The more I dig into this, the less I realize I know.

I asked, "did the slums exist before the highways and freeways that divide them from the wealthy whites?" The best I've come up with is "Sort of."

Apparently, in the 50's and 60s, city officials throughout the US thought of urban freeways as "a good opportunity to get rid of the local 'niggertown.'"[1] But that attempt at clearing the local slums ended up further disrupting and distressing them, deepening the problem.

[1] Google Books: Downtown, Inc: How America Rebuilds Cities https://goo.gl/mdgYXE

The Guardian published a good story on this just today: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/feb/21/roads-nowhere...

I appreciate the mention of West Oakland. I walked past Esther's Orbit Room on my way to work today. A derelict jazz club, a holdover from the time when West Oakland was flush with money and culture brought from all over by the people who worked the railways.

That was before the Cypress freeway tore West Oakland in two, or 980 sheared it away from downtown Oakland, or the trans-bay BART tracks, or before the USPS distribution center was built. The last, for those not familiar, is a 6 story concrete windowless menace that I've started calling the "Ministry of Truth."

Slums exist because the privileged spent a century paving over neighborhoods filled with people that they wished would just stop existing.

> did the slums exist before the highways and freeways that divide them from the wealthy whites?

You mean Oakland and Vallejo? Yeah that stuff has been there before the start of SV. See MC Hammer and Too Short for references to past gang activity in Oakland.

...you think MC Hammer predates SV? We started out as the site where transistors were made. That is also why the ground is so horrendously toxic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor

Those references are not before the highways and freeways mentioned upthread, and also do not predate Silicon Valley. (Too Short and MC Hammer were in elementary school when Silicon Valley was first recognized as a thing.)

Although aspects of this sort of separation go much further back. Being from "the wrong side of the tracks" is an expression that probably dates to the 19th century. (Of course, that was less of an actual physical barrier.)

In the case of East Palo Alto, the disparity can be traced back to at least the prohibition era (1919). EPA was the openly "wet" town during prohibition (after the now forgotten city of Mayview's speakeasies were shutdown), and I speculate the behavioral norm to overlook laws, no matter how misguided, fostered an environment where other undesirable business ventures thrived.

Another way to view it would be that speakeasies thrived where the police didn't bother (or accepted discouragement) to go. Police resources are financial and political, and often stretched thin over poor or minority neighborhoods. So it is strange to divorce something and call it just "norms" when such strong economic forces are in play.