8 ms·

A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish. That’s part of why suburbs happened

A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish. That’s part of why suburbs happened. You can’t just walk away from cities or towns because they no longer fit with our ideas for how cities and towns should be. Cities and towns already are. They need to function, well. Creative destruction is not an acceptable solution. This is the kind of view that gives idealism a bad name.

stevenleeg 9y ago
> A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish. That’s part of why suburbs happened. Orrrrr a good amount of racism lead to a great White Flight[1] which trapped minorities in downtown areas that were left to rot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ComputerGuru 9y ago
  I am a staunch opponent of racism (as if anyone would say otherwise) but I don't think that the answer is that simple. White flight is only part of it. The biggest reason for the birth of suburbia in the 50s was the affordability of the automobile combined with the newly minted Eisenhower expressways which made living far away from where you work cheap and feasible. White flight was a reason why people wanted to take advantage of these new possibilities but was not the only reason. Land in the city is expensive. Land in suburbia was (and still is) far cheaper. For $xx/month you can have twice as much "visible wealth" at the expense of a longer commute, which was then portrayed as simply a part of the "suburbian experience" (see the car ads of the time and their romanticization of the commute). I don't think there is consensus that white flight gave birth to suburbs in the first place. Rather, white flight is often used to explain the birth of future and farther suburbs as whites (being by and large the original inhabitants of the first suburbs) fought to keep that status quo and moved to newer suburbs and set up HOAs and zoning laws specifically designed to prevent poorer (and, directly, "more colored") persons from moving into their newly minted neighborhoods.
  - dalbasal 9y ago
    Maybe as a non-americas I should stay out of this. But.. Not everything is best viewed through the lens of macro-politics and big concepts. Ucaetano is willing to “Let them fail and wipe them out” based on their balance sheets and (I assume) a distaste for whatever model was used to set them up in previous generations. stevenleeg wants to put the problem at the feet of discriminatory and racist policies from days past (and their modern consequences). This is a terrible (IMO) approach to politics. There is a practical problem at hand. The solution cannot be to not have created the problem in the first place. If a population is too poor to support its municipal costs, the solution cannot be to let the suburb rot. There is no creative destruction option. If you let the suburb rot, all you’ll have is a more rotten suburb. The solutions needs to be practical ones. If the infrastructure is decrepit, renew the infrastructure. If the munincipal funding model that works for wealthy suburbs can’t work in poor suburbs, it can’t be the funding model for poor suburbs. Maybe there are some more grandiose ideas, like preventing the rich/poor suburb dichotomy from existing but those are unlikely to work unless the practical problems are first solved. I don’t understand this conversation at all.
    - marindez 9y ago
      >If a population is too poor to support its municipal costs, the solution cannot be to let the suburb rot. There is no creative destruction option. If you let the suburb rot, all you’ll have is a more rotten suburb. A rotten suburb is not a problem if nobody lives in it.
      - dalbasal 9y ago
        This comment is exactly my point. Are we talking about reality or reconciling plato and information theory to form a metaphysical philosophy of roads and sewer pipes? Cities, towns and suburbs do not go away. If they suck, they still stay where they are. People live there, even if the population declines a bit. If the schools are shit, people get poor education. If civil society, policing, job markets and community development sucks… you get the picture. There is no walking away option. No scenario where this suburb does not exist. That’s crazy talk. The only context this kind of talk makes sense in is some disconnected political theory, with no relation to the reality of. It’s not rational or intellectual. It’s fanatical.
- 0x4f3759df 9y ago
  Also Blockbusting and the policy of destroying ethnic Catholic neighborhoods by running a couple of highways through them.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  White flight wasn’t just hysteria or racism at the individual level. It was driven by federal policy back in the New Deal era. In most cases, it was very dumb on any metric to stay in the city if you had the means to move.
- baldfat 9y ago
  White Flight hit Allentown, PA very late. It wasn't till a new Interstate was finished I-78 and it was the mid to late 1980s. I live in Center City Allentown and it has now gotten over $1,000,000,000 in investment but the racism from the suburbs talking about how the city isn't what it was is infuriating. Look at any comment on the local newspaper and it is nothing but racist anti-city comments, www.mcall.com. Even mayors from suburbs even wrote opt pieces on how their economy doesn't need a city, which is completely insane. People just hate cities and it does come from a emotional and non-rational mindset.
  - Buttes 9y ago
    You weren't kidding about those comments. First story I clicked on: >Well buddy, They have been shooting each other here since they opened I78 and they started moving here. 20+ years now. They have ruined a once great all American city with this BS and it is true. When it gets cold they go back inside.
  - ForRealsies 9y ago
    While it's fun to get emotional, I'm more interested in statistics. Has crime increased in Allentown since the 80s?
    - baldfat 9y ago
      Actually the crime rate is fairly low for a city our size and the crime rate has had a consistent drop for the past 10 years. There are people who refuse to drive through Allentown due to fear of being a victim. http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/breaking-news/index.ssf/2015/02/how_safe_are_pennsylvania_citi.html http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/breaking-news/index.ssf/2015...
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    Comments on almost every website I have visited that are not moderated are a toxic stew of conservative trolls. It would be one thing if it was breitbart or infowars or r/the_donald, but when we are talking about newspapers for the bluest urban areas, there's something else going on where the actual residents can't or wont participate in the online discourse in this manner because we know the majority of voters in those areas don't think like the online trolls.
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  undrivable That's the key word. Not "white flight". The mass production of the automobile is what historians generally agree enabled the suburbs - not critical mass racism.
- simonsarris 9y ago
