[tharne]

> Suburban single-family homes are specifically an elitist policy.

Prior to the widespread development of suburban single family homes post WWII, most Americans outside of those in rural areas could not afford to home their own home. Suburbs are the exact opposite of an elitist policy, and in fact the overwhelming majority of Americans, including a majority of immigrants, live in the suburbs.

[drewcoo]

> . . . post WWII[1], most Americans outside of those in rural areas[2] could not afford to home their own home[3]. Suburbs are the exact opposite of an elitist policy[4], and in fact the overwhelming majority of Americans . . . live in the suburbs[5].

[1] Note that home prices wobbled a bit but were relatively even from the recovery after WWI and the flu through the early 60s. Income over that time increased significantly (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/16-05intax.pdf). Things change rapidly after that. I think it suggests a more complicated situation than "it all changed post WWII."

https://voxeu.org/article/home-prices-1870

[2] About half of the country. Nothing like today.

https://getrawmilk.com/content/urbanization-usa-rural-vs-urb...

[3] Affordable because of VA and FHA loans after the war. And increasing wages. And flat housing prices.

[4] Actually, the FHA (#3) mainstreamed redlining. That's pretty darned elitist.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/mapmaker-r...

[5] We're mostly suburban in the same way we're all middle class, smart, and attractive: self-description, but not any objective measure.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-14/u-s-is-ma...

[pru567]

Part of the attraction of the suburbs is that most US cities aren't very compelling. Its not like the choice is a Cleveland suburb vs Barcelona; its a Cleveland suburb vs Cleveland. Neither choice is all that great.

[tharne]

That's fair.

[nosianu]

An anecdote from Nazi Germany from the town I grew up in.

The Nazis did exactly the same! As part of their program - similar to what Putin wants to do now? - to become self-sufficient, among many other projects, they built a very large chemical fiber factory into the middle of underdeveloped Thuringia. That's the German state just above Bavaria.

https://www.all-neumann.de/rud-zellwolle.html

For the thousands of new workers, only some of which could be sourced from the local population, they build the equivalent to American suburbs, in 1935.

A few pictures, old black and white:

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/H5NXR6CAX2M...

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/2GD55POKL3R...

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/UNFBR42B35M...

The factory, by the way, even back in the 1930s included two olympic-size swimming pools, one heated (by the next door factory coal power plant) and one with waves:

https://www.all-neumann.de/images3/Schwarza_119674.jpg

That suburb still exists, with a lot of kind of equal double-houses surrounded by a lot of garden.

Google maps, you can see how all houses and plots are similar: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.6840376,11.3145743,413m/data...

Until after reunification they could still walk for shopping in little stores, Schwarza, a tiny place at the edge of which the new houses were built, even had a butcher shop. To get to the factory could be done by bike leisurely within ten minutes.

However, in my old hometown (Rudolstadt) industry and houses often were right next to one another. There were quite a few of those, and they were in the city or at the edges, next to houses and villas. There's an x-ray tube factory (https://new.siemens.com/global/en/company/about/history/stor...) and quite a few other industries, beginning early 20th century. I don't know if those various factories were at the edge of town in the 1920s, but even if they were, it can't have been very long that it all got a bit mixed. Today we have zoning too, kind of, "Gewerbegebiet" (industrial park) is where you have to go with your manufacturing business these days.

We now have very similar discussions about more mixing, example (German): "Architect recommends more mixed use areas" -- https://www.nw.de/lokal/bielefeld/mitte/21979129_Architekt-e... But also the opposite, "Please don't mix" -- https://www.welt.de/print-welt/article518393/Bitte-nicht-mis...