Redlining is awful, but it's sad that is really the only topic of discussion in that article. I'd like to know more about how they turned out, how they were received at the time, etc.
The wikipedia link above (that I assume you are talking about) says in part:
Built after World War II for returning white veterans and their new families, the communities offered attractive alternatives to cramped central city locations and apartments.
This is not accurate. World War II was the de facto end of The Great Depression and to their shock they were able to produce "more guns and more butter" because unemployment rates had been as high as 30 percent in the previous decade.
There was a tremendous need for housing. During the Great Depression, some people lived in the basement of their house and rented out the house to try to not lose the house. Others moved every thirteen months because if you could pay your rent on time and in full for twelve months in a row, you could get the thirteenth months free.
Levittown was the birth of the modern suburb and it helped resolve a massive need for new housing. It was so successful, we are still haunted by this ghost of Christmas past.
The entire country turned its collective will away from the newly finished war and towards building new housing. They created new policies and financing mechanisms and to this day it is challenging to build anything in the US other than suburban-style single family detached homes because our entire financing and policy infrastructure and collective subconscious supports the idea that a home in the 'burbs is the ideal home.
So we have grown 1950s-style suburban homes to be ugly homes on steroids, a la McMansions, and can't manage to build much else and then we wonder why there are so many homeless.
We are victims of the overwhelming success of Levittown.
I'm aware that racism tended to exclude people of color. I don't think this had much to do with it being the suburbs. If we had built towers of apartments in downtowns, I imagine redlining would have still kept out people of color.
Racism is not why they were suburbs. Them being suburbs is not primarily why people of color were excluded. Racism is people being shitty and they were going to be shitty in this particular way in that particular era regardless of the style of home which helped fill the overwhelming need this country had for additional housing and it finally had the means to build some of that for at least some people.
That's an...interesting take on redlining that avoids the shitty parts of the aforementioned "shittiness". The issue isn't simply that the shittiness exists, but how it's lead to current economic outcomes.
No, it doesn't. It just says that hating on suburbs because they are associated with racism doesn't fix it, so please don't get all up in my business about how much you associate suburbs with white supremacist shittiness.
That shittiness would have been associated with any housing type they built at that time to solve the housing issue. Sorry for the negative association and I wish we would find a path forward on more diversity in housing options, more walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods, more genuinely affordable small spaces, more homes where you can easily live without a car, etc. instead of remaining mired in this same argument about who to blame and who to hate on.
Hating on me doesn't get more housing built. Full stop.
So please kindly find something else to say about my comment. Because this take is not productive.
Moral grandstanding on behalf of historically questionable narratives doesn’t get more housing built either, no matter how much righteous indignation is feigned.