  > Orrrrr a good amount of racism lead to a great White Flight That's reductionist and possibly even causally reversed, like saying bad yelp reviews are the reason a restaurant closed. Rates of crime increased 600% (robbery) [1] in America overall during the 1960-1980. That's enormous. The increase in crime was mostly in urban areas, not rural, so there was even more than an 600% increase in some areas. This was well before Reagan's and Clinton's strategy of mass incarceration. It's deeply unfair to suggest that a family - of any race - that decides to move to the relatively affordable, calm suburbs, where they can own a full home and have a backyard, and avoid the massive increase in crime - was due to "a good amount of racism" as the primary reason. If your neighborhood violence increased by more than 600% over the span of 10 years, and you were having kids, you might just decided to move somewhere else, no? [1] http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
  - deong 9y ago
    I think that's conflating different forms of racism. There's no denying that the modern suburbs was in very large part a racist development. That doesn't mean anyone who took part in that development had racist intents. As you say, it's a perfectly logical decision to move one's family to the suburbs. That doesn't contradict the fact that the opportunity for you to do so was the product of racism, even if it was someone else's racism. The Levittown/redlining/white flight/whatever was already well underway by the 60s. Yes, crime increased in urban areas up through the 80s, but some of that is best explained by those urban areas being essentially economically abandoned by that time. Crime follows poverty, and when the tax money leaves, the result is fairly predictable.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - liveoneggs 9y ago
    I have spoken directly with a few people who left their southern in town neighborhood (still houses with yards etc) in the early 70's because they did not like the way black people behaved after civil rights in the 60's. Not sure if that counts for you as racism but there it is.
- graeme 9y ago
  We had a similar phenomenon in Canada, without the same racial dynamics. My bet is that the car was the main cause. We also had the surge in population in the west compared to the old cities of the east. We are also seeing a gentrification of urban areas. I could be wrong. Is there some major difference between the Canadian and American cases? My working hypothesis is that the car was the main cause, and that the cause of regentrification is that suburbs reached their natural geographic limits. Race and crime may have been an additional stimulus in the us, but I feel like on this question americans are guilty of not even bothering to glance at the natural experiment running to their north. But again, I might be wrong: am I missing something about the american case? One thing I can think of is that I’m not sure Canadian downtowns ever got quite so abandoned.
  - lazerpants 9y ago
    There's a demographic aspect to this I try to bring up every time these discussions arise. Age demographics are very important for countries and cities. Due to the nature of demographic trends, there are a ton of people 20-35 in the USA right now, more than there are "baby boomers". Due to the similarities in taste due to age, many, many, people want to live in cities right now, which drives gentrification. Whether or not that continues probably has a lot to do with birth rates going forward for people 20-35. What are the age demographics of Canada?
    - ghaff 9y ago
      And, more specifically, it's mostly college-educated people in that age range who want to live in the core of a relatively small number of cities, generally on the costs.
    - kashprime 9y ago
      Very similar, but one crucial difference: the provinces control funding to cities and equalize spending across county lines. So you don't end up with bankrupt cities, or super wealthy ones, and everyone tends to get the same services. Instead, at least in Toronto, you have "priority neighbourhoods".. poor communities that get extra funding and resources.
m0llusk 9y ago
Combinations are possible. It is easy to imagine that in an area with three bedroom communities one might commit to a bus, rail, boat, or air link to a metro area and grow its downtown while the other two fade.
forkandwait 9y ago
> A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish. Wrong, due to an specific Anglo-American cultural meme. Civilization has flourished in cities as long as there has been civilization. In the U.S. (uniquely), we ruined cities post WW2 by subsidizing highways and cars and low density suburban mortgages, due to said cultural fetish. Plus a whole lot of racism. In France, to my knowledge, there was never a time when the central city was considered lower class than the suburbs (ahem, Paris, ahem). And I think this is generally true.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  > Wrong, due to an specific Anglo-American cultural meme. We're talking about the US, so those "memes" are relevant.
  - dalbasal 9y ago
    Well… it’s me he quoted and I’m Irish, not american. I wasn’t talking about the US only. Anyway, it’s not an american meme. In Dublin, there was a massive (and disastrous) effort to move the urban underclass from inner city tenements to what is now inner suburbs. Two generations before that, the upper middle class migrated from the inner city to (different) inner city suburbs. The idea that cities are decrepit and suburbs are the future is a recurring one. Charles Dickens’ soot covered cities (in england, so I guess anglo-american?) existed and the middle class moved to the suburbs, much like americans. The trend back into city centres today is wider than the US too.
    - notfromhere 9y ago
      Middle and upper class wants to move away from industrial spaces. This is why migration patterns have changed from cities to cities based on manufacturing shifting from urban to suburban to rural
kijin 9y ago
Ever been to rural parts of the West? Lots of abandoned towns all over the place, some swallowed up by trees, others preserved by dry desert climate. Many of them are barely 100 years old. Cities and towns might look like permanent fixtures of civilization if you place them on a scale of mere decades; but they come and go, grow and shrink, appear and disappear, and are eventually reclaimed by nature on a scale of centuries and millennia. They are man-made machines just like steam engines and web services, and should be treated as such. There's nothing sacred about them! The only question is how to care for the people who are affected when a machine they've been relying on goes down. Creative destruction is not a panacea, but it should be on the table as a legitimate option to be weighed against other options. This isn't idealism, it's being realistic. Speaking of being realistic, I suspect that there are many cases where relocating residents and shutting down the town in an orderly manner would be far less costly, more humane, and perhaps even environmentally better than maintaining the decaying infrastructure indefinitely and making yet another generation of an already disadvantaged population grow up in a place without hope.
s73ver_ 9y ago
"A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish." Read: "Non-white people were living there." Seriously, don't try to whitewash what happened. White people fled the cities because non-white people were starting to live in those areas too.

