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The US is an extreme precisely due to these social and emotional reasons. It's shocking to me how this article fails to mention even once that a lot of post WW

• SupremeOverlord 8y ago
  >white flight People have a right to choose their neighbor(hood)s. Freedom of association ought to imply freedom of disassociation. Stats show neighborhood crime correlates much more strongly with race than with education or income/poverty level. It's telling that diversity has to be enforced by government force...
  • ivanbakel 8y ago
    It tells that in the 1950s, many white Americans were racist.
    • SupremeOverlord 8y ago
      Many, including myself, still are. We like to be around our own and no amount of school-age propaganda and government force will change that!
      • Frondo 8y ago
        I find it unfortunate that you aren't behaving bravely enough to post your real identifying information. Such a move is neither supreme, nor representative of an overlord.
        • Frondo 8y ago
          Downvoters, wouldn't you like to know who the avowed racist is? I for one wouldn't want them near by company -- we work with a lot of clients of color, and that's a bad look.
          • dang 8y ago
            Would you please stop it with the flamebait on divisive topics? The account was an obvious troll. If you want to help combat that kind of thing, why not flag the comment? Other users did, which (a) killed it, and then (b) brought it to our attention so we could ban it. That's how to contribute positively in a case like this. Taking HN threads further into flamewar and political rhetoric is exactly what the guidelines ask you not to do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
            • SupremeOverlord 8y ago
              Banning unpopular opinions and fostering echo chambers?
  • gerbilly 8y ago
    Dude, I had a friend who constantly harangued me[1] to look into such claims over a period of six months. He also made the same claims that you do above (and more!) and stupid as I was, I attempted to substantiate them. This puts me in the unusual position of being extremely liberal, but also very familiar with the lines of 'evidence' that people use for these types of claims, and many more conspiracy theories. I wasn't able to find support for any of it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
  • GVIrish 8y ago
    And those same black neighborhoods had redlining, deliberately starved infrastructure and public services, and bad policing to contend with. Not to mention that black GI's were deliberately cheated out of the GI Bill that created so much upward mobility for returning white soldiers. > It's telling that diversity has to be enforced by government force Do you really not understand the history of segregation in the United States? Again, segregation meant black public schools were getting deliberately starved of resources as yet another facet of institutional racism.
  • bsanr2 8y ago
    "Much more strongly" is an overstatement, and this thesis doesn't take into account the multiplicative (not linear) effects of discrimination - in all its institutional and informal forms - and poverty. Crime in Japan tracks more closely with Buraku heritage than with income, and they are genetically indistinguishable from the rest of the population. This is a social problem with a social solution, that racist mid-century urban planners and policymakers made phenomenally worse by encouraging white flight.
    • SupremeOverlord 8y ago
      So would you be willing to live in neighborhoods with a higher average crime rate, to combat "institutional racism?" Would you put your money and family where your mouth is?
• burlesona 8y ago
  Even more basic than that, zoning and development regulation have strongly - in many cases explicitly - racist origins. For example many the first zoning laws in SF were designed to push back against Chinese immigration. Those same tools have been used to the same effect, and strengthened, for generations. Yet for all the calls for social justice in society now, I almost never hear people calling for the end of zoning, when it may be the greatest perpetrator and enforcer of inequality today. In the Bay Area, zoning is the saw that has cut the bottom off the economic ladder. It’s surprising to me that more people don’t understand that intuitively, but alas.
• philwelch 8y ago
  It’s not entirely clear that racial animus was the primary motivating factor. Once civil rights legislation was passed to stop housing discrimination, for instance, there was also black flight, when middle-class black families also moved to the suburbs. It’s also not clear how one is supposed to reverse the effects of white flight; when middle-class whites move into a majority-nonwhite urban area, this is usually condemned as “gentrification”.
  • dkural 8y ago
    My issue is the article doesn't once mention this as factor at all. I also object that one needs racial animus to have racist policies. "I've got no animus towards blacks, I just don't want to share large chunks of civic life with them" is racist. Blacks wanted to move to the suburbs due to lack of city & civic infrastructure in black neighborhoods - as the whites fled; so did polling stations, hospitals, banks, stores, and good quality drinking water. Lending policies for mortgages were explicitly racist; and many neighborhoods tried (successfully!) to prevent black people from moving in and "ruining the suburbs too!". Also, rewinding only a couple of decades from civil rights legislation; denying blacks the vote, school entrance and outright lynchings in the hundreds qualifies as pretty strong racial animus. It's naive to argue that the same society & people "had no racial animus in mind" when choosing where and how to live. I've always thought of gentrification as more of an economic class issue (which so often corresponds to minority status). In Boston, a lot of poor and middle class white neighborhoods get gentrified as well - nonetheless I take your wider point that gentrification is often a positive force for urban renewal; and I agree. One counter-example: Hudson Yards is the 1% being gentrified with the 0.1%, hard to argue helps the urban fabric with its non-human scale.
