6 ms·

>The US is a country where it's very difficult to live without a car, except in certain major cities. This is by design. As I mentioned in another comment, the

>The US is a country where it's very difficult to live without a car, except in certain major cities. This is by design. As I mentioned in another comment, there was this 1950s utopian ideal amongst American planners that we'd all own cars, we could live tens of miles away from the city where we worked, modern planning would ensure traffic was amazing, and we could avoid all that nasty density business and all the 'others' that come with it. No longer would white men have to live near black men. We could all just drive away to the suburbs where restrictive covenants meant we couldn't even sell to black people and restrictive zoning forcing large lot single family homes would ensure that, even if we could legally sell to them, they wouldn't be able to afford to live there anyways. Racially motivated covenants can't be enforced any longer, but the land use control mechanisms put in place to ensure no poor people move to the pristine suburb still exist. It is unfortunate that the Supreme Court upheld these laws, even sharing in their legal opinions that apartments are evil and a drain on society, so of course we should ban them. If they had not upheld these laws, or these laws did not exist in the first place, I'm sure the US would have maintained its public transit friendly character to a great extent. Even LA had one of the largest, if not the largest, rail systems in the world. Imagine that.

workitout 11y ago
>> No longer would white men have to live near black men. Today's youth think the suburbs was about race now? It was about a lot of people don't actually like living in a concrete jungle, that was what it was about.
- Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
  >Today's youth think the suburbs was about race now? It was about a lot of people don't actually like living in a concrete jungle, that was what it was about. Race was a huge motivator. Why else would we have racial covenants? Funny how the growth of suburbs came at roughly the same time that schools started integrating and integration accelerated suburban growth. We had Federal suburban housing subsidies available almost exclusively for whites. We have a name for this phenomenon: White Flight. Pre-1950s we had racial covenants, but we didn't social engineer lifestyles in suburbs to build them around cars. Streetcar suburbs for instance looked similar to the cities they were connected to. Smaller and less dense, but walkable urban places in their own right. Look at places like Del Ray, Alexandria, Virginia for an example. In cities themselves we tended to build highways in poor, mostly minority, neighborhoods. The white neighborhoods wouldn't be leveled nearly as often.
  - theklub 11y ago
    I think you might be confusing crime and race although they happen to be tied closely together. My family decided to moved out of the city when they were followed home one day. Not sure race had anything to do with it but crime definitely did.
    - wpietri 11y ago
      You are ignoring the key part of what he said. Why else would there be racial covenants explicitly excluding non-caucasians? Sure, fear of crime was one of the mechanisms of white flight, but American fear of crime has a big racial component to it. Historically, America has kept black people poor, confined them to poor neighborhoods, and then blamed blackness for the high crime rates that go with poverty and desperation. This game continues today. Donald Trump recently tweeted something with totally made up statistics blaming black people for murders of whites: http://www.rawstory.com/2015/11/that-racist-trump-tweet-about-blacks-killing-whites-isnt-just-false-its-neo-nazi-propaganda/ http://www.rawstory.com/2015/11/that-racist-trump-tweet-abou... It wasn't just wrong and it wasn't just racist. It was literally neo-nazi propaganda.
      - thedavinci2000 11y ago
        I wonder if the guy is stupidly ignorant or willfully ignorant. He has said some really despicable things.
        DarkTree 11y ago
        The scary part is that he has gained a large following of people who think he's just saying "what everyone's thinking". There are many, many people in the U.S. who hear what he says, and then think, "Yeah! That's so true!" on their gut instinct without having any background knowledge on the subject. I'm living in the U.S. and it's a scary momentum.
        zo1 11y ago
- wpietri 11y ago
  Today's olds also think the suburbs were about race. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-teachers-07.htm http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-teachers-07.htm is http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1017_reg.html http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1017_reg.html People who think it was only about wanting to live with a little more greenery around are mainly white suburbanites who haven't looked at the history.
