> 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 ma

> 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. It's more complicated than that. First, there's the history of red-lining[1], and no requirement that housing be "integrated" (which meant non-discriminatory back then), so you had people like Levitt only allow whites to buy home. Second, the government financed most of the critical infrastructure necessary to "bootstrap" beyond just highway and roads. So if your water, sewer, electric, and school infrastructure was all built wholly or partially funded via federal or state grants or "pork", you could keep your taxes low because you have lots of shiny-new infrastructure that's cheap to maintain that you didn't need to finance yourself through municipal bonds. This allowed your tax money to be poured directly into hiring the best teachers, building parks, etc. Getting all that infrastructure for free greatly masked the inefficiencies of the suburbs and why, today at least, suburbs often carry huge property taxes burdens or offer very limited services (like not even curbs or sidewalks) and rely on a county/township to cover the essentials. The Suburbs are basically a public housing project for the middle class. If you actually required the average American to pay for their suburb with little or no help from the federal government it never would have gotten off the ground. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining