[dkural]

The US is an extreme precisely due to these social and emotional reasons. It's shocking to me how this article fails to mention even once that a lot of post WWII suburbanization was due to white flight. The article states:

"Millions of soldiers had come home from World War II to overcrowded, run-down cities; their new families needed a place to live."

"Overcrowded, run-down": who all of a sudden "overcrowded" these cities? What's a "run-down" area? We can win WWII but not fix a broken roof? The issue was not so much lack of affordability or too many people, what meant was cities / neighborhoods with more black people. Those highways were not built immediately post WWII, but later, to separate black neighborhoods from wealthier areas of the city, in the post-civil rights era.

Suburbanization accelerated not directly after WWII but with government-mandated busing of school-children. If you didn't want your daughter to go to school with black boys, you went to the suburbs.

Architects & urban planners played handmaiden to white flight, destroying the fabric of cities, and generally harming the environment in the process. Precisely due to their active participation in this cluster- they tend to whitewash the history, move the timelines a bit etc. hoping no one will notice.

[burlesona]

Even more basic than that, zoning and development regulation have strongly - in many cases explicitly - racist origins. For example many the first zoning laws in SF were designed to push back against Chinese immigration.

Those same tools have been used to the same effect, and strengthened, for generations. Yet for all the calls for social justice in society now, I almost never hear people calling for the end of zoning, when it may be the greatest perpetrator and enforcer of inequality today. In the Bay Area, zoning is the saw that has cut the bottom off the economic ladder. It’s surprising to me that more people don’t understand that intuitively, but alas.

[philwelch]

It’s not entirely clear that racial animus was the primary motivating factor. Once civil rights legislation was passed to stop housing discrimination, for instance, there was also black flight, when middle-class black families also moved to the suburbs.

It’s also not clear how one is supposed to reverse the effects of white flight; when middle-class whites move into a majority-nonwhite urban area, this is usually condemned as “gentrification”.

[dkural]

My issue is the article doesn't once mention this as factor at all. I also object that one needs racial animus to have racist policies. "I've got no animus towards blacks, I just don't want to share large chunks of civic life with them" is racist. Blacks wanted to move to the suburbs due to lack of city & civic infrastructure in black neighborhoods - as the whites fled; so did polling stations, hospitals, banks, stores, and good quality drinking water. Lending policies for mortgages were explicitly racist; and many neighborhoods tried (successfully!) to prevent black people from moving in and "ruining the suburbs too!".

Also, rewinding only a couple of decades from civil rights legislation; denying blacks the vote, school entrance and outright lynchings in the hundreds qualifies as pretty strong racial animus. It's naive to argue that the same society & people "had no racial animus in mind" when choosing where and how to live.

I've always thought of gentrification as more of an economic class issue (which so often corresponds to minority status). In Boston, a lot of poor and middle class white neighborhoods get gentrified as well - nonetheless I take your wider point that gentrification is often a positive force for urban renewal; and I agree. One counter-example: Hudson Yards is the 1% being gentrified with the 0.1%, hard to argue helps the urban fabric with its non-human scale.

[philwelch]

I guess the racial theory is still incomplete because it doesn’t explain why the socially dominant group (whites) were the ones to move. If you take the perfectly reasonable assumption that whites had the most power in society, the obvious question is: why did they flee to the suburbs themselves rather than just forcing the black population to move out into the suburbs? The answer must be that the whites perceived the suburbs to be a more desirable place to live. From that perspective, the racial injustice wasn’t white flight, it was denying black people the freedom to move to the suburbs themselves—which is exactly what they ultimately did when given the opportunity.

I’m not trying to dismiss racism as a causative factor. I guess I’m just saying it’s like living in a sawmill, and racism is the sawdust. The sawdust causes lots of problems by itself, but it also gets all over everything else. Suburbanization was something mid-century Americans of all races desired; it just happened in a racist way.

[bluGill]

You are partially correct. Only partially because it only takes a small number of actual racist to make a difference. Even if 90% of a suburb doesn't care about race, that 10% can still make a difference by making the unwanted feel unwelcome.

I don't know how to solve this.

[Kaiyou]

Why would not wanting to share your life with them be racist? Racism is the belief in the superiority of one race over another. It has nothing to do with who you want and don't want to have in your neighborhood. And people should be allowed to choose whom to associate with.

[asdff]

Banks would send black children to the homes of white people with pamphlets saying things like "you know who is moving in," warning about an imminent decline in property values due to black people moving in. Banks would come in after the pamphlets with agents who would low ball these white-owned houses, then flip them for profit by charging black people huge prices for the very same homes. It was entirely rooted in racism, no way about it.