  - ska 11y ago
    mainly white suburbanites who haven't looked at the history. Many of them are mainly white suburbanites who are uncomfortable with the implications of the history, and choose rather to ignore it or paper it over (with "well, our family was different because...). Perfectly understandable, of course.
    - wpietri 11y ago
      Oh, definitely. And so much of what they hear doesn't fit with the actual history, so it's easy to ignore their first encounters with the facts as weird aberrations. I was shocked when I finally learned this stuff.
- DanBC 11y ago
  You may want to look at Redlining which for example controlled who got mortgages or not based on race. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining > In the United States, redlining is the practice of denying services, either directly or through selectively raising prices, to residents of certain areas based on the racial or ethnic makeups of those areas. While some of the most famous examples of redlining regard denying financial services such as banking or insurance,[2] other services such as health care [3] or even supermarkets,[4] can be denied to residents to carry out redlining.[5]
  - mturmon 11y ago
    I have found it very interesting to inspect the redlining maps from this era -- many of the divisions they reflected and enforced up to the 1960s-1970s are still loosely in place today, right down to the "that's the wrong side of the street" level. (http://www.urbanoasis.org/projects/holc-fha/digital-holc-maps/ http://www.urbanoasis.org/projects/holc-fha/digital-holc-map...) Further to your point, another practice that re-distributed whites to the suburbs, to the benefit of shady property developers, is blockbusting. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting) It also had nothing to do with green lawns and everything to do with racism.
- kps 11y ago
  It's American parochialism. Suburbs, highways, and cars also exist in countries that don't have the US's unique racial history.
  - Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
    Suburbs, highways, and cars exist outside the US as I can attest (I used to live in Japan), but they are not the same suburbs and highways. Compare relatively car centric Naha, Japan to Houston. Very different development patterns because Japan doesn't have the same restrictions that America has. The car is not held above all other modes in Japan, efficiency be damned. Some places have imported the American car centric suburb, but they will learn over time the lesson America has started to learn.
    - Agustus 11y ago
      That cars enable upward mobility and easy access to jobs devoid of the ever reaching control from the central planning agencies? More power to them.
      - scentoni 11y ago
        That cars block upward mobility because of the great costs of vehicle, upkeep, fuel, and parking.
        dsfyu404ed 11y ago
        If you don't live in a state where insurance is absurdly expensive, don't live somewhere gas is absurdly expensive that is also very spread out (California, Alaska) and aren't insistent upon driving something new you can easily have a reliably car for under $3k or even under $2k and drive it for ~$500/yr in various fees (insurance) before gas. Add in a $120 set of tires and rims every other year (because you don't buy new, you buy used). If you live in a blue collar neighborhood maintenance usually costs next to nothing because you trade services with your neighbors or church congregation or have relatives or close friends that will do things at cost. If you're not trying to visibly live the suburban upper middle class lifestyle personal freedom of movement can be had relatively cheaply.
- akgerber 11y ago
  The suburbs were about a lot of things (some were built in the 30s as utopian projects by the US Government) but mass suburbanization was driven by FHA loans to veterans, which were not available to blacks.
- iamsohungry 11y ago
  > Today's youth think the suburbs was about race now? It was about a lot of people don't actually like living in a concrete jungle, that was what it was about. Ugh. You realize that people can do things for more than one reason?
  - CWuestefeld 11y ago
    For that matter, "people" isn't monolithic. One person can have a mix of reasons, and a different person can have an entirely different mix of reasons.
- thescriptkiddie 11y ago
  For real? Did you not learn about white flight in high school?
  - danans 11y ago
    That doesn't surprise me. I grew up (non-white, children of recent immigrants) in a white-flight created midwest suburb. For obvious reasons, they didn't teach us about white flight in school. I learned about it from white adults in the community who did leave the city for racially motivated reasons.
- superuser2 11y ago
  Historians don't tend to agree. White Flight is a well-studied and well-documented phenomenon, as much a part of our history as the Red Scare and other cultural memes of the 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
