"Millions of soldiers had come home from World War II to overcrowded, run-down cities; their new families needed a place to live."
"Overcrowded, run-down": who all of a sudden "overcrowded" these cities? What's a "run-down" area? We can win WWII but not fix a broken roof? The issue was not so much lack of affordability or too many people, what meant was cities / neighborhoods with more black people. Those highways were not built immediately post WWII, but later, to separate black neighborhoods from wealthier areas of the city, in the post-civil rights era.
Suburbanization accelerated not directly after WWII but with government-mandated busing of school-children. If you didn't want your daughter to go to school with black boys, you went to the suburbs.
Architects & urban planners played handmaiden to white flight, destroying the fabric of cities, and generally harming the environment in the process. Precisely due to their active participation in this cluster- they tend to whitewash the history, move the timelines a bit etc. hoping no one will notice.
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.
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”.
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.
I’m not trying to dismiss racism as a causative factor. I guess I’m just saying it’s like living in a sawmill, and racism is the sawdust. The sawdust causes lots of problems by itself, but it also gets all over everything else. Suburbanization was something mid-century Americans of all races desired; it just happened in a racist way.
I don't know how to solve this.
You can imagine if someone doesn't want black people in their neighborhood how they might feel about their children marrying one.
I don't know how to read people's minds, so I tend to gravitate towards a functional definition of racism which measures it based on someone's action - i.e. if someone being treated in an unfair manner based on their skin color.
To the typical mid-century white homeowner, "a black family moved into the neighborhood" wasn't the beginning and end of it. There were only two equilibria: either you live in a segregated white neighborhood or you live in a predominantly black neighborhood. (I openly admit there's nothing wrong with living in a predominantly black neighborhood, but this was probably not the most common opinion among mid-century white homeowners.)
Why? Fundamentally because there was a structural shortage of good housing for black people. If most neighborhoods don't allow black residents, having a neighborhood that does allow them causes a surge of demand. Even if you're not racist enough to move out just because a single black family moved into your neighborhood, some of your neighbors are, and many of their homes will be bought by black families, which will trigger your slightly-less racist neighbors to move out, and so forth. This was deliberately encouraged by "blockbusters", who would buy homes from white families at a discount and then price-gouge the black families who ended up moving in for a massive profit. But blockbusting only works if you have the pre-existing shortage of unsegregated housing in the first place.
You end up in a feedback loop:
(a) Moderately racist white homeowners want to keep their neighborhoods segregated because otherwise they'll live in black neighborhoods. This causes:
(b) Most neighborhoods are segregated white neighborhoods, causing a housing shortage for black families. This causes:
(c) Overwhelming surges in black demand to move into any individual neighborhood that desegregates. This causes (a).
The "solution" was to immediately, globally, across-the-board, outlaw housing discrimination so the pent up housing demand can disperse. I put "solution" in quotes because most American metro areas are still extremely segregated. They might be statistically segregated by 90/10 ratios instead of the 100/0 ratios that existed before, but people have to go significantly out of their way to completely reverse it, unless there's some other economic incentive. For example, gentrification has "desegregated" lots of majority-nonwhite urban neighborhoods through the sheer force of white hipsters wanting to move into them.
In fact, most racism gets expressed as racial separatism. Segregation was literally racial separatism.
One problem is that this literally turns into a question of ethnic territorialism, and can easily be extended from neighborhoods to entire states (Oregon was founded as a whites-only state) to entire countries (eg the notion of sending freed slaves back to Africa, which is how Liberia was founded).
It’s also just not that hard to express even the worst racism in mere separatist terms. In fact, that’s where most racism starts.
> also talks about the impact of educated, successful families moving out of historically black neighborhoods
Yeah, from what else I've read, that is one of the saddest parts of the story. Economic diversity is a hugely important part of a healthy community, and it's pretty uncommon in America.
Though I guess there is likely more than one cause.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/Cold.War.Urban.Vulnera...
The vast majority of proposals are from before 1956 -- i.e. before the Soviets demonstrated their own high-yield thermonuclear weapons. The degree of decentralization required to mitigate against the multi-megaton bombs of the later 1950s would have been truly staggering.
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.
I'm writing this from the 11th floor apartment in an apartment town suburb 30 minutes by subway from Seoul. It is dead silent. Very little traffic, and everything is walking distance. From above ground you don't hear the subway at all. Sound insulation in this apartment is pretty good so I never hear my neighbors (actually there's only 2 apartment units on each floor).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
What are the primary obstacles towards improving the cycling infrastructure here?
By the way - biking here is quite different from the US. Unlike the US, I can taste the pollution. It’s a much heavier thing. Perhaps I’m not used to it, but I often find myself holding my breath to get through fumes.
After spending a lot of time in
clean mountain air
Is it for economic mobility? If that's the case shouldn't you consider taking a hit in that lone aspect, for a better quality of living? I'm sure you will be gainfully employed breathing clean, crisp mountain air provided your skills are in demand. You'll just make a little less.
First of all, my house in the clean mountain air is also at the very edge of the electric grid. I have utility-provided power and telephone, but I'm so far out that the phone company won't offer me DSL at any speed. So I'm stuck with satellite internet, which really isn't suitable for remote work.
Second, almost no one offers a flat pay-scale that ignores your home address. Incredibly, this has meant that so far renting an expensive one bedroom apartment in the bay in addition to my mortgage is a much better economic decision than finding a remote job that would let me leave the bay behind.
And EVs? It will be very hard to convince anyone to get out of their cars when those cars are, potentially, less polluting than the available public transport options.
