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Comment by asteli | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.)

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