    • bluGill 8y ago
      You are partially correct. Only partially because it only takes a small number of actual racist to make a difference. Even if 90% of a suburb doesn't care about race, that 10% can still make a difference by making the unwanted feel unwelcome. I don't know how to solve this.
    • philwelch 8y ago
• AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > It's shocking to me how this article fails to mention even once that a lot of post WWII suburbanization was due to white flight. I've never really understood this explanation of suburbanization. Suppose you're a bunch of racist white folk wanting not to live near black folk. How do suburbs get you that any better than cities? What can you do to keep a black person from moving to your neighborhood in the suburbs that you can't do to keep them from moving to your neighborhood in the city? It seems more like two phenomena that happened to occur at the same time rather than one causing the other. Especially when at the same time the government had an explicit policy of encouraging people to move out of the cities, to reduce the damage that would be caused by a nuclear weapon.
  • throwawaymsft 8y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_segregation_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_segregation_in_the_U...
    • AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      That describes the process by which black people were excluded from a neighborhood, not the process by which the neighborhoods were chosen to be in the suburbs rather than the cities.
  • icsllaf 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York#Discriminatory_practices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York#Discrimina... Levittown was a quintessential model of the suburbs, one of the first examples of the suburbs we have now. Towns like this openly segregated against blacks and minorities, a dream away from the crowded city into your all white, picket fence house.
  • asdff 8y ago
    That was already happening. It was called red lining, and it meant as a bank you'd only approve loans for black families if they lived within the red line drawn by the bank on the map denoting the designated black neighborhood. Banks would also do something called blockbusting. They'd send panicked pamphlets to white people in urban neighborhoods, alerting them of black people moving into their neighborhoods and the damage that this could cause on their home value (the only asset many people had at this time). Now suburbs were being built because in 1946, suddenly there were millions of young men with a huge government subsidy to buy a house. Banks would not approve mortgages for black people in these areas, so they became predominantly white. And as a white person you are happy to be in the suburbs where you are free of all the perceived fears from decades of racially charged propaganda, and surrounded by people who also have a white boy and a white girl, a new ford, a dog and a cat, and who go to the same protestant church. It was sold as a utopia, and in the case of Detroit, white people bought that narrative so hard the city lost 1.5m from its tax base and collapsed in fewer decades than it took to grow as a metropolis in the first place. To date, Detroit has lost over 60% of is population from its all time high in 1950.
• rhacker 8y ago
  Also I'll tell you why sprawl exists: Sound. Whether that is a car driving by or a neighbor having a party. Some people just don't want to hear shit from you, ever. It is easier to justify making work far away from home at the expense of our kid's future air quality when in one case you hear chirping birds all day, in another you hear BUMP BUMP BUMP every 2 minutes. Sound is the number one cause of stress and people don't understand that - it's actually invisible and I wish it was taken into account more than anything on this planet.
  • JDiculous 8y ago
    Subways are underground
    • 0xffff2 8y ago
      Is this meant to contribute in some way? I honestly have no idea what this seemingly random phrase is supposed to convey.
      • dkural 8y ago
        Urban environments can often be less noisy than suburbs next to highways/freeways; due to extensive use of subway infrastructure - which moves the associated noise underground. Also, a suburban commuter spends a lot of time in a car commuting, being subjected to the very noise the parent poster is referring to.
        • 0xffff2 8y ago
          I think that's the more minor part of the noise that the original comment was referring to. It's much easier to insulate one's detached house from suburban noise than it is to insulate one's apartment from noisy neighbors on the other side of a shared wall. It's also my experience that those noisy neighbors are a much bigger nuisance than the traffic noise in the first place. On a tangential note, I'd be curious to know whether you have any links to back up the claim that urban environments are often less noisy. I don't disbelieve the claim outright, but it sure doesn't match my personal experience.