This also isn't just about commuting and pollution. There are a multitude of cultural reasons people use cars. Security is at the top of the list, the ability to be in your own locked box. You won't get people out of their cars until they are confidant in their physical security. Those parents driving their kids to work are constantly told that their kids are in danger and it is their duty as parents to maximize their children's individualized safety over all other concerns. Breaking that mindset requires far more than explaining to them why buses might be slightly faster than cars.
If the city of future requires families to abandon their own vehicle, it is not the correct city of future. Just design a better one.
Infact if anything, despite the very very recent free-range kids movement to liberate kids from the dependence on parents, its the opposite - kids get ferried everywhere, from high school sports practice sessions to neighborhood store visits.
We have a toddler and a large dog. We own two electric cargo bikes and get around perfectly well without owning a car. There's car/truck sharing and rental if I really need to transport something large and heavy (> 100kg).
> Just design a better one.
I'd very much prefer if all that parking space and all that space used by 4-lane roads would be used to make the city more dense and walkable. If I can walk to the kindergarden or school, there's no need to even take a bike, if close enough a kid can even walk on their own. The only things that makes such a thing infeasible are cars.
Cities like Oslo and Copenhagen aren’t exactly known for good weather either, but have substantial policies around clearing bikeways from snow first, before all other roads. It’s more of an infrastructure problem than anything else: good cycling infrastructure begets cyclists. Walkable cities conjur pedestrians. Look at the Dutch, living in the land of eternal sunshine and mild temperatures.
I would gladly live somewhere like Denver, Seattle, or San Francisco if money and family ties to the East coast weren’t an issue. Many of the cities with comfortable climates in the US are very expensive. The remaining, affordable cities have undesirable climates.
But of course we do have a car, so can have the best of both worlds.
I imagine that if we didn't have a car we would be using delivery a lot more often. Hard to do a Costco run without one.
I can imagine life with kids but without a car. But of course that life would heavily rely on Lyft & taxis, so is that really car free?
A good example of change in behavior to ensure survival, is that major powers used to go much more openly to war for territory and resources right up until those powers got the ability to utterly destroy humanity. While there are still countries who are enemies of each other, and who fight small proxy wars and the like, nobody in their right mind would stage an invasion of another major power, likely ever again.
...until you have a world leader who wonders why we can't use them if we have them.
Please don't be a credibility problem for tomorrow's environmental causes.
But if we hadn't banned CFCs we would have been doomed. The ozone layer actually is really important.
Now the danger is climate change and what we need is to stop burning carbon. The lesson from past experience is not that everything will be fine if we don't do anything, it's that everything will be fine if we do what is necessary. Everything will not be fine if we don't do what is necessary.
My high school science teacher telling me that we were running out of oil and that gas would be $10 a gallon by the time I entered the workforce did not build credibility.
This is an iterated game. The takeaway is that it's important to be right, important to not be wrong, and important to make sure people know it, not that it's important to lie your ass off (sorry, overstate your cause) in a misguided attempt to help.
So families even in Europe are opting more and more for SUVs and larger vehicles in general -- which was a total surprise to me and caught me unawares, I have to admit.
Hygiene, safety - from both the riff naff & new developing security threats, peace of mind, convenience, dependability [1][2][3] and more rider options are all major pain points.
Unless cities opt for a class-tiered approach to public transit -- the likes of first class carriages and premium waiting rooms at transit terminals, of yore -- and make public transit safe and even enjoyable to regular people I don't see this trend reversing.
[1]
BART announces what caused massive morning power outage last weekend
https://abc7news.com/traffic/bart-announces-what-caused-mass...
[2]
Single Computer Switch Failure Triggered Saturday’s BART Shut Down
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/03/11/computer-switch...
[3]
BART still unclear on cause of service outage, waiting to hear from tech support
http://www.sfexaminer.com/bart-still-unclear-cause-service-o...
That said we do have a car and also use it a lot. I think it has a lot to do with the time sensitivity. If you want to go some place and it’s not a quick walk or a straight shot on transit, or if you are going to get groceries or other bulky stuff, then yeah the car is easier.
I think, though, the idea is if you design a place such that you don’t HAVE to have a car, then cars would be driven vastly less. For us that’s true, combined my family of five drives about 7000 miles per year, much of that on road trips from the Bay Area to Tahoe or Yosemite etc.
Yeah. A lot of people fear that a transit centered city means we're gonna take ALL the cars. Realistically I think most transit/urbanist advocates are aiming for a world with 1 practical car per family rather than 1 car per driving age member of the household.
Modern car seats and LATCH anchors actually make it fairly easy to bring a child car seat with you. I agree with you though, all this stuff is bulky and adds up to a lot of baggage. It makes sense to have a car for your child. But those cars create enormous problems, and car owners should be required to pay to fix them.
See also: food deserts
I find the opposite to be true. If there are lots of people walking, there will be lots of walkable services and businesses, so you tend to have a lot of choice.
Ownership of houses is usually diverse in dense walkable cities so it's really easy to just rent space at the ground floor to start a business. If you don't like it, move across the street.
Compare this to car cities. People drive their cars to malls. Malls are very much rent seeking. I've heard that they constantly increase rents of the shops so there would be churn - new shops to "keep it interesting" for the visitors.
Sextuple streets are one solution to the problem. Another is not having as far a distance to travel for in the first place. Sextuple streets are extremely expensive - on the order of multi-billions per mile, but they would work. If you sextuple streets only support walkers but not cars they are much cheaper.