This is perhaps the worst issue that impacted and still impacts American cities today, as the proliferation of low density suburbs coupled with very strict zoning laws that prohibited commercial activity in residential areas led to the necessity of using a car to do anything. That's why American cities are so car dependent with insufferable congestion, not to mention the shortage of housing supplies in many cities as only single family housing is allowed.
It's not like Easter Europe is better, with most people living in apartment blocks/projects with tens or hundreds of small and medium flats in the cities. And having a lot of cars parked all over the place on sidewalks, in forbidden zones, pedestrian crossings etc.
@@xunqianbaidu6917 That apartment building/projects housing frenzy started in the '60s and peaked in the '80s. Cars started to multiply after the '90s when communism fell.
I agree with that but also it depends where you're at. Some cities the suburbs and public transportation actually function to how it would be everywhere else in the world.
“There is a widespread belief that americans hate cities. I think it is probable that Americans hate city failure, but, from the evidence, we certainly do not hate successful and vital city areas. On the contrary, so many people want to make use of such places, so many people want to work in them or live in them or visit in them.” ― Jane Jacobs,
Successful and vital cities like Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Oakland, Los Angeles, and St Louis? Americans love successful and vital city areas, but most American city areas simply are not successful and vital.
Many Americans do in fact hate cities and I'm one of many millions of them. Rural life is AFFORDABLE, offers personal space and is much freer than living in the equivalent of a jail where an apartment the size of my garage costs thousands a month. People move to cities because they're hoping for work, then they cash out to retire and live elsewhere.
So weird US lets this happen when it obviously very damaging to society longterm. In the country i live in, the goverment even buys up property in "white suburbia" to house immigrants there. Spreading them out amongst the population. There are no China towns etc. My father was abit grumpy when goverment bought his neighboring house to host some Palestinian refugees (Hes very pro-Israel) and him being old and in general skeptic of immigrants cause they were not many immigrants when he grew up. But after meeting the people, they come over with food. Borrowing tools from eachother etc. His views and skepticism has disapeared. Its healthy for people to be subjected to different people.
"impact"? If your a little bike person you might choose that word. But for the rest of us city dwellers we are happy we don't have to get rained on or bike up hills and live in a pack'em and stack'em. Oh wait but I would tell my friends how good and righteous I am for saving the world one bike at a time.
@@4149stonepony Why is it that there's always one American under videos like this, fighting ghosts? I honestly couldn't decipher what you're taking offence at here.
@@Dan-kr9bm If you could not, you would not have wrote an intentionally ambiguous comment about nothing. The problem for you is that no one is taking offence Mr. Canadian. American cities are connected to white flight and so on, But cities around the world have suburbanized and the factors leading to that are not so called "white flight", factors of suburbanization vary by country. Thus, white flight is a convenient argument that dismisses the reasons cities were abandoned by city dwellers since the 1950's. Regardless of your stupid American comment maybe it would help to look at a map of Canada and study the urban forms of Canadian cities and their demographics before making a moronic ethnographic comment.
This is also an impact on suburban infrastructure and architecture. While other places in the world, especially Europe, were developed with interconnectivity and walkability in mind, suburbia is disconnected here in the US. It's sort of a "moat" effect.
Well don't people want to be disconnected from high crime areas ? Its seems like a good thing. I live in Europe, few miles from my place is gypsy no go zone ( high crime, high incest rate, shits burns all the time etc). Since the state builded higway between NGZ and normal neigborhoods crime went down, streets are cleaner, much less shouting during working weeks nights etc. Just net benefits.
@@annuitcptis9627 Those disconnected surburban areas cause people to become more isolated and (physically) disconnected from each other and from their work place. This leads to poorer public health because you have to drive everywhere as well as the health issues arising from that car pollution and is bad for sociability especially for kids since it's not as easy to meet. High crime and stuff like that is not a feature of city living, but of poor social policies and it's also entirely possible to have lower density housing that isn't designed like the suburbs of America (European suburbs in my experience often aren't designed like American ones. Have a look at what LA looks like from above on Google Maps and you'll see what I mean).
@@annuitcptis9627 How did building a highway cause crime to go down? Taking "good" people out of "bad" neighborhoods doesn't solve the underlying causes of why the neighborhood is crime-ridden in the first place.
@@jliller He means that people can't cross over easily between the two neighborhoods; the road acts as a barrier. "Happy are those whose walls already rise"
Growing up as a mixed race kid in Cleveland I experienced the urban/suburb, racial/economic divide firsthand. My father's family are middle/working class Italian/polish who lived in decent suburbs since the 50's. My mother's family are black, and came up north during the great migration. And lived in run down underdeveloped parts of the city since long before I was born (will be 40 next year). Growing up was a strange thing in hindsight. I would go to both families houses, and see both families. But they hardly ever had any contact with one another. My grandfather's on both sides served in WWII. But as the video attests, their post war opportunities were not equal.
@@nickkerr8775 I live in Parma Heights myself these days. Economic inequity is at the root of the problem when it comes to urban crime in the US. Looking only at the crime itself and attempting to beat it into submission is not a lasting solution to this problem. The root causes, like economic inequity and a lack of educational and employment opportunities must be addressed. Such reforms will not be easy, quick or cheap. And for decades the American middle class has had little appetite for such reforms. They only seem to care when the "good neighborhoods" are threatened by crime. And even then. Only to seek to push the crime back into its inner city corner. Out of sight, out of mind.
@@youngimperialistmkii read the name you responded to. I can't see their post but that name should let you know they aren't operating in good faith with you.
I am a child and a Veteran of the Cold War and experienced white Flight from Baltimore City to the Suburbs of Baltimore County. During the time the Welfare Era went into effect the Black population of inner Cities skyrocketed. I attended my 1st racially integrated Middle School that was 50% Black and 50% White. The blacks were from the inner city; the white were from the outer city. It was a total shock and nightmare for me and my white school mates due to the hatred, racism, violence, and strong arm robberies on the playground at lunch break. We were accousted everyday by individuals and gangs on the playground, in the locker alcoves, and on the walk to the Bus Stop. It was the worst experience of my life. The teachers watching the students on the Playground did nothing for fear of being savagely beaten. In my all white rowhouse neighborhood realitors started to plant black families in strategically placed areas at no cost to the black families. It was a strategy known as "Block Busting". It caused the white flight to occur and house values to drop by 50%. Those realitors made fortunes. Once we moved to the suburbs, I never experienced any violence again.
It's white flight if they move out, but gentrification if they move in. They won't ever appease some percentage of people, no matter what they do, so they might as well ignore the whole issue and just move wherever they want if it's good for their family/career. That pretty much makes it a dead issue imo
Typical white supremacist talking point. Those white people didn't want to live next to black people. The politicians redlined and kept investment out of black communities, then brought up the land cheap and moved back.
@@Jalenlane93 Typical NPC talking point. You claim to be telepathic and know the true intentions of people you've never met. What nonsense. Really, you just seem to have a problem with people doing what they want and not what you want.
Reason why it’s called white flight isn’t simply moving out, but how while they moved out, the streets and roads were built to accommodate suburban people to the detriment of urban people. Robert Moses’ city planning created tons of highways for suburbanites, which specifically went through black, latino, and Russian Jewish households. He was even repeatedly given alternative ways to create his highways but refused. Alongside this at its worst, cities like LA are just huge suburbs built around car dependency which saps money out of families, especially poorer ones and isolated communities.
@@bandit6272 Because it was almost entirely white people leaving. Similar to how I said the highways ran through black, latino, and Russian Jewish neighborhoods. Race and class are intertwined, and white flight was done almost specifically out of fear mongering of black people moving into areas. It essentially shackled especially minorities to lower income inner city areas while allowing wealth, job markets, etc. to leave the cities but still have the cities be catered to these people who left.
Hell Yeah! You could buy two packs of Marlboros smoke them in your car on the way home with the windows rolled up. You could leave your kids home for days and nobody would notice. LOL! my how Fuc#$d up a country we have become.
Not all of it by a long shot (I did grow up back then) but in general it was much better socially. What changed is ignorance is no longer shameful and greedy elites flooded the US with those who add nothing of social value because they aspire to nothing but money.
@@earth8865 Many areas are still cool (like mine, but I'm not telling where it is) but they're not urban. I knew cities were bad news fifty years ago as a child and by devoting my life to avoiding them did nicely.
I think you should have mentioned blockbusting which was a major driver of white flight. You could also have mentioned the economic incentives which caused white flight such as being more affordable at the time.
Those were created well before the 1950's when suburbanization boomed and those things were depression era incentives that took decades before the housing crisis after ww2 helped the suburbs boom. White flight did not happen where there was housing to be built in the city. Cities that were old, dirty, polluted, unsafe, and bad schools was not going to stop people from moving no matter how much liberals blame white people for leaving, even though racism was one of the small reasons people chose to leave.
They deny it because you vilify them for making the smart decision for their children's future & safety. A nation of checked out ungrateful spoiled children are a result so in the end it all comes crashing down anyways. Oh Well.
It’s hard to explain US history on racial injustice if people you’re talking to want to desperately believe we live in a perfect meritocracy. If we live in a meritocracy anything trying to repair injustice would be seen as being unfair because we already live in a “fair system.”
@@sonia555220 neutral meritocratic system only exist inside of a community, if you put more communities in that system, that system becomes a lever of power.
I realize that this isn't a discussion on all the things that led to white flight, but I was surprised that you didn't mention "block busting", which caused a lot of white city dwellers to move to the suburbs.
@@ianhomerpura8937 "block busting" is when you want real estate prices to go down in a certain area so you perform/pay someone to do certain anti-social acts that would make small property owners want to sell.
@@ianhomerpura8937 In this context, a real estate agent would buy a home, sell it to a black family, then approach other white families in the neighborhood and say, "Look what is happening! The blacks are moving in. You'd better move out before it turns into a ghetto and your house is worthless." Then offer the owner a whole less than it was worth, then sell it black families at much more than they paid. This happened to my aunt & uncle and their neighbors in Houston. But was recorded everywhere, especially in cities in the North.
@@stischer47 That actually happened to my mom and dad when they moved in their home. The previous owner even told them, "I hope you can afford to live here". Their neighborhood when from 98% white to 2% white by the time I was born in 1978. I have older siblings and you can see how each year the white population dwindled. By the time I was a teenager over half of the homes in our subdivision were rented out, with most of them being on Section 8.