rayiner 11y ago
> As I mentioned in another comment, there was this 1950s utopian ideal amongst American planners that we'd all own cars, we could live tens of miles away from the city where we worked, modern planning would ensure traffic was amazing It's interesting to note that these people were the techno-optimists of their time.
- Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
  >It's interesting to note that these people were the techno-optimists of their time. The thing is, people knew in this time period how inefficient cars were for moving people. Cars take up way more space than equivalent public transit and this was used in advertisements for streetcar companies (who were getting killed by congestion caused by cars).
  - akgerber 11y ago
    Specifically: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7199/6853187005_135a28db2f_z.jpg http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7199/6853187005_135a28db2f_z.j...
  - superuser2 11y ago
    The US is enormous. If we're all truly living far away from the cities then the space occupied by cars is not relevant. That wasn't their mistake - it was the energy costs and corresponding pollution.
- mturmon 11y ago
  This time, we'll get it right for sure.
Absentinsomniac 11y ago
Don't forget the gigantic highway lobby and GM's role in funding the destruction of rail in cities across the country. Remarkably successful strategy. Eventually were convicted iirc, but it was too late.
- Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
  Cities did their best to kill transit without GM's meddling. For instance, capping fares on all public transit meant that over time the fare in inflation adjusted terms fell. Public transit was being starved to death from this, even in places where cars could never compete such as New York. The subways there went bankrupt from the fare cap as the city had some obsessive need to take over the subway systems. Cars didn't pay anything for road wear, and they didn't (and still don't) pay anything towards congestion. They clogged the streets, made streetcars slower, and essentially freeloaded. Utilities were forced to divest from streetcar ownership, which forced the streetcar companies to pay retail electricity prices instead of wholesale ones. At the time GM came around, public transit was already hurting. GM was able to do what they did because the companies were hurting and could be bought cheaply.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
sethammons 11y ago
Could then-suburbs be a result of socio-econmic divide rather than racism? Poor people / minorities get left behind. Maybe a then-bonus was homogenous grouping (which, historically, people tend to prefer), but it seems that a driving factor would be to get out of crowded space. The covenants, yeah, racist people did and do exist, but was that the majority? In your linked Wikipedia, it says that the desegregation of schools happened much earlier than the White Flight, and that many whites stayed and, sometimes violently and often politically, tried to prevent minorities from moving in to their areas. Could it be the more racist of the whites stayed in the cities (covenants aside)? Without more information, I don't see this yet as suburbs == racism bolstered by the availability of the car. Edit: apparently I replied to the wrong comment. And mobile makes it hard to rectify.
- apozem 11y ago
  The creation of whites-only suburbs was intentional and racist. The Federal Housing Administration started in 1934 and helped back home loans for white Americans. It helped get them out of the cities and invest in home ownership. The FHA explicitly refused to back loans for black people or even people who lived near black people. [1] The result was "redlining," where banks and lenders would draw lines on a map to delineate where blacks were allowed to live and who could get home loans in the white neighborhoods. [2] This is still something that happens now. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution won a Pulitzer in the '80s for a series demonstrating how banks would rather give money to a poor white family to buy a home in a "white" neighborhood than a middle- or even upper-class black family. [2] You're partially right in the sense that race and income are strongly correlated, but keeping black people out of the suburbs across the country was no accident. If you're interested in a long but fantastic read on the effects of discriminatory policies on minorities over the years, Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" is a good place to begin. [3] [1]: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-racist-housing-policy-that-made-your-neighborhood/371439/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-raci... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining [3]: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case...
Abraln 11y ago
