In 1940 there was a good chance you lived in a dirt floor structure with outdoor plumbing, no electricity, or climate control. You probably has a lot of people

In 1940 there was a good chance you lived in a dirt floor structure with outdoor plumbing, no electricity, or climate control. You probably has a lot of people sharing a bedroom and maybe didn’t have much of a kitchen. In the city you had a good chance of living in a tenement building under cramped conditions with other families. You were desperately afraid your kids would acquire polio or that everyone else would acquire TB. Regardless, your building was probably rundown and in need of renovation that wasn’t possible since the depression and WW2 made materials impossible to get or afford. Meanwhile the cost to live in the city was still relatively high, hence why so many people cramped together. People moved to the suburbs in the 50’s to escape this. (Moving to flee blacks is more of a myth.) We has breakthroughs in manufacturing houses (which only wealthy people could really afford prior) in terms of materials and methods and the automobile and road network became viable. You could stay in a cramped, expensive, outdated, and dirty city or you could get a plot of land and a spacious (for the time, average home sizes are twice as large today) home and a new car. This is what people did because it’s a much better way to raise a family. You can live in a small place and work a job that doesn’t require an education. Tons of people do today. You’ll still have better conditions than people back then.