I have my own experience with this via my father, who lived most of his life in the St. Louis area. Dad never lived in the city of St. Louis; he first came to the area out of the Ozarks at age 15 to work in the war plants. Dad went into the Army in 1944, came back in 1948, and settled near where his mother lived in an older STL suburb. He got married, had a son, and lived prosperously as a union sheet metal worker. Dad wasn't so concerned about material things, although he certainly enjoyed them. He simply did not want to live near Black people, and everyone else he knew was like that. My Dad was not the typical World War II veteran type either. He never supported Vietnam, he was sympathetic to marijuana back in the 60's (and still is now), and he never switched to being a Republican. As St. Louis collapsed, people moved further away from the city. In 1981, my dad moved my mother and I (then 18 months old) to a small town 80 miles from downtown to get that much further away from Black people (among other reasons), and he wasn't the only one. My Dad turns 96 in February, and he regrets nothing. Massive suburbs are being built now 50 miles from downtown St. Louis, and there's no jobs or population growth to support it. It's racial paranoia, nothing but. I know the type, cause I've seen it literally all my life.
@@williamerazo3921 For the same reason most white Missourians are: They believe people of color want to kill them. Racial paranoia is the 400-pound gorilla of Missouri's consciousness. That's why they want open carry, etc.
I knew WW2 and Korean war vets, they talked about their service, but never had a chip on their shoulder like some of the others vets. They would treasure small things like a cold coke when it was hot outside.
The 1960's riots in major cities across America are what solidified the suburban flight, and those cities for many years were left in squalor. By the 90's many of cities were coming back alive again with investment and the new "Yuppie" class. Today, the big cities seem to be at a crossroad with high crime and homelessness etc.
That's the racist way America trains you to see it: as there being two segregated sides rather than one America that manufactures two sides that centuries of legalized slavery and segregation engineered. In fact, there is just one America with as many sides as there are Americans. And we all know the side that is mistreated by the buisiness class that runs the country and the side that benefits from it.
So many stories put down suburbs as bad places filled with racist whites but I don’t find this to be true. I was born in NYC in 1965 and my parents and us moved out to Long Island in 1968. My parents wanted my twin brother and I (and later my sister) to be raised in an area with green grass and woods not a concrete jungle. My father traveled two hour each morning to get to work on Wall Street but he did this so us kids could have some room and to be away from the growing crime in Brooklyn. I had a cousin my age who stayed in Brooklyn who got his skull cracked open by a gang in school. We had no such problems and that’s a good thing. There were a few black and Hispanic families in my neighborhood and no we did not share the same skin color but we shared one thing. We were hard working Americans with parents who wanted the best for this children and who could afford a nice house in the suburbs.
It is liberal myth making by the environmentalist left, bike people and housing advocates. Just a hard left agenda that has no basis in reality. They resist suburbs because most suburbanites are moderate on environmental issues, biking is relatively something you do on a trail and does not impede traffic and no smart suburbanite wants a pack'em and stack'em ruining their neighborhood. So that is why they screech about how bad suburbs are.
This is a very interesting video David, I find the social history to be fascinating. Is there a chance you could do more of these but with a UK perspective? I feel that a lot of the issues that are being faced in the country right now have their roots in the Cold War era, so I'd appreciate seeing your take on what was happening in the UK during these times
Having grown up in Levittown, Pennsylvania, perhaps the quintessential American suburb built in the 1950s, I have to stress the thinking of white people as some great homogeneous mass is an error. Many American towns and cities were classified and stratified among ethnic lines, even among the white people. In my parents' hometown in upstate Pennsylvania in the 1930s the English and the Scots lived on the flat lands near the river, the Italians in the North and South ends, and the Poles, Czech, and Slovaks up on the hillside. It was very insular and frankly there wasn't a lot of mixing. And people still referred to each other by where their ancestors came from despite the fact that they could be native born. One thing that did happen in Levittown was that all of this was broken down. On my home street alone those of English, Italian, Irish, German, Polish, Dutch, and Scotch descent all lived side by side with one another. Yes African Americans were discriminated against, but if someone was Catholic and they married someone who was Jewish, no one batted an eye. That's an enormous social change from just a generation prior.
@@Jay-ho9io Not hard to understand if you have thinking skills. These people came from different countries and cultures and melded together quickly. I know it’s the “Current Year” and all but you may find it surprising that just because someone has the same skin color as someone else they have a different lived experience. Maybe go read and watch some videos sweaty.
That move was absolutely needed. Our family did it in 1967 after the enraged riot mob burned down Detroit. My earliest memories were seeing the 101st Airborne Division going down our street. Ironically, in 1985 i ended up serving in the 101st Airborne Division. It was the best thing my father could have done to move us out of hate filled Detroit and into a new suburb in Bloomfield Hills. The city of Detroit was burned down and never rebuilt...even now over 50 years later.
Let’s not forget that America is not just Black and White. We also need to include Hispanic and Asian Americans to the narrative as well as the affect of Crime on the flight from cities
This presentation leaves out the latest research pioneered by James Lowen that showed the great migration wasn't black people moving directly from Southern agricultural areas to northern cities. Rather, it included black Americans first migrating to literally every rural county in the United States... then getting systematically kicked out of those places and reluctantly relocating in the few cities that didn't kick them out, which happened to be northern and mid western cities. The other major change in cities during the 1930s-70s that likely led to white flight was very likely... cars themselves, making cities hostile towards children. Rather than give up driving, those who could afford it simply bought a large property for their child to play in while safe behind a fence.
Suburbanization still affects the US today as many major cities are hemmed in by their suburbs making it impossible to build more higher density neighborhoods at their fringes. The decay of Cities in the 1970s was probably a signal to the Soviets that American capitalism was on it's way out as crime, loss of manufacturing jobs was just too obvious.
Short version of this history: Segregationists warned that integration would motivate white people to move out of cities, which would descend into ruin. Then segregation ended, and the cities descended into ruin, in that order. It is considered rude to notice a connection between these things.
@@ianhomerpura8937 Can't speak about Indonesia, but China kicks minorities around for sport - look how Africans are treated there, and to say France is integrated means you have not visited there anywhere beyond the tourist traps. I challenge you to go to La Corneuve or any of the banlieues and then make that statement again.
"and they're all made out of tacky-tacky and they all look just the same!" I listened to the Kingston Trio cover of that tune when I must have been six or seven years old. Loved it! It stuck-- --
Horrible when it comes to the racism and segregation, how it affected mortgage values simply by race. It also makes me think of what happened in "Cancer Alley" when the chemical companies moved in, the white families knew in advance and left the area, but then they sold the homes to black families who didn't know/weren't told what was coming.
What should they have done instead? Stayed there and died? Warned the homebuyers not to make an offer on their houses? Should black people have minders to keep an eye on them to make sure they only invest in good real estate? Do white people have an obligation to look out for black people?
The same occured in Western Europe beginning in the 50s and 60s when purchasing power started to rise and car ownership became widespread, which in turn reduced the appeal of living in cities for middle class families, without any racial aspects.
@@dirkbogarde7796 Which is why renovation is underway in some cities to have those in some degree: reducing car dependency, more pedestrian spaces with tress, and public parks.
Our small, SoCal desert town was quiet and relatively crime free(besides some drug issues) when I moved in during the mid-90's. The population was racially mixed as it is California and just north of a large military base. Most of my neighbors were military or prior, it was quiet. THEN... the section-8 housing program came to our county. It seemed as if overnight we were overrun by violent crime, beggars, teen pregnancy(9 ninth graders in the first year alone, but I was told that was quite normal) and our minor drug issue became major. It wasn't an issue of color but culture. And it destroyed what had been several nice communities.
White communities, especially those who couldn’t afford to leave (like many ‘ethnic whites’ - as they were called at the time), faced quite a bit of violence at the hands of black newcomers during the ‘’great migration’. The 70s book ‘Left Behind in Rosedale’ by a liberal academic gives some pretty harrowing accounts. Most of the white folk from these places were never allowed a voice, it’s important to keep that in mind.
Excellent episode again CW. Sometimes the truth hurts and this one hurt. But, ya know, Free your mind and your ass will follow. Thanks for this. Happy Christmas and cheers from Tennessee
I hate big cities because they're noisy, congested, and artificial. I have come to see skyscrapers as abominations. I think anyone voluntarily living a places like Manhattan is practically insane. I also hate commuting because it's tedious and basically wasting out of my life on a daily basis. A 30 minute commute cut to 15 minutes reclaims 2.5 hours of your life on a weekly basis.
@Ajit Adonis Manilal Yup because black people were the only people ever enslaved and slavery wasn't invented until capitalism was 😂 What a brainlet take
@Ajit Adonis Manilal Lol. You don't know what capitalism is. The free exchange of goods and services, which excludes slavery. Fun fact communists own stuff too, it's just that it used to be your stuff. Also fun fact, more Europeans were enslaved than africans. Also, most African slaves went east to the middle east, not Europe. Your ignorance is painful.
@Ajit Adonis Manilal No, it's YOUR focus because you only care about slavery when it suits your purposes. Furthermore, slavery predates anything like "capitalism", so stretch before you reach like that. Communal societies practiced slavery too for instance. No capitalism there. Why we're at it, capitalism abolished slavery in the free world. So there's that.
@Ajit Adonis Manilal "free" exchange of goods and services. "FREE". Maybe you think a slave freely gives his/her services, lol. I'll bet you could believe something as silly as that. Check out Locke. He lays the foundation how property rights are the foundation of human rights. Self ownership, specifically. If you own yourself, the fruits of your labor are yours to barter, hence, slavery is antithetical. Now, under communism where you don't own the fruits of your labor, but they belong to someone else, well....that sounds like slavery to me 😂 How about pre-currency, when hunter gatherer tribes were enslaving each other? I'll bet you think those Neolithic tribes were a bunch of capitalists, huh? 🤣 You should fire whoever been doing your thinking for you
I'd always thought that song was a Pete Seeger song. Apparently they were friends but Seeger's cover of her song "Little Boxes" had more success than her original version.
The book ‘Cities of Knowledge’ by Margaret Pugh O’Mara included some interesting discussion about the policy and tax incentives granted to industry to encourage nuclear dispersal which was another factor contributing to white flight. Worth a read.
Lot of confused americans here bringing two pointa over and over: "I don't wanna live in cramped, busy city" - Well that is entirely false and self-imposed dichotomy. There is a lot of points inbetween those two extremes that US doesn't wanna build for some reason. "West europeans have familu houses outside fo cities too" - I grew up in such house actually. But like any small town I could walk to school safely alone, it had multiple modes of public transport and local shops including groceries, drogerie, pharmacy, pub... This is ehat differentiates sctual town from car dependent suburban desert
I actually lived in the suburbs in the 80s, dude. "Car dependent suburban desert" is just honestly one of the most ignorant things people today love to say about the place.