[dkural]

Imagine not wanting to have someone in your neighborhood only because that person is black, without you needing to know anything else. That sole fact of their skin color makes up your mind that you don't want them in your neighborhood, without asking if they're a good person, an honest person, a friendly person.. they're simply disqualified without you asking any additional question.

You can imagine if someone doesn't want black people in their neighborhood how they might feel about their children marrying one.

I don't know how to read people's minds, so I tend to gravitate towards a functional definition of racism which measures it based on someone's action - i.e. if someone being treated in an unfair manner based on their skin color.

[Kaiyou]

I don't see anything wrong with that. If I move out to a place without blacks, because it's a place without blacks and I am the one that moved, why should I have to accept them following me? That's not racism. That's wanting to be left alone. It's also not unfair. Forcing someone to move is unfair. Moving out on your own and preventing people you don't like from moving in isn't unfair.

[philwelch]

There's also a game-theoretic stalemate that you have to break with active policy change.

To the typical mid-century white homeowner, "a black family moved into the neighborhood" wasn't the beginning and end of it. There were only two equilibria: either you live in a segregated white neighborhood or you live in a predominantly black neighborhood. (I openly admit there's nothing wrong with living in a predominantly black neighborhood, but this was probably not the most common opinion among mid-century white homeowners.)

Why? Fundamentally because there was a structural shortage of good housing for black people. If most neighborhoods don't allow black residents, having a neighborhood that does allow them causes a surge of demand. Even if you're not racist enough to move out just because a single black family moved into your neighborhood, some of your neighbors are, and many of their homes will be bought by black families, which will trigger your slightly-less racist neighbors to move out, and so forth. This was deliberately encouraged by "blockbusters", who would buy homes from white families at a discount and then price-gouge the black families who ended up moving in for a massive profit. But blockbusting only works if you have the pre-existing shortage of unsegregated housing in the first place.

You end up in a feedback loop:

(a) Moderately racist white homeowners want to keep their neighborhoods segregated because otherwise they'll live in black neighborhoods. This causes:

(b) Most neighborhoods are segregated white neighborhoods, causing a housing shortage for black families. This causes:

(c) Overwhelming surges in black demand to move into any individual neighborhood that desegregates. This causes (a).

The "solution" was to immediately, globally, across-the-board, outlaw housing discrimination so the pent up housing demand can disperse. I put "solution" in quotes because most American metro areas are still extremely segregated. They might be statistically segregated by 90/10 ratios instead of the 100/0 ratios that existed before, but people have to go significantly out of their way to completely reverse it, unless there's some other economic incentive. For example, gentrification has "desegregated" lots of majority-nonwhite urban neighborhoods through the sheer force of white hipsters wanting to move into them.

[philwelch]

“Racism” is an overloaded term. The idea you’re describing (racial separatism) is definitely in the general category of racism.

In fact, most racism gets expressed as racial separatism. Segregation was literally racial separatism.

One problem is that this literally turns into a question of ethnic territorialism, and can easily be extended from neighborhoods to entire states (Oregon was founded as a whites-only state) to entire countries (eg the notion of sending freed slaves back to Africa, which is how Liberia was founded).

It’s also just not that hard to express even the worst racism in mere separatist terms. In fact, that’s where most racism starts.

[beat]

I recommend reading Ta-Nehisi Coates on this subject. He's done terrific work on the history of redlining, and also talks about the impact of educated, successful families moving out of historically black neighborhoods.

[philwelch]

I'll have to check that out.

> also talks about the impact of educated, successful families moving out of historically black neighborhoods

Yeah, from what else I've read, that is one of the saddest parts of the story. Economic diversity is a hugely important part of a healthy community, and it's pretty uncommon in America.

[Tharkun]

I thought the race to suburbia was a deliberate attempt to spread out the population in case of Soviet nukes?

Though I guess there is likely more than one cause.

[philipkglass]

That's interesting. I hadn't heard of this before. The evidence is pretty well set out in Kathleen Tobin's "The Reduction of Urban Vulnerability: Revisiting 1950s American Suburbanization as Civil Defence."

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/Cold.War.Urban.Vulnera...

The vast majority of proposals are from before 1956 -- i.e. before the Soviets demonstrated their own high-yield thermonuclear weapons. The degree of decentralization required to mitigate against the multi-megaton bombs of the later 1950s would have been truly staggering.

