Hacker News Reader

Comment by orangedog | Hacker News Reader

Was the flight out of the cities to "preserve apartheid" or did many people simply want the suburban lifestyle with a yard and bigger house?

I don't thin racism was the dominant factor for people moving out of the cities. Today the suburb I'm in is packed with immigrants.

Regardless, I don't think you're being very charitable.

View on HN

This has been written about broadly by social historians. This book, in particular, is illuminating: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133867/wh...

Some other links:

https://news.iu.edu/live/news/24906-research-ties-persistenc...

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/10/white-flight...

https://psmag.com/news/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessin...

There's also this rather infamous quote by one of the most powerful Republican strategists in the 80s, Lee Atwater: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#:~:text=Later%20in...

I won't quote it here but it's very telling.

The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein is another good source on the topic, covering how racist governmental polices played a role.

That's been on my to-read list for a long time. I've read in brief about red-lining and loosely regulated mortgage providers but it'd be good to dive in much deeper. It's almost always so much uglier and much more deeply dystopian if and when you choose to dig past any surface layer of popular history towards more rigorous historiography.

In places like Detroit racism was very much the primary reason in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s at least. Some of it was just personal racism, pure and simple. See "blockbusting" techniques used by realtors who would hire a black mother to walk down the street with a baby carriage to give the impetus for white people to sell quickly and cheaply. Or a black family moving into a house, the white neighbors trying to push them out via lawsuit for breaking a racially restrictive covenant, then losing so that all the white people left the neighborhood (e.g. read about Orsel and Minnie McGhee in Detroit, I was the primary author of the National Register nomination for their house).

The racist pressure to move was also a structural issue supported by the Federal government. Redlining meant you couldn't get loans to buy houses in certain neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods were exactly where black people lived. Literal walls could be constructed between two similar communities of different races so that the white side could be higher rated and have better access to loans (e.g., the Birwood Wall in Detroit). A ton has been written about the topic, I can't really do it justice, but the idea that people just wanted a bigger house was not the case. A lot of Detroit actually consisted of single-family homes with yards anyhow, so it was literally white people leaving a house for a very similar one.

I'm wondering how much of it was racism, and how much was people simply being aware that the "worse" areas of town had lots of crime (which they associated with the color of the people living there, not knowing any better) and they didn't want that crime to come to their area.

If I'm walking a street at night and I see a guy with attributes associated with poverty, I'm more likely to switch to the other side of road than if he's wearing a suit, just saying.

Racism might be part of the reason, but you have nearly entirely white cities like Portland that also experienced their own explosive suburban growth in the same time period.

Also, if "suburbanization" was really the explanation for the decline in community, you would see a clear pattern where people (regardless of race) in the suburbs have fewer friends and social lives and people in urban areas have more. But the opposite is largely true!

You don't think the racial make-up of Portland had anything to do with racism?

That's honestly a little wild that people don't realize exactly what principles Oregon was founded on and the role Portland played in all of it.

One, the Portland municipal government explicitly admits to racism during white flight: https://www.portland.gov/bps/planning/adap/history-racist-pl...

Two, the state itself has passed multiple anti-Black exclusionary laws and was founded as a 'white utopia': https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/exclusion_laws/#...

> Any free Black person who refused to leave would be subject to lashing, a provision that was known as "Peter Burnett's lash law."

> The second exclusion law was enacted by the Territorial Legislature on September 21, 1849. This law specified that “it shall not be lawful for any n** or m*** to enter into, or reside” in Oregon, with exceptions made for those who were already in the territory.

> Voters [...] approved the exclusion clause by a wide margin. Incorporated into the Bill of Rights, the clause prohibited Black people from being in the state, owning property, and making contracts. Oregon thus became the only free state admitted to the Union with an exclusion clause in its constitution.

This, too, is covered extensively: https://www.oregonlive.com/history/2020/06/oregons-founders-...

And more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53996159

I honestly don't know if you could've found a worse example.

> but you have nearly entirely white cities like Portland that also experienced their own explosive suburban growth in the same time period

Yes, it was exactly my point that Portland was already the whitest metropolitan area in the country. And yes, I am well aware of the extensive redlining (my grandparents lived in Vanport before it was destroyed). And yet they still had people explode out into the suburbs through the 50s and 60s.

This is a counter-example to the thesis that urban flight was purely a racist response to "preserve apartheid".

No one is arguing that racism didn't exist. But suburbanization happened everywhere around the world where cars were introduced (even places with almost no diversity). To blame suburbanization as a purely racial phenomenon is not true.

What they're describing is well documented, but my understanding is that the reality is a blend of what you're describing and what they're describing.

To this day there's significant social pressure to not acknowledge how much racism and racial division played a role in them growth of suburbs in the US, but ultimately it's the documented history which is revealed to those who research the topic.

In many cases individual families were not overtly racist but they were caught up in the economic effects created by racist dynamics and felt they had no choice to go along. If property prices in your neighborhood are decreasing, because neighbors are leaving, and you have the means would you not feel compelled to leave to somewhere with rising property values? Real estate firms intentionally tried to create waves of fear to get people to rush to move, selling low, and then profiting on selling to newer Black families.

It was common for suburbs to have deed restrictions limiting areas by race, and for a while federal housing guidelines would not underwrite developments that did not racially segregate.

At the same time there were massive amounts of state & federal funding pouring into suburbs and highly disruptive unpopular overhauls occurring in cities while cities were also losing tax revenue. For people with the option the future of good living seemed like it was in the suburbs independent of segregation, but part of what fueled the frenzy was the racial segregation.

I think it's important to remember that the 1950s and 1960s were the time when western society really started to swing the government around for each and every thing in a way what we think is normal now but was fairly unprecedented at the time. When the government is seemingly capriciously regulating your life, pulling strings to get neighborhoods redeveloped in accordance with some new vision, bulldozing other neighborhoods for highways, that's not someplace you want to put down roots, raise your family or be in it for the long haul.

Hate to break it to you but that wasn't new in the 50s and 60s. The mechanisms by which it was done were changing away frome the machine politics of earlier eras - but ways to regulate what can and can't be done by neighborhood have been around since the birth of the country. Use of eminent domain for public works private ventures is at least as old as the railroads. Planned suburbs, company towns, bedroom communities and the like are all 19th century "new" things in the US.

The "new" part was who it was happening to. Instead of just stealing some poor hicks town for a dam and reservoir (after circling the plan for years to depress land values of course) they were interfering with substantially more established communities in far more volume than the railroads ever had. And it was more than just the highways, zoning codes and all manner of municipal regulation proliferated hugely over this time bringing government into people's lives (remember, the economy was way different too, people didn't all work in cube farms with a compliance department between them and the rules).

All those centrally planned things you mentioned were green(ish) field developments

People also moved to suburbs in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK.

Cars enabled people to have free standing houses and work became decentralised, which was also due to cars.

Many people prefer to live in a free standing house.

In many American cities it definitely was about race. If you look at cities like Chicago you can still see today the effects of decades of overtly racist policies that have shaped the demographic layout of the city today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com