@@ianhomerpura8937 By my home? We walked on school. Had a large park around the corner. Little trail through the wooded part took us behind the local grocery store that also was part of a strip mall that had a Little Caeser's, Radio Shack, Burger joint, and video store. Skating rink/Video arcade was right past that. Both my sister and I were under 10 and hung out with our friends that all lived around the neighborhood on bike or foot. My oldest high school age sister rode around on her 10-speed. Traffic was very light, so having a sidewalk wasn't necessary. Granted my suburbia was not the classic curly street subdivision type. We lived on straight streets that went in the 4 directions with little variation, and all the streets connected in a grid off an at-grade state highway, so I may be an outlier, but we certainly did not feel isolated as kids without a car. Of course both my parents had cars.
Trains were there first and that was the intent since urban life was always nasty long before cars were available. (Horse "exhaust" required constant cleaning, drew flies and was amazingly foul.)
Very interesting episode I remember when I was in school when we talked about integration during the Cold war as it was a part of the the domestic changes in the United States after world war II in USA history it is very interesting because we talked about that levittown I think there's also a documentary about it on UA-cam it talks about the people at the time basically we're freaking out that a black family moved in in the fear of the future of the Town becoming racially diverse. Very nice video also have a happy holidays to the team of the Cold war channel
Yeah but in the documentary they debunked that argument as a concern for the people in the town as well as a few others I'm not saying it's always on a reasonable worry but I think that was used as one of the main causes to deny them to come to the town anyway
@@thomaschristopher8593 and now that is why you have NIMBYs deliberately inflating land values by blocking ANY housing project, even senior housing, from being built near their community. Screw them all.
@@thomaschristopher8593 that’s why you have credit checks. If you can’t afford to live there you can’t. No poor ass family is going to move to the middle Class suburbs
Sure. And Africans are even more tribal than Caucasians. Seems accepted if differences are nuanced but not accepted when major. Whites are the ONLY group on the planet that aren’t “ allowed” to live amongst themselves! And much of that is their refusal to say: “ GTF outta my face”.
"To the beg the question" means to give an answer to a question that simply assumes the conclusion: When will the economy pick up? Answer: When business increases> THAT answer simply RESTATES the question with it being an answer. Some dictionaries now list "to raise a question", which of course arose due to the rapid spread of the ignorant use of the phrase.
As a non-American it is always so frustrating seeing American history. The US has always had massive potential, it has achieved so much and been at the forefront of so many amazing developments. But always there is the stain of racism soiling everything.
@@looinrims It's a bit worrying that you are concerned about me soiling the good reputation of racism, but I'll humor you. If you read the short comment carefully (or at all), I didn't say that racism hindered tecnological innovation, in fact I especially say that the US has been at "the forefront of so many amazing developments". The comment about racism isn't about that. Think for example it like this: 'American athletes performed very well in the Berlin olympics. A historical moment that snubbed Hitler. But when the black athletes came back to the US they didn't get the same honor white athletes did, couldn't sleep in the same hotels and often had to enter through the back door of buildings.' That's what I mean with the shadow of racism soiling every American achievement. But if you want to argue the point, I'd think it was self evident that since minorities have often being excluded from science and medicine, it has been harder for them to open businesses or buy homes etc. the US has never lived up to it's full potential by default. The US being a leader in nearly everything? Sure, in things like military spending, gun violence and homelessness the US is way ahead of the rest of the developed world. Not so much in literacy, education in general, safety or democracy.
@@arttusepanheimo4909 I love how many times you strawman me, saying ‘you said x’ when I didn’t to call me racist, cool, I’ll address just one part to shut you up then go on with my day By saying ‘potential’ you imply the potential hasn’t been reached, supposedly by racism, I’m just asking how the hell you could think that But considering the nonsense you’ve peddled, you won’t even address what I said, hence the lying
@@looinrims I'm honored an important person such as yourself spares time to educate a lowlife such as me. I didn't say 'you said x' once, let alone many times. It's difficult to strawman you when I wasn't talking about anything you said. The first sentence was about what you seemed to be implying. The rest was just explaining my earlier points further, just like you asked me to. I don't get your hostility. You asked: 'What technological innovation was stifled because of racism?' I answered: 'I didn't say technology was stifled because of racism. I said achievements were shadowed/soiled by the constant presence of racism.' And I gave an example. You asked: 'How hasn't the US lived up to it's potential? It's a leader in almost everythin.' I answered: 'By definition by excluding a part of society from innovation and the economy you aren't reaching your potential. And the US is not a leader in a lot of important metrics.' And I gave examples. (I'm paraphrasing.) I don't know how it could have been simpler, but apparently there was a communication problem.
I remember in the 80s and 90s my father commenting about how neighborhoods he grew up in are getting bad as more minorities were moving into them. We moved within the same city (in the south eastern US) several times into more exclusive, isolated, and gated neighborhoods. Black families were moving into the neighborhoods closest to the city, or on the side of town that was more affordable. 3-4 decades later those parts of town are utterly run down, crime-ridden and dilapidated. I can't help but feel like more honest methods of social integration half a century ago could have prevented the creation of "bad sides" to town where there's almost no hope in improving quality of life.
It’s because those areas lack common sense, general policing. If you are wealthy and can’t walk into a Walgreens without someone storming out stealing stuff, then the police do nothing about it, you’re incentivizing crime in your city. Crime breeds crime. Then these same people move out, the properties are bought up by investors, and rents go up on guess who? All the poor and minorities left in town. Governments and corporations are working hand in hand to destabilize race relations and stability.
With hindsight maybe, but who’s fault is it that people are violent criminals? Unless they were indoctrinated into that behavior (I wonder what kinda music glorifies that…) it’s no one’s fault but the criminal’s
very interesting episode. A lot of discussion has been made about how todays gentrification is in a way similar to yesterdays white flight, where urban renewal projects have been undertaken for the sake of a 'repentant' white population moving back to the cities but in reality the undertaking of urban renewal was to eliminate the racial tensions that sparked decay in that neighborhood. The discussion on gentrification might be a video for "the Cold War 2" down the line lol
@@noobster4779 More like the rest of human civilization CANT afford that. Any decently well off family in any country will move to a suburb or suburb like equivalent when given the chance, otherwise, they are stuck to cramed apartments or row houses
Let's remember WHY cities are bad compared to the burbs. Suburbs in the Northeast were built in the late 1800s to escape filth and urban crowding (if you think car exhaust is bad, try horse feces!). Cities were where you worked if you didn't have a choice, and as the crowded cores expanded with population those who could moved out. Light rail made this practical long before cars were common. Some of those classic pre-WWI (not WWII) suburbs remain mostly intact and they are beautiful. I grew up in one (Rutherford, NJ in Bergen County). What KEPT it beautiful IS single family housing! What kept it safe is gatekeeping bottom-feeders out. What kept it beautiful is keeping out low income housing because low income adults are that through personal defects. The burbs were places where Americans who pursued self-betterment could flourish. Know and understand people escaping overcrowding by spending our life savings would be crazy to destroy what WE built. Population growth is all bad except for the big developers selling property. Growth is crowding. Growth is crime. Growth is pollution. Growth is too many people competing for too few jobs. The US has plenty of cities that could be expanded but planning always focuses on making rich parasites even wealthier by cramming more people who don't know better (check the median US reading level) into places they will never afford and should not want to be by any sane economic metric.
The last part reminds me of an old soviet joke. "Voice of America" asks the soviet "Radio Armenia": "Can a soviet space engineer afford a car?" "Er... and you lynch the blacks!"
I Don't buy the white flight dynamic completely, as this also happened across post war Europe, where there were no non-whites coming into urban areas. Considering how much more space, greenery, clean air and quality of life one had out side cities it can not be put down to race solely. To this day people in the West generally would like to live in a more green place with better air, quiet etc. Just look at say Germany after unification. many people left inner cities and a building boom ensued with cookie cutter houses littering suburbia. Or look at the UK post war. In Europe we had something called the "garden city" which was thought up during the 1910s in Germany and France. These were places with small houses with gardens for the working classes, yet close to factories. Again no blacks in sight.
It would be very easy to live in a city like New York at this time and live in a "white neighbourhood" I doubt it was a big driving force. Cars, bigger families, more money, television idealising suburbs would be bigger factors. African Americans made the same move at the same time for the same reasons.
One major difference between suburban planning in the US and Europe is that they also built suburbs with public transportation in mind. So the governments there made it easy for buses and trains to access the new suburbs. This is also the pattern that HK, Japan, Singapore, and other rising Asian economies followed from the 1960s onwards. In the US you do NOT have that pattern, since they made suburbs to be as exclusive as possible to whites.
@@itsmenicci7003 I was alive then and those who could afford to and planned ahead (like my parents) escaped the cities anyway though white hoods remained. Suburban life was often amazingly better than a cold water flat (still very common in post-WWII US cities) in an old tenement even in a decent hood. Cities DETERIORATE until housing stock gets replaced which guarantees bust and boom cycles. The only way out is not to live in one so I don't.
David, you are well aware the phrase “white flight” is completely misleading. All over the world and throughout history, groups have collected together with people like themselves, whether by race, income, education, religion, or any number of other characteristics. There is nothing unique when white people do it. A century or so ago, when Polish immigrants began moving into various Detroit neighborhoods, blacks began moving out. The research of pioneering black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier showed long ago that Harlem and other black communities were internally divided, with people of different income, education, and behavior patterns living in distinctly different zones. When Eastern European Jewish immigrants began arriving in the United States and some began moving into German Jewish neighborhoods in Chicago, the German Jews began moving out. Similar patterns have been found among all sorts of groups.
The Suburbia most urbanists hate for its car dependence and "soullessness" is the reason why United States didn't face a terminal demography while evey other country that urbanized from a similar starting point is facing a demographic cliff. Falling TFR and collapsing of their birth rates below that has leads to a shrinkage of their(developed world) working age population. (To the urbanists in the comment section) So instead of rabidly barking at the wrong tree perhaps appreciate the suburbs that have maintained the population growth lest you are foaming at the mouth wanting to experience a Japanese style lost decade . Atleast the Germans had the EU and to shove their exports into. What is at stake is more than just the vapid concerns of an obnoxious cadre of nuisances who have far exceeded the limit of any kind of reasonable or credible criticism they might have towards suburbs.(Suburbia definitely has room for improvement but remains absolutely indispensable).