stevenleeg 9y ago

> A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish. That’s part of why suburbs happened. Orrrrr a good amount of racism lead to a great White Flight[1] which trapped minorities in downtown areas that were left to rot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ComputerGuru 9y ago
I am a staunch opponent of racism (as if anyone would say otherwise) but I don't think that the answer is that simple. White flight is only part of it. The biggest reason for the birth of suburbia in the 50s was the affordability of the automobile combined with the newly minted Eisenhower expressways which made living far away from where you work cheap and feasible. White flight was a reason why people wanted to take advantage of these new possibilities but was not the only reason. Land in the city is expensive. Land in suburbia was (and still is) far cheaper. For $xx/month you can have twice as much "visible wealth" at the expense of a longer commute, which was then portrayed as simply a part of the "suburbian experience" (see the car ads of the time and their romanticization of the commute). I don't think there is consensus that white flight gave birth to suburbs in the first place. Rather, white flight is often used to explain the birth of future and farther suburbs as whites (being by and large the original inhabitants of the first suburbs) fought to keep that status quo and moved to newer suburbs and set up HOAs and zoning laws specifically designed to prevent poorer (and, directly, "more colored") persons from moving into their newly minted neighborhoods.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  Maybe as a non-americas I should stay out of this. But.. Not everything is best viewed through the lens of macro-politics and big concepts. Ucaetano is willing to “Let them fail and wipe them out” based on their balance sheets and (I assume) a distaste for whatever model was used to set them up in previous generations. stevenleeg wants to put the problem at the feet of discriminatory and racist policies from days past (and their modern consequences). This is a terrible (IMO) approach to politics. There is a practical problem at hand. The solution cannot be to not have created the problem in the first place. If a population is too poor to support its municipal costs, the solution cannot be to let the suburb rot. There is no creative destruction option. If you let the suburb rot, all you’ll have is a more rotten suburb. The solutions needs to be practical ones. If the infrastructure is decrepit, renew the infrastructure. If the munincipal funding model that works for wealthy suburbs can’t work in poor suburbs, it can’t be the funding model for poor suburbs. Maybe there are some more grandiose ideas, like preventing the rich/poor suburb dichotomy from existing but those are unlikely to work unless the practical problems are first solved. I don’t understand this conversation at all.
  - marindez 9y ago
    >If a population is too poor to support its municipal costs, the solution cannot be to let the suburb rot. There is no creative destruction option. If you let the suburb rot, all you’ll have is a more rotten suburb. A rotten suburb is not a problem if nobody lives in it.
    - dalbasal 9y ago
      This comment is exactly my point. Are we talking about reality or reconciling plato and information theory to form a metaphysical philosophy of roads and sewer pipes? Cities, towns and suburbs do not go away. If they suck, they still stay where they are. People live there, even if the population declines a bit. If the schools are shit, people get poor education. If civil society, policing, job markets and community development sucks… you get the picture. There is no walking away option. No scenario where this suburb does not exist. That’s crazy talk. The only context this kind of talk makes sense in is some disconnected political theory, with no relation to the reality of. It’s not rational or intellectual. It’s fanatical.
0x4f3759df 9y ago
Also Blockbusting and the policy of destroying ethnic Catholic neighborhoods by running a couple of highways through them.
Spooky23 9y ago
White flight wasn’t just hysteria or racism at the individual level. It was driven by federal policy back in the New Deal era. In most cases, it was very dumb on any metric to stay in the city if you had the means to move.
baldfat 9y ago
White Flight hit Allentown, PA very late. It wasn't till a new Interstate was finished I-78 and it was the mid to late 1980s. I live in Center City Allentown and it has now gotten over $1,000,000,000 in investment but the racism from the suburbs talking about how the city isn't what it was is infuriating. Look at any comment on the local newspaper and it is nothing but racist anti-city comments, www.mcall.com. Even mayors from suburbs even wrote opt pieces on how their economy doesn't need a city, which is completely insane. People just hate cities and it does come from a emotional and non-rational mindset.
- Buttes 9y ago
  You weren't kidding about those comments. First story I clicked on: >Well buddy, They have been shooting each other here since they opened I78 and they started moving here. 20+ years now. They have ruined a once great all American city with this BS and it is true. When it gets cold they go back inside.
- ForRealsies 9y ago
