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Most American cities had population peaks in the immediate postwar period.
by wbl 7y ago
Most American cities had population peaks in the immediate postwar period.
- jacobolus 7y agoAmong other things, (a) many white people moved out because they could keep people of color out of living in the suburbs, (b) the federal government heavily subsidized suburban sprawl and the car transportation network. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
- bobthepanda 7y agoNot the metropolitan areas, though. What a “city” is depends on your local history and how arbitrary political lines in the sand were drawn.
- ghaff 7y ago>Not the metropolitan areas, though. At some level, that's true. For example, if you take the US census definition of "urban," which some 80% of the US population lives in, there's been pretty much steady urbanization. But most people don't mean places like where I live--with about 3 houses scattered across 100 acres--when they talk about urban although it is according to the census. On the other hand, the city of Boston--for example--whose political boundaries more or less correspond to good public transportation and the like (or mostly a bit bigger than that) was losing population into the 1990s.