I'm glad my parents moved to Grosse Pointe from Detroit. I was afforded an excellent education in the school system there. This likely wouldn't have happened had we stayed in Detroit because, according to my parents, the quality of education was going down even in the mid-fifties (they were both graduates of Detroit high schools). Grosse Pointe eventually desegregated with no screaming or demonstrations, etc. Yes, it's still majority-white, but every census, the percentage of other groups rises. I think a lot of that is due to financial reasons rather than racial, since the Grosse Pointes--yes, there are five of them--are still pretty pricey. Considering that I grew up in Grosse Pointe Park, which when I was young was exclusively white (1950s-1969), the village now has a population which is 7.5 percent African American (as of the 2010 census), still a ways to go, but a good start. My parents moved to Gosse Pointe Park when they married, because they wanted good opportunities educationally for their children. By the time my mum died, our neighbourhood in Grosse Pointe Shores already had 2 or 3 African American families and my mum just took it as changing times. Did a lot of racism drive flight to the suburbs? Undoubtedly, but so did a desire to see one's children have it better than they did (remember, many young parents of the era grew up during the Great Depression, so they remembered the privations they suffered and wanted better for their children. I'm encouraged to see that Grosse Pointe has come as far as it has in the 50 years since I lived there full-time. Anyhow, just a look from someone who grew up in the era when the suburbs were getting started.
Why is it that having better public schools depend on the property taxes in the area? Can't they just pool all property taxes by state and distribute them equally among the school districts?
There is one critical way to make people really want to live in high density places. Just pass a law MAKING builders put SOUND PROOFING between every apartment and condo unit. The one most important thing that makes single family houses desirable is PRIVACY!!
Americans liked cities and urban development until immigrants and particular black Americans started moving in.. first it started with “they’re taking our jobs”, then unwritten segregation and disenfranchisement, then white flight once automobiles became widely accessible due to American global economic hegemony following WWII.
The real estate agents (called Blockbusters) in Detroit would go door to door with the sales pitch sell your house before the blacks cause your property to depreciate ! If caused a lot of fear.
I’m gonna to let you in on some facts here I don’t know if u skipped them bc they don’t fit your narrative, 1st the gov promoted the growth of suburbs to get the population dispersed from the cities in case of nuclear attack the suburbs are usual outside of the instakill zone of nuclear weapons. Now for “white flight” the whites didn’t move when backs moved in, the case of Detroit they didn’t leave until after the 67 riots and the city started busing kids across the city for school instead of letting. Them walk a block to school their local schools. Would you rather watch your kid walk across the street to school ……. One that you probably went to as a child as well or watch them get on a bus for a 20 mile trip to a school you know nothing about. And lastly if it was just bc “blacks moved in” tell me why gross point is the richest city in Michigan and is literally across a street from Detroit and burned down homes and vacant lots ?
Weird because nowadays suburbanites hate the very thought of children walking or biking to and from school. Everyone nowadays had to be chauffeured by car. No independence for children I guess.
@@ianhomerpura8937 the need for suburbia goes far beyond something as mundane as independence of children. The fact that they exist is more important. Urban areas have the worst fertility rates amongst all the different forms of settlements. Suburbs provide a healthy balance and support for maintaining the population growth.
The burbs LONG predate the Cold War especially in the Northeast where light rail made them practical in the late 1800s as escape from amazingly polluted cities. Most modern Americans never grew up with smog let alone "killer smog" and almost none living with horsedrawn urban transport. Many of those rail links and their stations are in constant use today.
@@TheNecessaryEvil what did I do? It's sensitive snowflakes like you who run away when you see someone with melanin in their skin, you're to blame for cities falling apart
Americans moved out of cities because cities had no housing for them after ww2. Cities had been suburbanizing since the 1900's or the with birth of streetcars and industry. By the 1950's the American middle class needed housing and cities could not provide the amount of single family homes, good schools, clean air, green space, safe neighborhoods and ease of transportation that suburbs or "suburban style" areas of cities could provide. The American middle class was also wealthier, today people still move for the same reasons they did since the 50's and much less since the dawn of industry. Cities that could accommodate the growing middle class grew and so did their suburbs, cities that could not, stagnated or lost population and their suburbs still grew.
They've always chosen to excel and work together so their communities remain cohesive. When you can afford to leave a city that's the smart move and their traditions always demanded education (no one else's do in the US) so they bought into the burbs, a few old Orthodox urban hoods excepted. Groups who consider ignorance shameful do better than those who take pride in it (most poor groups whites included).
A wonderful historical coverage of white flight..in USA 🇺🇸 during early times of First Cold War 🥶 ...this accurate, realistically introducing 👌...showing exact truthfulness, trustful of ( cold war ) introduces
How big a factor was car ownership? I imagine that before cars, living in suburbs - at least, American-style low-density suburbs - would have been difficult. I also imagine that owning a car would be more difficult for most black families, who were poorer on average than whites.
Before cars light rail BUILT the early burbs, but US public school education imploded (thank the left) in the 1970s so that's little known today. Much of the Northeast is still served by suburban/interurban light rail (which railfan channels chronicle in detail). Light rail did not discriminate and fares were cheap. Tens of millions of Americans still commute to cities on those passenger rail systems. Many of their 1800s train stations were preserved and remain in use.
Federal school bussing laws were one of the many sparks that lit the fuse of White Flight. Diversity is our greatest weakness and not strength. It’s why the country is falling apart today.
Is it true that the big three car manufacturers in Detroit, ford, Chrysler and General Motors that had a very high percentage of black Americans employed there moved to the suburbs when they retired? Sounds like black flight to me.
min 7.it has a neurotically nasty ideological flavor such I I witnessed in the late 60's and early 70's at Stanford. This bit has more to do with a nasty attack on the population by embittered academics who seldom had the ability to function well outside of the protected confines of an academic setting. Re the 'paranoia" about communists we do know that several thousand people in the Roosevelt & Truman administration were working as agents of the USSR. As a gay man I can attest to the persecytion of gay people in that and prior eras by liberals, by progressives, by communists as well as by others.
K can’t stand being in a city. Noisy, crowded, rude people everywhere, crime, pollution, litter, homeless people, gangs, junkies. I can’t even think of one positive for any city.
This is perhaps the worst issue that impacted and still impacts American cities today, as the proliferation of low density suburbs coupled with very strict zoning laws that prohibited commercial activity in residential areas led to the necessity of using a car to do anything. That's why American cities are so car dependent with insufferable congestion, not to mention the shortage of housing supplies in many cities as only single family housing is allowed.
It's not like Easter Europe is better, with most people living in apartment blocks/projects with tens or hundreds of small and medium flats in the cities. And having a lot of cars parked all over the place on sidewalks, in forbidden zones, pedestrian crossings etc.
@@drupiROM Why do you compare it with easter Europe instead of western Europe?
@@danielsan901998 The theme of the channel Cold War, East vs West, communism vs capitalism.
@@xunqianbaidu6917 That apartment building/projects housing frenzy started in the '60s and peaked in the '80s. Cars started to multiply after the '90s when communism fell.
I agree with that but also it depends where you're at. Some cities the suburbs and public transportation actually function to how it would be everywhere else in the world.
“There is a widespread belief that americans hate cities. I think it is probable that Americans hate city failure, but, from the evidence, we certainly do not hate successful and vital city areas. On the contrary, so many people want to make use of such places, so many people want to work in them or live in them or visit in them.”
― Jane Jacobs,
Successful and vital cities like Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Oakland, Los Angeles, and St Louis? Americans love successful and vital city areas, but most American city areas simply are not successful and vital.
Jacobs was a poseur, but you dont even know her, just post some random quote for some likes
Many Americans do in fact hate cities and I'm one of many millions of them. Rural life is AFFORDABLE, offers personal space and is much freer than living in the equivalent of a jail where an apartment the size of my garage costs thousands a month. People move to cities because they're hoping for work, then they cash out to retire and live elsewhere.
Americas biggest issue is the lack of midrises. Its either skyskrapers or single family homes
@@ラーメンのボス you are gay
This still has a massive impact on much of American society. Thanks for this very important episode.
So weird US lets this happen when it obviously very damaging to society longterm. In the country i live in, the goverment even buys up property in "white suburbia" to house immigrants there. Spreading them out amongst the population. There are no China towns etc.
My father was abit grumpy when goverment bought his neighboring house to host some Palestinian refugees (Hes very pro-Israel) and him being old and in general skeptic of immigrants cause they were not many immigrants when he grew up.
But after meeting the people, they come over with food. Borrowing tools from eachother etc. His views and skepticism has disapeared.
Its healthy for people to be subjected to different people.
Agreed. It’s major explanation on the financial disparity between Black and White Americans.
"impact"? If your a little bike person you might choose that word. But for the rest of us city dwellers we are happy we don't have to get rained on or bike up hills and live in a pack'em and stack'em. Oh wait but I would tell my friends how good and righteous I am for saving the world one bike at a time.
@@4149stonepony Why is it that there's always one American under videos like this, fighting ghosts? I honestly couldn't decipher what you're taking offence at here.
@@Dan-kr9bm If you could not, you would not have wrote an intentionally ambiguous comment about nothing. The problem for you is that no one is taking offence Mr. Canadian. American cities are connected to white flight and so on, But cities around the world have suburbanized and the factors leading to that are not so called "white flight", factors of suburbanization vary by country. Thus, white flight is a convenient argument that dismisses the reasons cities were abandoned by city dwellers since the 1950's. Regardless of your stupid American comment maybe it would help to look at a map of Canada and study the urban forms of Canadian cities and their demographics before making a moronic ethnographic comment.
This is also an impact on suburban infrastructure and architecture. While other places in the world, especially Europe, were developed with interconnectivity and walkability in mind, suburbia is disconnected here in the US. It's sort of a "moat" effect.
Isolation of people
Well don't people want to be disconnected from high crime areas ? Its seems like a good thing. I live in Europe, few miles from my place is gypsy no go zone ( high crime, high incest rate, shits burns all the time etc). Since the state builded higway between NGZ and normal neigborhoods crime went down, streets are cleaner, much less shouting during working weeks nights etc. Just net benefits.
@@annuitcptis9627 Those disconnected surburban areas cause people to become more isolated and (physically) disconnected from each other and from their work place. This leads to poorer public health because you have to drive everywhere as well as the health issues arising from that car pollution and is bad for sociability especially for kids since it's not as easy to meet. High crime and stuff like that is not a feature of city living, but of poor social policies and it's also entirely possible to have lower density housing that isn't designed like the suburbs of America (European suburbs in my experience often aren't designed like American ones. Have a look at what LA looks like from above on Google Maps and you'll see what I mean).
@@annuitcptis9627 How did building a highway cause crime to go down?
Taking "good" people out of "bad" neighborhoods doesn't solve the underlying causes of why the neighborhood is crime-ridden in the first place.
@@jliller He means that people can't cross over easily between the two neighborhoods; the road acts as a barrier.
