight happened. Crime rose after white flight happened because there was no longer any funding for the social programs that helped keep crime down. Remember it was still legal to deny black people financial opportunities solely for their blackness at the time, so white people actively denied black peoples business loans and other necessary financial funding to build those programs that white people had happily funded for themselves.
The quality of life declined BECAUSE the majority of tax-payers left causing city services to fail.