For so very close to all of the 20th Century, people really liked cars. The housing stocks dated to at the latest the 1920s. Land prices favored suburbanization

For so very close to all of the 20th Century, people really liked cars. The housing stocks dated to at the latest the 1920s. Land prices favored suburbanization. Two cars wasn't really a thing until the 1970s. Places like New York City had urban blight because of peculiarities in the tax code. You could live in the 1950s and 1960s in NYC in a poor quality apartment cheaply - it wasn't until the 1970s that price started going up. As I've been told, people left larger cities in the '50s a lot because of drugs and because industry was vacating city centers. And there's always white flight.