As someone who lives near Phoenix Arizona, I can see that at least out here it seems to be a result of the fact that the city only really came into existence fairly recently. Compared to much older places like London, which obviously predates the automobile, New forms of transportation were taken into account when zoning regulations and other things were made. As an example, all of our major roads are spaced 1 mile apart and are at right angles to each other in a nice grid. I'm happy living in the suburbs just because it means I get more house for my money.
- Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
  >Compared to much older places like London, which obviously predates the automobile, New forms of transportation were taken into account when zoning regulations and other things were made. As an example, all of our major roads are spaced 1 mile apart and are at right angles to each other in a nice grid. There's a difference between designing streets wide enough to accommodate cars--no windy medieval footpaths that eventually got paved in Phoenix--and forcing businesses and all new housing to provide free parking spaces to drivers. One is taking cars into account, another is forcing them on everyone. It should be noted, however, that Phoenix is old enough it predates cars and its wide streets and grid layout are for other reasons. Grids are efficient, allowing someone on foot to cover a larger area in a given time period than would otherwise be the case. They also allow for efficient navigation; if you name your streets like DC's or Manhattan's, it's easy to get between any two corners. They also minimize property disputes. Streets were wide to allow wagons and the like to turn around easily and for aesthetic reasons. That this happened to be useful for cars is an accident.
jquery 11y ago
I thought the suburbs were mostly about crime. Look at Detroit. Is someone necessarily racist for not wanting to live there? It's a complex issue but you have tumblr-fied it.
- Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
  If suburbs were about crime, people would merely have moved to them, as they existed (just using transit, not cars). They wouldn't have set up command and control economy experimental land use policies and subsidies that had never been done before if they just wanted breathing room or to be away from the city. That sort of life could already be had, but that wasn't enough. Those other people could flee crime too since they could afford a train ticket, and you wouldn't want one of those others in your neighborhood, would you? Of course not. We've got to set things up so they don't follow us. What don't they have? Cars. If we build a new society that forces everyone to have cars, 'they' can't follow us.
  - jquery 11y ago
    You're making a lot of limiting assumptions about what people are willing to do to be safe. Few things will make people react broadly and strongly than to regain a sense of familial safely.
matt-attack 11y ago
Is is possible that some just don't like living in tight urban quarters? I'm not exactly sure why the race card must be played. I know plenty of folks who simply want big houses with big yards in which to spread out. It might even be innate human nature to not wish to live confined.
- Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
  >Is is possible that some just don't like living in tight urban quarters? I'm not exactly sure why the race card must be played. Sure is. I'm totally OK with people living this lifestyle. What I don't appreciate is when these people take over land use policies in all of America and make this lifestyle required, outside of handful of pockets that had the fortune to be born before this lifestyle existed. I don't like that these policies have tremendous effects on house prices, the cost of transportation, and economic growth nationwide (to the point that economists from various viewpoints oppose them). I would likewise be opposed to policies that legally mandated all people live in environments that look like Manhattan. Not everyone enjoys that lifestyle, and it would have massive ramifications on all aspects of society. What I support is a relaxing of zoning and land use policies so that they become about the efficient movement of people and goods and public safety, which is how they started out. I do not support land use policies that are meant to force me to live a certain way. Let the me decide how I want to live. Don't tell me what I like or should like.
- danans 11y ago
  The race card was played in real estate and metropolitan planning long ago, to great detrimental effect on blacks. You can't separate the creation of the American suburb from America's 20th century racial history. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight Also: http://wpsa.research.pdx.edu/meet/2012/greer.pdf http://wpsa.research.pdx.edu/meet/2012/greer.pdf http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/05/racism_in_real_estate_landlords_redlining_housing_values_and_discrimination.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...