"Happy are those whose walls already rise"
Growing up as a mixed race kid in Cleveland I experienced the urban/suburb, racial/economic divide firsthand. My father's family are middle/working class Italian/polish who lived in decent suburbs since the 50's. My mother's family are black, and came up north during the great migration. And lived in run down underdeveloped parts of the city since long before I was born (will be 40 next year). Growing up was a strange thing in hindsight. I would go to both families houses, and see both families. But they hardly ever had any contact with one another. My grandfather's on both sides served in WWII. But as the video attests, their post war opportunities were not equal.
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Thank you for sharing, that was an interesting read and I was wondering how someone who was mixed would have grown up in that kind of environment.
@@resentfuldragon Well. I guess it was normal to me at the time. It was only later in life that I began to realize how unfortunate it was.
@@nickkerr8775 I live in Parma Heights myself these days. Economic inequity is at the root of the problem when it comes to urban crime in the US. Looking only at the crime itself and attempting to beat it into submission is not a lasting solution to this problem. The root causes, like economic inequity and a lack of educational and employment opportunities must be addressed. Such reforms will not be easy, quick or cheap. And for decades the American middle class has had little appetite for such reforms. They only seem to care when the "good neighborhoods" are threatened by crime. And even then. Only to seek to push the crime back into its inner city corner. Out of sight, out of mind.
@@youngimperialistmkii read the name you responded to. I can't see their post but that name should let you know they aren't operating in good faith with you.
*NotJustBikes enters the chat*
I have noticed black moped gangs in NYC terrorising the wider population. is this what you mean ?
LOL!
I am a child and a Veteran of the Cold War and experienced white Flight from Baltimore City to the Suburbs of Baltimore County. During the time the Welfare Era went into effect the Black population of inner Cities skyrocketed. I attended my 1st racially integrated Middle School that was 50% Black and 50% White. The blacks were from the inner city; the white were from the outer city. It was a total shock and nightmare for me and my white school mates due to the hatred, racism, violence, and strong arm robberies on the playground at lunch break. We were accousted everyday by individuals and gangs on the playground, in the locker alcoves, and on the walk to the Bus Stop. It was the worst experience of my life. The teachers watching the students on the Playground did nothing for fear of being savagely beaten. In my all white rowhouse neighborhood realitors started to plant black families in strategically placed areas at no cost to the black families. It was a strategy known as "Block Busting". It caused the white flight to occur and house values to drop by 50%. Those realitors made fortunes. Once we moved to the suburbs, I never experienced any violence again.
That's an outright lie. Your mind is too far gone. PROVE IT.
That's horrible. I moved to Parkville as a black middle schooler and got harassed by older white kids because the white girls took a liking to me.
@@b1gS0Wh4t Bullies will be bullies regardless of the color or their skin.
It's white flight if they move out, but gentrification if they move in.
They won't ever appease some percentage of people, no matter what they do, so they might as well ignore the whole issue and just move wherever they want if it's good for their family/career. That pretty much makes it a dead issue imo
Typical white supremacist talking point. Those white people didn't want to live next to black people. The politicians redlined and kept investment out of black communities, then brought up the land cheap and moved back.
@@Jalenlane93 Typical NPC talking point. You claim to be telepathic and know the true intentions of people you've never met. What nonsense.
Really, you just seem to have a problem with people doing what they want and not what you want.
Reason why it’s called white flight isn’t simply moving out, but how while they moved out, the streets and roads were built to accommodate suburban people to the detriment of urban people. Robert Moses’ city planning created tons of highways for suburbanites, which specifically went through black, latino, and Russian Jewish households. He was even repeatedly given alternative ways to create his highways but refused. Alongside this at its worst, cities like LA are just huge suburbs built around car dependency which saps money out of families, especially poorer ones and isolated communities.
@@bobettethedestroyerthebuil1034 Then why the insistence on "white" flight? This racializing of everything is pure nonsense.
@@bandit6272 Because it was almost entirely white people leaving. Similar to how I said the highways ran through black, latino, and Russian Jewish neighborhoods. Race and class are intertwined, and white flight was done almost specifically out of fear mongering of black people moving into areas. It essentially shackled especially minorities to lower income inner city areas while allowing wealth, job markets, etc. to leave the cities but still have the cities be catered to these people who left.
What a great time to be alive back then and raise your family !
Great time for whom?
Hell Yeah! You could buy two packs of Marlboros smoke them in your car on the way home with the windows rolled up. You could leave your kids home for days and nobody would notice. LOL! my how Fuc#$d up a country we have become.
I wish I had grown up back then, everything looked so idyllic and classy. This country was so much better back then.
yeah when it was white and homogenous
Everything was beautiful and nice when it was white. Era of unlocked front doors, decorum, and class is gone.
Not all of it by a long shot (I did grow up back then) but in general it was much better socially. What changed is ignorance is no longer shameful and greedy
elites flooded the US with those who add nothing of social value because they aspire to nothing but money.
@@earth8865 Many areas are still cool (like mine, but I'm not telling where it is) but they're not urban. I knew cities were bad news fifty years ago as a child and by devoting my life to avoiding them did nicely.
I think you should have mentioned blockbusting which was a major driver of white flight.
You could also have mentioned the economic incentives which caused white flight such as being more affordable at the time.
he literally did.
Those were created well before the 1950's when suburbanization boomed and those things were depression era incentives that took decades before the housing crisis after ww2 helped the suburbs boom. White flight did not happen where there was housing to be built in the city. Cities that were old, dirty, polluted, unsafe, and bad schools was not going to stop people from moving no matter how much liberals blame white people for leaving, even though racism was one of the small reasons people chose to leave.
My mom and also my dad's family deny this ever happened and get mad as hell when shown evidence. It's very frustrating and sad
They deny it because you vilify them for making the smart decision for their children's future & safety. A nation of checked out ungrateful spoiled children are a result so in the end it all comes crashing down anyways.
Oh Well.
It’s hard to explain US history on racial injustice if people you’re talking to want to desperately believe we live in a perfect meritocracy. If we live in a meritocracy anything trying to repair injustice would be seen as being unfair because we already live in a “fair system.”
Black crime forced white people out.
@@sonia555220 neutral meritocratic system only exist inside of a community, if you put more communities in that system, that system becomes a lever of power.
cus if they were honest they would be morally charged , if u call it good theyll be open about it.. maybe just be more cool
This continues to impact America today. Amazing how little attention this issue receives
I still don’t understand what the “issue” is.
I realize that this isn't a discussion on all the things that led to white flight, but I was surprised that you didn't mention "block busting", which caused a lot of white city dwellers to move to the suburbs.
Do you want to elaborate?
@@ianhomerpura8937 "block busting" is when you want real estate prices to go down in a certain area so you perform/pay someone to do certain anti-social acts that would make small property owners want to sell.
@@ianhomerpura8937 In this context, a real estate agent would buy a home, sell it to a black family, then approach other white families in the neighborhood and say, "Look what is happening! The blacks are moving in. You'd better move out before it turns into a ghetto and your house is worthless." Then offer the owner a whole less than it was worth, then sell it black families at much more than they paid. This happened to my aunt & uncle and their neighbors in Houston. But was recorded everywhere, especially in cities in the North.
Reality caused them to move to the burbs. The reality of those who didn't leave fast enough is a matter of record.
@@stischer47 That actually happened to my mom and dad when they moved in their home. The previous owner even told them, "I hope you can afford to live here". Their neighborhood when from 98% white to 2% white by the time I was born in 1978. I have older siblings and you can see how each year the white population dwindled. By the time I was a teenager over half of the homes in our subdivision were rented out, with most of them being on Section 8.
Makes me wonder how Richard Overton was able to buy his house despite all the obstacles in his way…
He built his home in a redlined section of east Austin, TX, spending about $6,000
I have my own experience with this via my father, who lived most of his life in the St. Louis area. Dad never lived in the city of St. Louis; he first came to the area out of the Ozarks at age 15 to work in the war plants. Dad went into the Army in 1944, came back in 1948, and settled near where his mother lived in an older STL suburb. He got married, had a son, and lived prosperously as a union sheet metal worker. Dad wasn't so concerned about material things, although he certainly enjoyed them. He simply did not want to live near Black people, and everyone else he knew was like that. My Dad was not the typical World War II veteran type either. He never supported Vietnam, he was sympathetic to marijuana back in the 60's (and still is now), and he never switched to being a Republican.
As St. Louis collapsed, people moved further away from the city. In 1981, my dad moved my mother and I (then 18 months old) to a small town 80 miles from downtown to get that much further away from Black people (among other reasons), and he wasn't the only one. My Dad turns 96 in February, and he regrets nothing. Massive suburbs are being built now 50 miles from downtown St. Louis, and there's no jobs or population growth to support it. It's racial paranoia, nothing but. I know the type, cause I've seen it literally all my life.
Why is your dad afraid of black people
@@williamerazo3921 For the same reason most white Missourians are: They believe people of color want to kill them. Racial paranoia is the 400-pound gorilla of Missouri's consciousness. That's why they want open carry, etc.
13 does 52
So you have this little closeted animosity for your dad because he kept your family safe from violent and terrible people?
I knew WW2 and Korean war vets, they talked about their service, but never had a chip on their shoulder like some of the others vets. They would treasure small things like a cold coke when it was hot outside.
This was an interesting look into this subject. Nice video. And Merry Christmas Cold War Channel.
The 1960's riots in major cities across America are what solidified the suburban flight, and those cities for many years were left in squalor. By the 90's many of cities were coming back alive again with investment and the new "Yuppie" class. Today, the big cities seem to be at a crossroad with high crime and homelessness etc.
Understandable; i wouldn't want to live and raise children in an enviornment porne to violent riots.
@@vorynrosethorn903 True.
Is very interesting how both sides was very good on pointing out the opponent's weaknesses but couldn't see their own pitfalls 😏
I feel that's how most conflicts go, it's a tribal us vs them thing
That's the racist way America trains you to see it: as there being two segregated sides rather than one America that manufactures two sides that centuries of legalized slavery and segregation engineered. In fact, there is just one America with as many sides as there are Americans. And we all know the side that is mistreated by the buisiness class that runs the country and the side that benefits from it.
So many stories put down suburbs as bad places filled with racist whites but I don’t find this to be true. I was born in NYC in 1965 and my parents and us moved out to Long Island in 1968. My parents wanted my twin brother and I (and later my sister) to be raised in an area with green grass and woods not a concrete jungle. My father traveled two hour each morning to get to work on Wall Street but he did this so us kids could have some room and to be away from the growing crime in Brooklyn. I had a cousin my age who stayed in Brooklyn who got his skull cracked open by a gang in school. We had no such problems and that’s a good thing. There were a few black and Hispanic families in my neighborhood and no we did not share the same skin color but we shared one thing. We were hard working Americans with parents who wanted the best for this children and who could afford a nice house in the suburbs.