[rhacker]

Also I'll tell you why sprawl exists: Sound. Whether that is a car driving by or a neighbor having a party. Some people just don't want to hear shit from you, ever. It is easier to justify making work far away from home at the expense of our kid's future air quality when in one case you hear chirping birds all day, in another you hear BUMP BUMP BUMP every 2 minutes. Sound is the number one cause of stress and people don't understand that - it's actually invisible and I wish it was taken into account more than anything on this planet.

[francisofascii]

Which is another great reason to get cars out of cities. The best time to be walking in a city is during a heavy snow storm when the cars are gone. Bikes and electric buses are fairly quiet, keep those.

[asdff]

Sprawl exists because its cheaper to build 100 houses on 20 acres of empty land than it is to build a 100 unit apartment in an urban environment. The only sound the developer cares about is the sound of trees being cleared for more land and the sound of someones check clearing for a new build.

[JDiculous]

Subways are underground

[0xffff2]

Is this meant to contribute in some way? I honestly have no idea what this seemingly random phrase is supposed to convey.

[dkural]

Urban environments can often be less noisy than suburbs next to highways/freeways; due to extensive use of subway infrastructure - which moves the associated noise underground. Also, a suburban commuter spends a lot of time in a car commuting, being subjected to the very noise the parent poster is referring to.

[0xffff2]

I think that's the more minor part of the noise that the original comment was referring to. It's much easier to insulate one's detached house from suburban noise than it is to insulate one's apartment from noisy neighbors on the other side of a shared wall. It's also my experience that those noisy neighbors are a much bigger nuisance than the traffic noise in the first place.

On a tangential note, I'd be curious to know whether you have any links to back up the claim that urban environments are often less noisy. I don't disbelieve the claim outright, but it sure doesn't match my personal experience.

[JDiculous]

I was replying specifically to the "in another you hear BUMP BUMP BUMP every 2 minutes" comment which seems to imply that trains must be above ground. In Manhattan, NYC you can hear the subway from the street and the noise pollution is awful (eg. ear-piercing sirens and traffic noise at all times), but it's not like that everywhere else.

I'm writing this from the 11th floor apartment in an apartment town suburb 30 minutes by subway from Seoul. It is dead silent. Very little traffic, and everything is walking distance. From above ground you don't hear the subway at all. Sound insulation in this apartment is pretty good so I never hear my neighbors (actually there's only 2 apartment units on each floor).

[AnthonyMouse]

> It's shocking to me how this article fails to mention even once that a lot of post WWII suburbanization was due to white flight.

I've never really understood this explanation of suburbanization.

Suppose you're a bunch of racist white folk wanting not to live near black folk. How do suburbs get you that any better than cities? What can you do to keep a black person from moving to your neighborhood in the suburbs that you can't do to keep them from moving to your neighborhood in the city?

It seems more like two phenomena that happened to occur at the same time rather than one causing the other.

Especially when at the same time the government had an explicit policy of encouraging people to move out of the cities, to reduce the damage that would be caused by a nuclear weapon.

[icsllaf]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York#Discrimina...

Levittown was a quintessential model of the suburbs, one of the first examples of the suburbs we have now. Towns like this openly segregated against blacks and minorities, a dream away from the crowded city into your all white, picket fence house.

[asdff]

That was already happening. It was called red lining, and it meant as a bank you'd only approve loans for black families if they lived within the red line drawn by the bank on the map denoting the designated black neighborhood. Banks would also do something called blockbusting. They'd send panicked pamphlets to white people in urban neighborhoods, alerting them of black people moving into their neighborhoods and the damage that this could cause on their home value (the only asset many people had at this time).

Now suburbs were being built because in 1946, suddenly there were millions of young men with a huge government subsidy to buy a house. Banks would not approve mortgages for black people in these areas, so they became predominantly white. And as a white person you are happy to be in the suburbs where you are free of all the perceived fears from decades of racially charged propaganda, and surrounded by people who also have a white boy and a white girl, a new ford, a dog and a cat, and who go to the same protestant church. It was sold as a utopia, and in the case of Detroit, white people bought that narrative so hard the city lost 1.5m from its tax base and collapsed in fewer decades than it took to grow as a metropolis in the first place. To date, Detroit has lost over 60% of is population from its all time high in 1950.

[throwawaymsft]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_segregation_in_the_U...

[AnthonyMouse]

That describes the process by which black people were excluded from a neighborhood, not the process by which the neighborhoods were chosen to be in the suburbs rather than the cities.