workitout 11y ago

>> No longer would white men have to live near black men. Today's youth think the suburbs was about race now? It was about a lot of people don't actually like living in a concrete jungle, that was what it was about.

Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
>Today's youth think the suburbs was about race now? It was about a lot of people don't actually like living in a concrete jungle, that was what it was about. Race was a huge motivator. Why else would we have racial covenants? Funny how the growth of suburbs came at roughly the same time that schools started integrating and integration accelerated suburban growth. We had Federal suburban housing subsidies available almost exclusively for whites. We have a name for this phenomenon: White Flight. Pre-1950s we had racial covenants, but we didn't social engineer lifestyles in suburbs to build them around cars. Streetcar suburbs for instance looked similar to the cities they were connected to. Smaller and less dense, but walkable urban places in their own right. Look at places like Del Ray, Alexandria, Virginia for an example. In cities themselves we tended to build highways in poor, mostly minority, neighborhoods. The white neighborhoods wouldn't be leveled nearly as often.
- theklub 11y ago
  I think you might be confusing crime and race although they happen to be tied closely together. My family decided to moved out of the city when they were followed home one day. Not sure race had anything to do with it but crime definitely did.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    You are ignoring the key part of what he said. Why else would there be racial covenants explicitly excluding non-caucasians? Sure, fear of crime was one of the mechanisms of white flight, but American fear of crime has a big racial component to it. Historically, America has kept black people poor, confined them to poor neighborhoods, and then blamed blackness for the high crime rates that go with poverty and desperation. This game continues today. Donald Trump recently tweeted something with totally made up statistics blaming black people for murders of whites: http://www.rawstory.com/2015/11/that-racist-trump-tweet-about-blacks-killing-whites-isnt-just-false-its-neo-nazi-propaganda/ http://www.rawstory.com/2015/11/that-racist-trump-tweet-abou... It wasn't just wrong and it wasn't just racist. It was literally neo-nazi propaganda.
    - thedavinci2000 11y ago
      I wonder if the guy is stupidly ignorant or willfully ignorant. He has said some really despicable things.
      - DarkTree 11y ago
        The scary part is that he has gained a large following of people who think he's just saying "what everyone's thinking". There are many, many people in the U.S. who hear what he says, and then think, "Yeah! That's so true!" on their gut instinct without having any background knowledge on the subject. I'm living in the U.S. and it's a scary momentum.
        zo1 11y ago
wpietri 11y ago
Today's olds also think the suburbs were about race. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-teachers-07.htm http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-teachers-07.htm is http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1017_reg.html http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1017_reg.html People who think it was only about wanting to live with a little more greenery around are mainly white suburbanites who haven't looked at the history.
- ska 11y ago
  mainly white suburbanites who haven't looked at the history. Many of them are mainly white suburbanites who are uncomfortable with the implications of the history, and choose rather to ignore it or paper it over (with "well, our family was different because...). Perfectly understandable, of course.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    Oh, definitely. And so much of what they hear doesn't fit with the actual history, so it's easy to ignore their first encounters with the facts as weird aberrations. I was shocked when I finally learned this stuff.
DanBC 11y ago
You may want to look at Redlining which for example controlled who got mortgages or not based on race. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining > In the United States, redlining is the practice of denying services, either directly or through selectively raising prices, to residents of certain areas based on the racial or ethnic makeups of those areas. While some of the most famous examples of redlining regard denying financial services such as banking or insurance,[2] other services such as health care [3] or even supermarkets,[4] can be denied to residents to carry out redlining.[5]
- mturmon 11y ago
  I have found it very interesting to inspect the redlining maps from this era -- many of the divisions they reflected and enforced up to the 1960s-1970s are still loosely in place today, right down to the "that's the wrong side of the street" level. (http://www.urbanoasis.org/projects/holc-fha/digital-holc-maps/ http://www.urbanoasis.org/projects/holc-fha/digital-holc-map...) Further to your point, another practice that re-distributed whites to the suburbs, to the benefit of shady property developers, is blockbusting. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting) It also had nothing to do with green lawns and everything to do with racism.
kps 11y ago
It's American parochialism. Suburbs, highways, and cars also exist in countries that don't have the US's unique racial history.
- Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
  Suburbs, highways, and cars exist outside the US as I can attest (I used to live in Japan), but they are not the same suburbs and highways. Compare relatively car centric Naha, Japan to Houston. Very different development patterns because Japan doesn't have the same restrictions that America has. The car is not held above all other modes in Japan, efficiency be damned. Some places have imported the American car centric suburb, but they will learn over time the lesson America has started to learn.
  - Agustus 11y ago
    That cars enable upward mobility and easy access to jobs devoid of the ever reaching control from the central planning agencies? More power to them.
    - scentoni 11y ago
      That cars block upward mobility because of the great costs of vehicle, upkeep, fuel, and parking.
      - dsfyu404ed 11y ago
        If you don't live in a state where insurance is absurdly expensive, don't live somewhere gas is absurdly expensive that is also very spread out (California, Alaska) and aren't insistent upon driving something new you can easily have a reliably car for under $3k or even under $2k and drive it for ~$500/yr in various fees (insurance) before gas. Add in a $120 set of tires and rims every other year (because you don't buy new, you buy used). If you live in a blue collar neighborhood maintenance usually costs next to nothing because you trade services with your neighbors or church congregation or have relatives or close friends that will do things at cost. If you're not trying to visibly live the suburban upper middle class lifestyle personal freedom of movement can be had relatively cheaply.
akgerber 11y ago
The suburbs were about a lot of things (some were built in the 30s as utopian projects by the US Government) but mass suburbanization was driven by FHA loans to veterans, which were not available to blacks.
iamsohungry 11y ago
> Today's youth think the suburbs was about race now? It was about a lot of people don't actually like living in a concrete jungle, that was what it was about. Ugh. You realize that people can do things for more than one reason?
- CWuestefeld 11y ago
  For that matter, "people" isn't monolithic. One person can have a mix of reasons, and a different person can have an entirely different mix of reasons.
thescriptkiddie 11y ago
For real? Did you not learn about white flight in high school?
- danans 11y ago
  That doesn't surprise me. I grew up (non-white, children of recent immigrants) in a white-flight created midwest suburb. For obvious reasons, they didn't teach us about white flight in school. I learned about it from white adults in the community who did leave the city for racially motivated reasons.
superuser2 11y ago
Historians don't tend to agree. White Flight is a well-studied and well-documented phenomenon, as much a part of our history as the Red Scare and other cultural memes of the 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