Exactly, the suburbs are the best place for anyone to grow up.
Just because you didn't experience it doesn't mean it's nonexistent. I grew up in the suburbs as a black kid. We got harassed
It is liberal myth making by the environmentalist left, bike people and housing advocates. Just a hard left agenda that has no basis in reality. They resist suburbs because most suburbanites are moderate on environmental issues, biking is relatively something you do on a trail and does not impede traffic and no smart suburbanite wants a pack'em and stack'em ruining their neighborhood. So that is why they screech about how bad suburbs are.
This is a very interesting video David, I find the social history to be fascinating. Is there a chance you could do more of these but with a UK perspective? I feel that a lot of the issues that are being faced in the country right now have their roots in the Cold War era, so I'd appreciate seeing your take on what was happening in the UK during these times
Enoch Powell would love this channel ...'nuff said.
Having grown up in Levittown, Pennsylvania, perhaps the quintessential American suburb built in the 1950s, I have to stress the thinking of white people as some great homogeneous mass is an error. Many American towns and cities were classified and stratified among ethnic lines, even among the white people. In my parents' hometown in upstate Pennsylvania in the 1930s the English and the Scots lived on the flat lands near the river, the Italians in the North and South ends, and the Poles, Czech, and Slovaks up on the hillside. It was very insular and frankly there wasn't a lot of mixing. And people still referred to each other by where their ancestors came from despite the fact that they could be native born.
One thing that did happen in Levittown was that all of this was broken down. On my home street alone those of English, Italian, Irish, German, Polish, Dutch, and Scotch descent all lived side by side with one another. Yes African Americans were discriminated against, but if someone was Catholic and they married someone who was Jewish, no one batted an eye. That's an enormous social change from just a generation prior.
"we learned the great lesson that we were all okay so long as we weren't Brown or Black."
You seem to want the cookie for this.
@@vorynrosethorn903 feel free to re-explain it for him then.
@@Jay-ho9io Not hard to understand if you have thinking skills. These people came from different countries and cultures and melded together quickly.
I know it’s the “Current Year” and all but you may find it surprising that just because someone has the same skin color as someone else they have a different lived experience. Maybe go read and watch some videos sweaty.
in 1950s West Germany a "mixed" marriage was a marriage between a catholic and a Protestant.
Never mind Northern Ireland ( cough cough ).
Yes it is probably more about the growth of the middle class than anything.
This is because of diversity.
That move was absolutely needed.
Our family did it in 1967 after the enraged riot mob burned down Detroit. My earliest memories were seeing the 101st Airborne Division going down our street.
Ironically, in 1985 i ended up serving in the 101st Airborne Division.
It was the best thing my father could have done to move us out of hate filled Detroit and into a new suburb in Bloomfield Hills.
The city of Detroit was burned down and never rebuilt...even now over 50 years later.
Let’s not forget that America is not just Black and White.
We also need to include Hispanic and Asian Americans to the narrative as well as the affect of Crime on the flight from cities
Glad someone said it 😂 everyone is always white/black this and forgets about everyone else lol
This presentation leaves out the latest research pioneered by James Lowen that showed the great migration wasn't black people moving directly from Southern agricultural areas to northern cities. Rather, it included black Americans first migrating to literally every rural county in the United States... then getting systematically kicked out of those places and reluctantly relocating in the few cities that didn't kick them out, which happened to be northern and mid western cities.
The other major change in cities during the 1930s-70s that likely led to white flight was very likely... cars themselves, making cities hostile towards children. Rather than give up driving, those who could afford it simply bought a large property for their child to play in while safe behind a fence.
Suburbanization still affects the US today as many major cities are hemmed in by their suburbs making it impossible to build more higher density neighborhoods at their fringes. The decay of Cities in the 1970s was probably a signal to the Soviets that American capitalism was on it's way out as crime, loss of manufacturing jobs was just too obvious.
Midrises are the answer
Short version of this history:
Segregationists warned that integration would motivate white people to move out of cities, which would descend into ruin. Then segregation ended, and the cities descended into ruin, in that order.
It is considered rude to notice a connection between these things.
Other countries did integration much better. Where did the US get it wrong then?
@@ianhomerpura8937Which nations did it right?
@@starventure China, Indonesia, and France comes to mind.
@@ianhomerpura8937 Can't speak about Indonesia, but China kicks minorities around for sport - look how Africans are treated there, and to say France is integrated means you have not visited there anywhere beyond the tourist traps. I challenge you to go to La Corneuve or any of the banlieues and then make that statement again.
Integration in Singapore works well
Was just explaining this to my son yesterday how in the US not that many cities are walkable.
"and they're all made out of tacky-tacky and they all look just the same!" I listened to the Kingston Trio cover of that tune when I must have been six or seven years old. Loved it! It stuck-- --
I just heard it watching “Weeds.”
Horrible when it comes to the racism and segregation, how it affected mortgage values simply by race. It also makes me think of what happened in "Cancer Alley" when the chemical companies moved in, the white families knew in advance and left the area, but then they sold the homes to black families who didn't know/weren't told what was coming.
What should they have done instead? Stayed there and died? Warned the homebuyers not to make an offer on their houses? Should black people have minders to keep an eye on them to make sure they only invest in good real estate? Do white people have an obligation to look out for black people?
13 50 13 50
@@ZackFrisbeeThey dindu nuffin
Merry Christmas to you David and to the cold war channel 🎄 ❄️
The same occured in Western Europe beginning in the 50s and 60s when purchasing power started to rise and car ownership became widespread, which in turn reduced the appeal of living in cities for middle class families, without any racial aspects.
I made that point as well. Clean air, trees and a garden a good reason to leave a city.
@@dirkbogarde7796 Which is why renovation is underway in some cities to have those in some degree: reducing car dependency, more pedestrian spaces with tress, and public parks.
@@dirkbogarde7796 and what made cities lose that clean air and trees?
Roads being widened due to more cars going around.
Car free cities are much more popular in europe
Our small, SoCal desert town was quiet and relatively crime free(besides some drug issues) when I moved in during the mid-90's. The population was racially mixed as it is California and just north of a large military base. Most of my neighbors were military or prior, it was quiet. THEN... the section-8 housing program came to our county. It seemed as if overnight we were overrun by violent crime, beggars, teen pregnancy(9 ninth graders in the first year alone, but I was told that was quite normal) and our minor drug issue became major. It wasn't an issue of color but culture. And it destroyed what had been several nice communities.
You people really have to blame section 8 housing? Why not blame your governments for not having adequate law enforcement instead?
And how's that relevant to this video?
A Soviet underground joke:
- How much does an engineer earn in the Soviet Union?
- But in the USA, they linch black men.
Great video. I appreciate the focus on the role institutional racism played in creating the suburbs.
White communities, especially those who couldn’t afford to leave (like many ‘ethnic whites’ - as they were called at the time), faced quite a bit of violence at the hands of black newcomers during the ‘’great migration’. The 70s book ‘Left Behind in Rosedale’ by a liberal academic gives some pretty harrowing accounts. Most of the white folk from these places were never allowed a voice, it’s important to keep that in mind.
Propaganda. Black people got lynched and crowds of white people gathered to watch. Purse snatchers don't even begin to compare.
OH REALLY?
Excellent episode again CW. Sometimes the truth hurts and this one hurt. But, ya know, Free your mind and your ass will follow. Thanks for this. Happy Christmas and cheers from Tennessee
love that song
Merry Christmas to you as well!
I hate big cities because they're noisy, congested, and artificial. I have come to see skyscrapers as abominations. I think anyone voluntarily living a places like Manhattan is practically insane.
I also hate commuting because it's tedious and basically wasting out of my life on a daily basis. A 30 minute commute cut to 15 minutes reclaims 2.5 hours of your life on a weekly basis.
They left for a reason.....
As a Native American (Lakota) white settlers are gonna white settle.
Does it rhyme with bigger?
Goofy
Now I understand the where does the rethoric of "capitalism created racism" comes from.
Yeah, it comes from crap thinking
@Ajit Adonis Manilal Yup because black people were the only people ever enslaved and slavery wasn't invented until capitalism was 😂
What a brainlet take
@Ajit Adonis Manilal Lol. You don't know what capitalism is. The free exchange of goods and services, which excludes slavery. Fun fact communists own stuff too, it's just that it used to be your stuff.
Also fun fact, more Europeans were enslaved than africans. Also, most African slaves went east to the middle east, not Europe. Your ignorance is painful.
@Ajit Adonis Manilal No, it's YOUR focus because you only care about slavery when it suits your purposes. Furthermore, slavery predates anything like "capitalism", so stretch before you reach like that.
Communal societies practiced slavery too for instance. No capitalism there.
Why we're at it, capitalism abolished slavery in the free world. So there's that.
@Ajit Adonis Manilal "free" exchange of goods and services. "FREE". Maybe you think a slave freely gives his/her services, lol. I'll bet you could believe something as silly as that. Check out Locke. He lays the foundation how property rights are the foundation of human rights. Self ownership, specifically. If you own yourself, the fruits of your labor are yours to barter, hence, slavery is antithetical.
Now, under communism where you don't own the fruits of your labor, but they belong to someone else, well....that sounds like slavery to me 😂
How about pre-currency, when hunter gatherer tribes were enslaving each other? I'll bet you think those Neolithic tribes were a bunch of capitalists, huh? 🤣
You should fire whoever been doing your thinking for you
I'd always thought that song was a Pete Seeger song. Apparently they were friends but Seeger's cover of her song "Little Boxes" had more success than her original version.
The book ‘Cities of Knowledge’ by Margaret Pugh O’Mara included some interesting discussion about the policy and tax incentives granted to industry to encourage nuclear dispersal which was another factor contributing to white flight. Worth a read.
Lot of confused americans here bringing two pointa over and over:
"I don't wanna live in cramped, busy city" - Well that is entirely false and self-imposed dichotomy. There is a lot of points inbetween those two extremes that US doesn't wanna build for some reason.
"West europeans have familu houses outside fo cities too" - I grew up in such house actually. But like any small town I could walk to school safely alone, it had multiple modes of public transport and local shops including groceries, drogerie, pharmacy, pub... This is ehat differentiates sctual town from car dependent suburban desert
I actually lived in the suburbs in the 80s, dude. "Car dependent suburban desert" is just honestly one of the most ignorant things people today love to say about the place.
@@xandercruz900 you might want to explain what your experience was.
