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.
"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.