Levittown

1 comment on Hacker News

1. NeutraleesmithJul 3, 2018

   You wrote "The government subsidized the shit out of suburbia in the cold war days for a reason" and implied that it was to decentralize the US population as a defensive strategy for survival after a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.

   Given the absence of any evidence for your hypothesis, and the mountain of evidence which shows other reasons for the US subsidization of suburbanization, why should I believe you?

   You ask "What subsidy would be large enough to get the typical urbanite to abruptly go rural?"

   If there was a post-war goal to encourage the US population to decentralize, as a defensive mechanism against a thermonuclear exchange, then that question is irrelevant.

   The question should have been "how do we prevent rural flight?", that is, "how do we keep rural and small town residents from moving to likely targets?".

   Instead, your question seems to concern how to get someone now to go rural. But I'm asking about the Cold War days.

   You wrote: "gas and groceries would be in the same bucket as netflix or nintendo. Keeping enough people around to say that you still have a country would be the new gold standard."

   Yes, that is my point. If you want people to survive a nuclear exchange, the you should set up the infrastructure so it has a dual-purpose use once things like gas and groceries are more dreams than anything else.

   You want to encourage people to live in small rural towns? Have health centers within walking distance. These are useful now, because people leave if they don't have health care, and they would become critical once there is no more gas to go to regional hospitals.

   Make sure there are schools, make sure there are local social centers. These help keep towns alive, and will be the nucleus of the new life post-war, because kids will still need an education (during the winter months when there's nothing else to do), and a place to handle local politics and courts.

   Did this happen? No. Instead of subsidizing the existing distributed population, we subsidized living in more centralized target zones that were less robust to even pre-nuclear fire bombing.

   You wrote ""... to favor white people" is your phrase, not mine".

   I don't follow your comment. It's not just my phrase. It's the standard view of government and private housing industry practices during that time. Levittown, for example, was a whites-only suburb. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York :

   > William Levitt attempted to justify their decision to only sell homes to white families by saying that it was in the best interest for business.[12] He claimed their actions were not discriminatory but intended to maintain the value of their properties. The company explained that it was not possible to reduce racial segregation while they were attempting to reduce the housing shortage. .. They believed that potential white buyers would not want to buy a house in Levittown if they were aware that they would have black neighbors.

   While Shelley v. Kraemer decided that those covenants were unconstitutional, it took another 20 years for the Fair Housing Act to prohibit housing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

   In the meanwhile, practices like redlining, and the creation of interstates through traditionally black neighborhoods, prevented the buildup of black wealth that white neighborhoods got.

   This isn't some "nth-order effect" but deliberate policy (that is, n == 1).

   You write: "seeded by one defense goal or another"

   We have a longer history of US goals - military and otherwise - being directed by the interests of large capital owners, starting with the slave-holding Founding Fathers.