@@ianhomerpura8937 By my home? We walked on school. Had a large park around the corner. Little trail through the wooded part took us behind the local grocery store that also was part of a strip mall that had a Little Caeser's, Radio Shack, Burger joint, and video store. Skating rink/Video arcade was right past that.
Both my sister and I were under 10 and hung out with our friends that all lived around the neighborhood on bike or foot. My oldest high school age sister rode around on her 10-speed. Traffic was very light, so having a sidewalk wasn't necessary.
Granted my suburbia was not the classic curly street subdivision type. We lived on straight streets that went in the 4 directions with little variation, and all the streets connected in a grid off an at-grade state highway, so I may be an outlier, but we certainly did not feel isolated as kids without a car. Of course both my parents had cars.
Because you've never had to experience diversity
@@kenwaltson7113 are you really sure that your country is the only diverse country out there? Where do you come from?
These videos IMPLY that the flight was irrational
I think cars made life in suburbs possible.
Trains were there first and that was the intent since urban life was always nasty long before cars were available. (Horse "exhaust" required constant cleaning, drew flies and was amazingly foul.)
Such a great channel. I'm not a huge fan of the Cold War but you have a lot of great content that makes it interesting
Thanks for tackling this thorny issue in US race relations and housing history.
Very interesting episode I remember when I was in school when we talked about integration during the Cold war as it was a part of the the domestic changes in the United States after world war II in USA history it is very interesting because we talked about that levittown I think there's also a documentary about it on UA-cam it talks about the people at the time basically we're freaking out that a black family moved in in the fear of the future of the Town becoming racially diverse. Very nice video also have a happy holidays to the team of the Cold war channel
actually, the fear is of property value going down and crime going up, and riots going on. not an unreasonable fear - as evidence shows.
Yeah but in the documentary they debunked that argument as a concern for the people in the town as well as a few others I'm not saying it's always on a reasonable worry but I think that was used as one of the main causes to deny them to come to the town anyway
@@thomaschristopher8593 and now that is why you have NIMBYs deliberately inflating land values by blocking ANY housing project, even senior housing, from being built near their community. Screw them all.
@@thomaschristopher8593 that’s why you have credit checks. If you can’t afford to live there you can’t. No poor ass family is going to move to the middle Class suburbs
@@williamerazo3921 apples and oranges
Would you introduce “semiconductor industry” in Cold War? 😂
They sure will. It is an integral part of what made East Asia the powerhouses they became from the 1970s up until today.
New York seems pretty cool (if you were white) back when skyscrapers were novel, there were fewer cars, and it was full of everyone pre-suburbia.
Good work… 👍
Happy Xmas from Rome to Canada good bearded sir.
From Madrid to Rome Merry Christmas
@@andresalvarez5415 heeey. Do I know you from another channel hombre?
@@jstantongood5474 I move around
In-group preference is built into our DNA, no amount of liberalism can change that.
Sure. And Africans are even more tribal than Caucasians.
Seems accepted if differences are nuanced but not accepted when major.
Whites are the ONLY group on the planet that aren’t “ allowed” to live amongst themselves!
And much of that is their refusal to say: “ GTF outta my face”.
No for true Americans. We aren't all mean girls
Speaking of what you said at the end, will we now have an episode about indigenous peoples in Russia, more often in the "autonomous oblasts"?
How did the Levittown home get bought second hand? You guessed it ✡️✡️
Whatever Kenye lol
"To the beg the question" means to give an answer to a question that simply assumes the conclusion: When will the economy pick up? Answer: When business increases> THAT answer simply RESTATES the question with it being an answer. Some dictionaries now list "to raise a question", which of course arose due to the rapid spread of the ignorant use of the phrase.
White flight was necessary but unfortunate
Necessary at whose expense?
@@JeromeWade-lm8jh At their own expense. It costs a lot of money and takes an emotional toll to have to uproot one's family.
good morning and merry Christmas my fellow history lovers
As a non-American it is always so frustrating seeing American history. The US has always had massive potential, it has achieved so much and been at the forefront of so many amazing developments. But always there is the stain of racism soiling everything.
…what technological innovation was stifled by racism exactly? What do you mean massive potential? America leads in just about everything
@@looinrims It's a bit worrying that you are concerned about me soiling the good reputation of racism, but I'll humor you.
If you read the short comment carefully (or at all), I didn't say that racism hindered tecnological innovation, in fact I especially say that the US has been at "the forefront of so many amazing developments". The comment about racism isn't about that.
Think for example it like this:
'American athletes performed very well in the Berlin olympics. A historical moment that snubbed Hitler. But when the black athletes came back to the US they didn't get the same honor white athletes did, couldn't sleep in the same hotels and often had to enter through the back door of buildings.' That's what I mean with the shadow of racism soiling every American achievement.
But if you want to argue the point, I'd think it was self evident that since minorities have often being excluded from science and medicine, it has been harder for them to open businesses or buy homes etc. the US has never lived up to it's full potential by default.
The US being a leader in nearly everything? Sure, in things like military spending, gun violence and homelessness the US is way ahead of the rest of the developed world. Not so much in literacy, education in general, safety or democracy.
@@arttusepanheimo4909 I love how many times you strawman me, saying ‘you said x’ when I didn’t to call me racist, cool, I’ll address just one part to shut you up then go on with my day
By saying ‘potential’ you imply the potential hasn’t been reached, supposedly by racism, I’m just asking how the hell you could think that
But considering the nonsense you’ve peddled, you won’t even address what I said, hence the lying
@@looinrims I'm honored an important person such as yourself spares time to educate a lowlife such as me.
I didn't say 'you said x' once, let alone many times. It's difficult to strawman you when I wasn't talking about anything you said. The first sentence was about what you seemed to be implying. The rest was just explaining my earlier points further, just like you asked me to. I don't get your hostility.
You asked:
'What technological innovation was stifled because of racism?'
I answered:
'I didn't say technology was stifled because of racism. I said achievements were shadowed/soiled by the constant presence of racism.' And I gave an example.
You asked:
'How hasn't the US lived up to it's potential? It's a leader in almost everythin.'
I answered:
'By definition by excluding a part of society from innovation and the economy you aren't reaching your potential. And the US is not a leader in a lot of important metrics.' And I gave examples.
(I'm paraphrasing.)
I don't know how it could have been simpler, but apparently there was a communication problem.
@@arttusepanheimo4909 you know very little
I remember in the 80s and 90s my father commenting about how neighborhoods he grew up in are getting bad as more minorities were moving into them. We moved within the same city (in the south eastern US) several times into more exclusive, isolated, and gated neighborhoods. Black families were moving into the neighborhoods closest to the city, or on the side of town that was more affordable. 3-4 decades later those parts of town are utterly run down, crime-ridden and dilapidated. I can't help but feel like more honest methods of social integration half a century ago could have prevented the creation of "bad sides" to town where there's almost no hope in improving quality of life.
It’s because those areas lack common sense, general policing. If you are wealthy and can’t walk into a Walgreens without someone storming out stealing stuff, then the police do nothing about it, you’re incentivizing crime in your city. Crime breeds crime. Then these same people move out, the properties are bought up by investors, and rents go up on guess who? All the poor and minorities left in town. Governments and corporations are working hand in hand to destabilize race relations and stability.
With hindsight maybe, but who’s fault is it that people are violent criminals? Unless they were indoctrinated into that behavior (I wonder what kinda music glorifies that…) it’s no one’s fault but the criminal’s
Lets talk about YT pedophilia taking over America.
@@DK-lz7kg And how do you explain the fact that the richest black americans commit more crime than the poorest white americans?
When you realize that your urban people were being judged by the content of their character all along.
This is BS. Suburbs were added for veterans. Go find your racism somewhere else.
Not really.
🧐
It's crazy a simple active prejudice turned a small crack that could have been fixed into this massive chasm that we a still struggling to fill.
very interesting episode. A lot of discussion has been made about how todays gentrification is in a way similar to yesterdays white flight, where urban renewal projects have been undertaken for the sake of a 'repentant' white population moving back to the cities but in reality the undertaking of urban renewal was to eliminate the racial tensions that sparked decay in that neighborhood. The discussion on gentrification might be a video for "the Cold War 2" down the line lol
Suburbs are honestly where its at if you have a young family.
If your american. The rest of human civilization doesnt do that.
@@noobster4779 lmao Australians do that
@@noobster4779
More like the rest of human civilization CANT afford that.
Any decently well off family in any country will move to a suburb or suburb like equivalent when given the chance, otherwise, they are stuck to cramed apartments or row houses
@@KerboDrive they said human and civilization, not convict and hellhole
Video starts at the 2 minute mark
Let's remember WHY cities are bad compared to the burbs. Suburbs in the Northeast were built in the late 1800s to escape filth and urban crowding (if you think car exhaust is bad, try horse feces!). Cities were where you worked if you didn't have a choice, and as the crowded cores expanded with population those who could moved out. Light rail made this practical long before cars were common. Some of those classic pre-WWI (not WWII) suburbs remain mostly intact and they are beautiful. I grew up in one (Rutherford, NJ in Bergen County). What KEPT it beautiful IS single family housing! What kept it safe is gatekeeping bottom-feeders out.
What kept it beautiful is keeping out low income housing because low income adults are that through personal defects. The burbs were places where Americans who pursued self-betterment could flourish.
Know and understand people escaping overcrowding by spending our life savings would be crazy to destroy what WE built. Population growth is all bad except for the big developers selling property. Growth is crowding. Growth is crime. Growth is pollution. Growth is too many people competing for too few jobs. The US has plenty of cities that could be expanded but planning always focuses on making rich parasites even wealthier by cramming more people who don't know better (check the median US reading level) into places they will never afford and should not want to be by any sane economic metric.
The last part reminds me of an old soviet joke.
"Voice of America" asks the soviet "Radio Armenia":
"Can a soviet space engineer afford a car?"
"Er... and you lynch the blacks!"
I Don't buy the white flight dynamic completely, as this also happened across post war Europe, where there were no non-whites coming into urban areas. Considering how much more space, greenery, clean air and quality of life one had out side cities it can not be put down to race solely.
To this day people in the West generally would like to live in a more green place with better air, quiet etc. Just look at say Germany after unification. many people left inner cities and a building boom ensued with cookie cutter houses littering suburbia.
Or look at the UK post war. In Europe we had something called the "garden city" which was thought up during the 1910s in Germany and France. These were places with small houses with gardens for the working classes, yet close to factories. Again no blacks in sight.
It would be very easy to live in a city like New York at this time and live in a "white neighbourhood" I doubt it was a big driving force. Cars, bigger families, more money, television idealising suburbs would be bigger factors. African Americans made the same move at the same time for the same reasons.