  While it's fun to get emotional, I'm more interested in statistics. Has crime increased in Allentown since the 80s?
  - baldfat 9y ago
    Actually the crime rate is fairly low for a city our size and the crime rate has had a consistent drop for the past 10 years. There are people who refuse to drive through Allentown due to fear of being a victim. http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/breaking-news/index.ssf/2015/02/how_safe_are_pennsylvania_citi.html http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/breaking-news/index.ssf/2015...
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Comments on almost every website I have visited that are not moderated are a toxic stew of conservative trolls. It would be one thing if it was breitbart or infowars or r/the_donald, but when we are talking about newspapers for the bluest urban areas, there's something else going on where the actual residents can't or wont participate in the online discourse in this manner because we know the majority of voters in those areas don't think like the online trolls.
lr4444lr 9y ago
undrivable That's the key word. Not "white flight". The mass production of the automobile is what historians generally agree enabled the suburbs - not critical mass racism.
simonsarris 9y ago
> Orrrrr a good amount of racism lead to a great White Flight That's reductionist and possibly even causally reversed, like saying bad yelp reviews are the reason a restaurant closed. Rates of crime increased 600% (robbery) [1] in America overall during the 1960-1980. That's enormous. The increase in crime was mostly in urban areas, not rural, so there was even more than an 600% increase in some areas. This was well before Reagan's and Clinton's strategy of mass incarceration. It's deeply unfair to suggest that a family - of any race - that decides to move to the relatively affordable, calm suburbs, where they can own a full home and have a backyard, and avoid the massive increase in crime - was due to "a good amount of racism" as the primary reason. If your neighborhood violence increased by more than 600% over the span of 10 years, and you were having kids, you might just decided to move somewhere else, no? [1] http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
- deong 9y ago
  I think that's conflating different forms of racism. There's no denying that the modern suburbs was in very large part a racist development. That doesn't mean anyone who took part in that development had racist intents. As you say, it's a perfectly logical decision to move one's family to the suburbs. That doesn't contradict the fact that the opportunity for you to do so was the product of racism, even if it was someone else's racism. The Levittown/redlining/white flight/whatever was already well underway by the 60s. Yes, crime increased in urban areas up through the 80s, but some of that is best explained by those urban areas being essentially economically abandoned by that time. Crime follows poverty, and when the tax money leaves, the result is fairly predictable.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- liveoneggs 9y ago
  I have spoken directly with a few people who left their southern in town neighborhood (still houses with yards etc) in the early 70's because they did not like the way black people behaved after civil rights in the 60's. Not sure if that counts for you as racism but there it is.
graeme 9y ago
We had a similar phenomenon in Canada, without the same racial dynamics. My bet is that the car was the main cause. We also had the surge in population in the west compared to the old cities of the east. We are also seeing a gentrification of urban areas. I could be wrong. Is there some major difference between the Canadian and American cases? My working hypothesis is that the car was the main cause, and that the cause of regentrification is that suburbs reached their natural geographic limits. Race and crime may have been an additional stimulus in the us, but I feel like on this question americans are guilty of not even bothering to glance at the natural experiment running to their north. But again, I might be wrong: am I missing something about the american case? One thing I can think of is that I’m not sure Canadian downtowns ever got quite so abandoned.
- lazerpants 9y ago
  There's a demographic aspect to this I try to bring up every time these discussions arise. Age demographics are very important for countries and cities. Due to the nature of demographic trends, there are a ton of people 20-35 in the USA right now, more than there are "baby boomers". Due to the similarities in taste due to age, many, many, people want to live in cities right now, which drives gentrification. Whether or not that continues probably has a lot to do with birth rates going forward for people 20-35. What are the age demographics of Canada?
  - ghaff 9y ago
    And, more specifically, it's mostly college-educated people in that age range who want to live in the core of a relatively small number of cities, generally on the costs.
  - kashprime 9y ago
    Very similar, but one crucial difference: the provinces control funding to cities and equalize spending across county lines. So you don't end up with bankrupt cities, or super wealthy ones, and everyone tends to get the same services. Instead, at least in Toronto, you have "priority neighbourhoods".. poor communities that get extra funding and resources.

