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>> 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

>> 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
        ""Yeah! That's so true!" on their gut instinct without having any background knowledge on the subject. I'm live in the U.S. and it's a scary momentum." This happens on the other side of the fence, and no one bats an eye about it. In fact, they call it democracy, or something like that. Snarkiness aside, if these people agree with him, then that is their vote. Really, we can't have democracy if we don't call it democracy when people vote the way we don't like them to. It's the same as free-speech: we can't suddenly abandon it if we don't like what's being said.
        DarkTree 11y ago
        Right, but this conflation comes up with most political arguments and I think it's a straw man. I don't think that people shouldn't have the right to follow Trump, but it's also true that people are free to hate certain types of people. That doesn't mean it isn't scary.
        wpietri 11y ago
        Populism does have both right and left forms (and others besides), but that doesn't mean that it isn't inimical to democracy. It is not hard to find historical examples of populists who have used the vote to seize power. Democracy is a lot more than voting, and it's certainly more than having one last free vote for a populist who ends free voting. There's also a particularly ugly history of populists stirring up racial hatred as a means to power, which I think is especially dangerous.
- CWuestefeld 11y ago
  It goes a lot deeper than that, even. Racism was an early motivator behind minimum wage laws [1],[2]. It was also the origin of gun control [3]. Funny how the passage of time can turn our perspective in different ways. [1] http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/16/the-racist-history-of-the-minimum-wage/ http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/16/the-racist-history-of-the-... [2] http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2718/racist_origins_of_the_minimum_wage http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2718/racist_origins_of... [3] http://www.constitution.org/cmt/cramer/racist_roots.htm http://www.constitution.org/cmt/cramer/racist_roots.htm
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

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
        ""Yeah! That's so true!" on their gut instinct without having any background knowledge on the subject. I'm live in the U.S. and it's a scary momentum." This happens on the other side of the fence, and no one bats an eye about it. In fact, they call it democracy, or something like that. Snarkiness aside, if these people agree with him, then that is their vote. Really, we can't have democracy if we don't call it democracy when people vote the way we don't like them to. It's the same as free-speech: we can't suddenly abandon it if we don't like what's being said.
        DarkTree 11y ago
        Right, but this conflation comes up with most political arguments and I think it's a straw man. I don't think that people shouldn't have the right to follow Trump, but it's also true that people are free to hate certain types of people. That doesn't mean it isn't scary.
        wpietri 11y ago
        Populism does have both right and left forms (and others besides), but that doesn't mean that it isn't inimical to democracy. It is not hard to find historical examples of populists who have used the vote to seize power. Democracy is a lot more than voting, and it's certainly more than having one last free vote for a populist who ends free voting. There's also a particularly ugly history of populists stirring up racial hatred as a means to power, which I think is especially dangerous.
CWuestefeld 11y ago
It goes a lot deeper than that, even. Racism was an early motivator behind minimum wage laws [1],[2]. It was also the origin of gun control [3]. Funny how the passage of time can turn our perspective in different ways. [1] http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/16/the-racist-history-of-the-minimum-wage/ http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/16/the-racist-history-of-the-... [2] http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2718/racist_origins_of_the_minimum_wage http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2718/racist_origins_of... [3] http://www.constitution.org/cmt/cramer/racist_roots.htm http://www.constitution.org/cmt/cramer/racist_roots.htm

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