One major difference between suburban planning in the US and Europe is that they also built suburbs with public transportation in mind. So the governments there made it easy for buses and trains to access the new suburbs. This is also the pattern that HK, Japan, Singapore, and other rising Asian economies followed from the 1960s onwards.
In the US you do NOT have that pattern, since they made suburbs to be as exclusive as possible to whites.
@@itsmenicci7003 I was alive then and those who could afford to and planned ahead (like my parents) escaped the cities anyway though white hoods remained. Suburban life was often amazingly better than a cold water flat (still very common in post-WWII US cities) in an old tenement even in a decent hood. Cities DETERIORATE until housing stock gets replaced which guarantees bust and boom cycles. The only way out is not to live in one so I don't.
If all the crime moves to one area then the non criminals are gonna leave the area
David, you are well aware the phrase “white flight” is completely misleading. All over the world and throughout history, groups have collected together with people like themselves, whether by race, income, education, religion, or any number of other characteristics. There is nothing unique when white people do it.
A century or so ago, when Polish immigrants began moving into various Detroit neighborhoods, blacks began moving out. The research of pioneering black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier showed long ago that Harlem and other black communities were internally divided, with people of different income, education, and behavior patterns living in distinctly different zones.
When Eastern European Jewish immigrants began arriving in the United States and some began moving into German Jewish neighborhoods in Chicago, the German Jews began moving out. Similar patterns have been found among all sorts of groups.
^ this user has high concentrations of lead in their bloodstream
In the rest of the world, that might be the case.
But US and Canadian urban and suburban planning was VERY different
@@ianhomerpura8937 I'm elated you've read the first sentence of my statement
@@genege6301 yep. I am also interested in reading these studies further, but I hope these are not behind some expensive paywall by Elsevier or JSTOR.
@@ianhomerpura8937 thomas sowell
The Suburbia most urbanists hate for its car dependence and "soullessness" is the reason why United States didn't face a terminal demography while evey other country that urbanized from a similar starting point is facing a demographic cliff. Falling TFR and collapsing of their birth rates below that has leads to a shrinkage of their(developed world) working age population.
(To the urbanists in the comment section) So instead of rabidly barking at the wrong tree perhaps appreciate the suburbs that have maintained the population growth lest you are foaming at the mouth wanting to experience a Japanese style lost decade . Atleast the Germans had the EU and to shove their exports into.
What is at stake is more than just the vapid concerns of an obnoxious cadre of nuisances who have far exceeded the limit of any kind of reasonable or credible criticism they might have towards suburbs.(Suburbia definitely has room for improvement but remains absolutely indispensable).
Nowadays what I find most disturbing is that in West Bloomfield Michigan blacks are moving in, I wonder were the white residents are fleeing to?
And the Worst Urban planning disaster to date
Hi sir can you pls have a topic about Soviet holidays during cold war and lifestyles of Soviet elites thank you
I'm glad my parents moved to Grosse Pointe from Detroit. I was afforded an excellent education in the school system there. This likely wouldn't have happened had we stayed in Detroit because, according to my parents, the quality of education was going down even in the mid-fifties (they were both graduates of Detroit high schools). Grosse Pointe eventually desegregated with no screaming or demonstrations, etc. Yes, it's still majority-white, but every census, the percentage of other groups rises. I think a lot of that is due to financial reasons rather than racial, since the Grosse Pointes--yes, there are five of them--are still pretty pricey. Considering that I grew up in Grosse Pointe Park, which when I was young was exclusively white (1950s-1969), the village now has a population which is 7.5 percent African American (as of the 2010 census), still a ways to go, but a good start.
My parents moved to Gosse Pointe Park when they married, because they wanted good opportunities educationally for their children. By the time my mum died, our neighbourhood in Grosse Pointe Shores already had 2 or 3 African American families and my mum just took it as changing times.
Did a lot of racism drive flight to the suburbs? Undoubtedly, but so did a desire to see one's children have it better than they did (remember, many young parents of the era grew up during the Great Depression, so they remembered the privations they suffered and wanted better for their children.
I'm encouraged to see that Grosse Pointe has come as far as it has in the 50 years since I lived there full-time. Anyhow, just a look from someone who grew up in the era when the suburbs were getting started.
Why is it that having better public schools depend on the property taxes in the area? Can't they just pool all property taxes by state and distribute them equally among the school districts?
There is one critical way to make people really want to live in high density places. Just pass a law MAKING builders put SOUND PROOFING between every apartment and condo unit. The one most important thing that makes single family houses desirable is PRIVACY!!
Americans liked cities and urban development until immigrants and particular black Americans started moving in.. first it started with “they’re taking our jobs”, then unwritten segregation and disenfranchisement, then white flight once automobiles became widely accessible due to American global economic hegemony following WWII.
why are you living in america instead of liberia?
The real estate agents (called Blockbusters) in Detroit would go door to door with the sales pitch sell your house before the blacks cause your property to depreciate ! If caused a lot of fear.
Oversimplified: people tend to move out of areas of high crime. Tada! White flight.
I dont wanna hear it. I'm from Camden, NJ and I DEFENITELY didn't grow up in the suburbs!
Was the flight justified? Look At Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore today
I’m gonna to let you in on some facts here I don’t know if u skipped them bc they don’t fit your narrative, 1st the gov promoted the growth of suburbs to get the population dispersed from the cities in case of nuclear attack the suburbs are usual outside of the instakill zone of nuclear weapons. Now for “white flight” the whites didn’t move when backs moved in, the case of Detroit they didn’t leave until after the 67 riots and the city started busing kids across the city for school instead of letting. Them walk a block to school their local schools. Would you rather watch your kid walk across the street to school ……. One that you probably went to as a child as well or watch them get on a bus for a 20 mile trip to a school you know nothing about. And lastly if it was just bc “blacks moved in” tell me why gross point is the richest city in Michigan and is literally across a street from Detroit and burned down homes and vacant lots ?
Weird because nowadays suburbanites hate the very thought of children walking or biking to and from school. Everyone nowadays had to be chauffeured by car.
No independence for children I guess.
@@ianhomerpura8937 the need for suburbia goes far beyond something as mundane as independence of children. The fact that they exist is more important. Urban areas have the worst fertility rates amongst all the different forms of settlements. Suburbs provide a healthy balance and support for maintaining the population growth.
The burbs LONG predate the Cold War especially in the Northeast where light rail made them practical in the late 1800s as escape from amazingly polluted cities. Most modern Americans never grew up with smog let alone "killer smog" and almost none living with horsedrawn urban transport. Many of those rail links and their stations are in constant use today.
LOL they get mad when you move away due to crime, and they get mad when you want to move in the make the area nice. Can’t win.
Who are "they"?
@@nyastalgiakitten 🤷🏿🤷🏿🤷🏿
@@TheNecessaryEvil say it with your chest whitie
@@nyastalgiakitten stay mad and down. Look in the mirror to see who to blame
@@TheNecessaryEvil what did I do? It's sensitive snowflakes like you who run away when you see someone with melanin in their skin, you're to blame for cities falling apart
Not a single reference to the actual facts that led to " white flight" .
@@cody4916 Thank you. Nowadays, speaking the truth is an act of bravery in of itself
Americans moved out of cities because cities had no housing for them after ww2. Cities had been suburbanizing since the 1900's or the with birth of streetcars and industry. By the 1950's the American middle class needed housing and cities could not provide the amount of single family homes, good schools, clean air, green space, safe neighborhoods and ease of transportation that suburbs or "suburban style" areas of cities could provide. The American middle class was also wealthier, today people still move for the same reasons they did since the 50's and much less since the dawn of industry. Cities that could accommodate the growing middle class grew and so did their suburbs, cities that could not, stagnated or lost population and their suburbs still grew.
I hate suburbia
It truly is a wasteland.
Yes it wiped out the important wildlife for wild animals
I do too.
Great summary on the racist origins of suburbia
The move to the crabgrass frontier.
And eventually, the racists run out of room to run. You can only move so far from the city center before setting up new suburbs becomes impractical.
@@BSJinxThat is when the guns come out, as demonstrated in a suburb of St. Louis a few years ago.
What about the Jewish community?
They've always chosen to excel and work together so their communities remain cohesive. When you can afford to leave a city that's the smart move and their traditions always demanded education (no one else's do in the US) so they bought into the burbs, a few old Orthodox urban hoods excepted. Groups who consider ignorance shameful do better than those who take pride in it (most poor groups whites included).
Suburban lifestyle is what the movie "American Beauty" is about... 😍
William Levitt, the grandson of a rabbi, built homes that would not be sold to fellow Jewish people. Yes.
A wonderful historical coverage of white flight..in USA 🇺🇸 during early times of First Cold War 🥶 ...this accurate, realistically introducing 👌...showing exact truthfulness, trustful of ( cold war ) introduces
How big a factor was car ownership?
I imagine that before cars, living in suburbs - at least, American-style low-density suburbs - would have been difficult. I also imagine that owning a car would be more difficult for most black families, who were poorer on average than whites.
Before cars light rail BUILT the early burbs, but US public school education imploded (thank the left) in the 1970s so that's little known today. Much of the Northeast is still served by suburban/interurban light rail (which railfan channels chronicle in detail). Light rail did not discriminate and fares were cheap.
Tens of millions of Americans still commute to cities on those passenger rail systems. Many of their 1800s train stations were preserved and remain in use.
Federal school bussing laws were one of the many sparks that lit the fuse of White Flight. Diversity is our greatest weakness and not strength. It’s why the country is falling apart today.
What is wrong with you? 😂
What is wrong with you? 😂
A mutt is a far healthier dog than a purebred because of its genetic diversity. Diversity is a strength, not a weakness. Only racists decry diversity.
Is it true that the big three car manufacturers in Detroit, ford, Chrysler and General Motors that had a very high percentage of black Americans employed there moved to the suburbs when they retired? Sounds like black flight to me.
min 7.it has a neurotically nasty ideological flavor such I I witnessed in the late 60's and early 70's at Stanford. This bit has more to do with a nasty attack on the population by embittered academics who seldom had the ability to function well outside of the protected confines of an academic setting. Re the 'paranoia" about communists we do know that several thousand people in the Roosevelt & Truman administration were working as agents of the USSR. As a gay man I can attest to the persecytion of gay people in that and prior eras by liberals, by progressives, by communists as well as by others.
K can’t stand being in a city. Noisy, crowded, rude people everywhere, crime, pollution, litter, homeless people, gangs, junkies. I can’t even think of one positive for any city.
I think the Soviet Union was just as discriminatory as the United States in their housing policies
Soviet poster on the wall НЕ БОЛТАЙ 😀👍