m0llusk 9y ago

Combinations are possible. It is easy to imagine that in an area with three bedroom communities one might commit to a bus, rail, boat, or air link to a metro area and grow its downtown while the other two fade.

forkandwait 9y ago

> A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish. Wrong, due to an specific Anglo-American cultural meme. Civilization has flourished in cities as long as there has been civilization. In the U.S. (uniquely), we ruined cities post WW2 by subsidizing highways and cars and low density suburban mortgages, due to said cultural fetish. Plus a whole lot of racism. In France, to my knowledge, there was never a time when the central city was considered lower class than the suburbs (ahem, Paris, ahem). And I think this is generally true.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
> Wrong, due to an specific Anglo-American cultural meme. We're talking about the US, so those "memes" are relevant.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  Well… it’s me he quoted and I’m Irish, not american. I wasn’t talking about the US only. Anyway, it’s not an american meme. In Dublin, there was a massive (and disastrous) effort to move the urban underclass from inner city tenements to what is now inner suburbs. Two generations before that, the upper middle class migrated from the inner city to (different) inner city suburbs. The idea that cities are decrepit and suburbs are the future is a recurring one. Charles Dickens’ soot covered cities (in england, so I guess anglo-american?) existed and the middle class moved to the suburbs, much like americans. The trend back into city centres today is wider than the US too.
  - notfromhere 9y ago
    Middle and upper class wants to move away from industrial spaces. This is why migration patterns have changed from cities to cities based on manufacturing shifting from urban to suburban to rural

kijin 9y ago

Ever been to rural parts of the West? Lots of abandoned towns all over the place, some swallowed up by trees, others preserved by dry desert climate. Many of them are barely 100 years old. Cities and towns might look like permanent fixtures of civilization if you place them on a scale of mere decades; but they come and go, grow and shrink, appear and disappear, and are eventually reclaimed by nature on a scale of centuries and millennia. They are man-made machines just like steam engines and web services, and should be treated as such. There's nothing sacred about them! The only question is how to care for the people who are affected when a machine they've been relying on goes down. Creative destruction is not a panacea, but it should be on the table as a legitimate option to be weighed against other options. This isn't idealism, it's being realistic. Speaking of being realistic, I suspect that there are many cases where relocating residents and shutting down the town in an orderly manner would be far less costly, more humane, and perhaps even environmentally better than maintaining the decaying infrastructure indefinitely and making yet another generation of an already disadvantaged population grow up in a place without hope.

s73ver_ 9y ago

"A few generations ago inner cities were too dense, filthy, undrivable and morally corrupt to allow civilisation to flourish." Read: "Non-white people were living there." Seriously, don't try to whitewash what happened. White people fled the cities because non-white people were starting to live in those areas too.