rayiner 11y ago

> As I mentioned in another comment, there was this 1950s utopian ideal amongst American planners that we'd all own cars, we could live tens of miles away from the city where we worked, modern planning would ensure traffic was amazing It's interesting to note that these people were the techno-optimists of their time.

Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
>It's interesting to note that these people were the techno-optimists of their time. The thing is, people knew in this time period how inefficient cars were for moving people. Cars take up way more space than equivalent public transit and this was used in advertisements for streetcar companies (who were getting killed by congestion caused by cars).
- akgerber 11y ago
  Specifically: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7199/6853187005_135a28db2f_z.jpg http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7199/6853187005_135a28db2f_z.j...
- superuser2 11y ago
  The US is enormous. If we're all truly living far away from the cities then the space occupied by cars is not relevant. That wasn't their mistake - it was the energy costs and corresponding pollution.
mturmon 11y ago
This time, we'll get it right for sure.

Absentinsomniac 11y ago

Don't forget the gigantic highway lobby and GM's role in funding the destruction of rail in cities across the country. Remarkably successful strategy. Eventually were convicted iirc, but it was too late.

Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
Cities did their best to kill transit without GM's meddling. For instance, capping fares on all public transit meant that over time the fare in inflation adjusted terms fell. Public transit was being starved to death from this, even in places where cars could never compete such as New York. The subways there went bankrupt from the fare cap as the city had some obsessive need to take over the subway systems. Cars didn't pay anything for road wear, and they didn't (and still don't) pay anything towards congestion. They clogged the streets, made streetcars slower, and essentially freeloaded. Utilities were forced to divest from streetcar ownership, which forced the streetcar companies to pay retail electricity prices instead of wholesale ones. At the time GM came around, public transit was already hurting. GM was able to do what they did because the companies were hurting and could be bought cheaply.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

sethammons 11y ago

Could then-suburbs be a result of socio-econmic divide rather than racism? Poor people / minorities get left behind. Maybe a then-bonus was homogenous grouping (which, historically, people tend to prefer), but it seems that a driving factor would be to get out of crowded space. The covenants, yeah, racist people did and do exist, but was that the majority? In your linked Wikipedia, it says that the desegregation of schools happened much earlier than the White Flight, and that many whites stayed and, sometimes violently and often politically, tried to prevent minorities from moving in to their areas. Could it be the more racist of the whites stayed in the cities (covenants aside)? Without more information, I don't see this yet as suburbs == racism bolstered by the availability of the car. Edit: apparently I replied to the wrong comment. And mobile makes it hard to rectify.

apozem 11y ago
The creation of whites-only suburbs was intentional and racist. The Federal Housing Administration started in 1934 and helped back home loans for white Americans. It helped get them out of the cities and invest in home ownership. The FHA explicitly refused to back loans for black people or even people who lived near black people. [1] The result was "redlining," where banks and lenders would draw lines on a map to delineate where blacks were allowed to live and who could get home loans in the white neighborhoods. [2] This is still something that happens now. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution won a Pulitzer in the '80s for a series demonstrating how banks would rather give money to a poor white family to buy a home in a "white" neighborhood than a middle- or even upper-class black family. [2] You're partially right in the sense that race and income are strongly correlated, but keeping black people out of the suburbs across the country was no accident. If you're interested in a long but fantastic read on the effects of discriminatory policies on minorities over the years, Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" is a good place to begin. [3] [1]: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-racist-housing-policy-that-made-your-neighborhood/371439/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-raci... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining [3]: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case...

Abraln 11y ago

As someone who lives near Phoenix Arizona, I can see that at least out here it seems to be a result of the fact that the city only really came into existence fairly recently. Compared to much older places like London, which obviously predates the automobile, New forms of transportation were taken into account when zoning regulations and other things were made. As an example, all of our major roads are spaced 1 mile apart and are at right angles to each other in a nice grid. I'm happy living in the suburbs just because it means I get more house for my money.

Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
>Compared to much older places like London, which obviously predates the automobile, New forms of transportation were taken into account when zoning regulations and other things were made. As an example, all of our major roads are spaced 1 mile apart and are at right angles to each other in a nice grid. There's a difference between designing streets wide enough to accommodate cars--no windy medieval footpaths that eventually got paved in Phoenix--and forcing businesses and all new housing to provide free parking spaces to drivers. One is taking cars into account, another is forcing them on everyone. It should be noted, however, that Phoenix is old enough it predates cars and its wide streets and grid layout are for other reasons. Grids are efficient, allowing someone on foot to cover a larger area in a given time period than would otherwise be the case. They also allow for efficient navigation; if you name your streets like DC's or Manhattan's, it's easy to get between any two corners. They also minimize property disputes. Streets were wide to allow wagons and the like to turn around easily and for aesthetic reasons. That this happened to be useful for cars is an accident.

jquery 11y ago

I thought the suburbs were mostly about crime. Look at Detroit. Is someone necessarily racist for not wanting to live there? It's a complex issue but you have tumblr-fied it.

Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
If suburbs were about crime, people would merely have moved to them, as they existed (just using transit, not cars). They wouldn't have set up command and control economy experimental land use policies and subsidies that had never been done before if they just wanted breathing room or to be away from the city. That sort of life could already be had, but that wasn't enough. Those other people could flee crime too since they could afford a train ticket, and you wouldn't want one of those others in your neighborhood, would you? Of course not. We've got to set things up so they don't follow us. What don't they have? Cars. If we build a new society that forces everyone to have cars, 'they' can't follow us.
- jquery 11y ago
  You're making a lot of limiting assumptions about what people are willing to do to be safe. Few things will make people react broadly and strongly than to regain a sense of familial safely.

matt-attack 11y ago

Is is possible that some just don't like living in tight urban quarters? I'm not exactly sure why the race card must be played. I know plenty of folks who simply want big houses with big yards in which to spread out. It might even be innate human nature to not wish to live confined.

Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
>Is is possible that some just don't like living in tight urban quarters? I'm not exactly sure why the race card must be played. Sure is. I'm totally OK with people living this lifestyle. What I don't appreciate is when these people take over land use policies in all of America and make this lifestyle required, outside of handful of pockets that had the fortune to be born before this lifestyle existed. I don't like that these policies have tremendous effects on house prices, the cost of transportation, and economic growth nationwide (to the point that economists from various viewpoints oppose them). I would likewise be opposed to policies that legally mandated all people live in environments that look like Manhattan. Not everyone enjoys that lifestyle, and it would have massive ramifications on all aspects of society. What I support is a relaxing of zoning and land use policies so that they become about the efficient movement of people and goods and public safety, which is how they started out. I do not support land use policies that are meant to force me to live a certain way. Let the me decide how I want to live. Don't tell me what I like or should like.
danans 11y ago
The race card was played in real estate and metropolitan planning long ago, to great detrimental effect on blacks. You can't separate the creation of the American suburb from America's 20th century racial history. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight Also: http://wpsa.research.pdx.edu/meet/2012/greer.pdf http://wpsa.research.pdx.edu/meet/2012/greer.pdf http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/05/racism_in_real_estate_landlords_redlining_housing_values_and_discrimination.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...