Cities do suck dick though.
Too loud, too many people, not enough trees.
Cities do suck dick though.
Too loud, too many people, not enough trees.
The fear of the cities actually traces its roots back to the establishment of the (overwhelmingly) white suburban "middle class", which was a product of Jim Crow era legislation and laws along with redlining and white flight.
I have a whole bit about how this happened, if anyone is interested in hearing more about it.
Please share!
Alright here goes:
So at the end of WWII you have this influx of veterans returning to the US.
This posed a social problem that, in a post-WWI country, was often disastrous. The early proto-fascist and pro-fascist paramilitaries that wracked the Weimar Republic and helped bring the Nazis to power and to intimidate/suppress the opponents of the Nazis (along with terrorizing German Jews etc.) were made up by a majority of returned WWI veterans who were pretty fucked by the war and often struggled to find work and reintegrate into a post-war society, although they knew how to conduct war and they were roaming the streets, so it created a powderkeg of malcontents. These WWI veterans across Europe caused a great deal of political strife throughout the interwar period.
I haven't read any sources where the US government was specifically aware of the political problems posed by veterans from WWI failing to find work and to reintegrate into society, thus causing political strife, but it'd be hard to imagine that they weren't aware of this and that thus that their policies towards WWII veterans weren't influenced by trying to pacify and neutralise this potential political problem.
So WWII veterans return to the US and the US creates the GI Bill which was a massive welfare program designed to bolster the US economy domestically while also providing for the needs of the WWII veterans.
A large part of the bill was aimed at providing low-interest rate, no down payment home loans to veterans and the funding preferenced new builds.
This created a massive subsidy for the construction industry and it was the Levitt brothers who used this influx of funding to create low cost, mass produced housing outside of the city areas, the most famous of which was Levittown town (humble folks, those Levitt brothers eh?)
This was essentially the advent of suburbia.
Because of the low cost that housing loans were provided at, it was actually cheaper for veterans to buy new houses in the suburbs that were springing up than it was to live in the city.
Although, this is post-war America we're talking about so obviously this is when Jim Crow laws were still gripping the country and, of course, the GI Bill catered to the political interests of those who supported Jim Crow.
Effectively, what this meant was that the GI Bill massively preferenced white veterans and it actively and passively discouraged non-white veterans from benefitting from the bill.
As one example of this, in the New York and northern New Jersey suburbs 67,000 mortgages were insured by the G.I. Bill, but fewer than 100 were taken out by non-whites.
So, basically this was economic apartheid.
Not only do we have the creation of the suburbs and all the car-dependence that comes with it happening right there, we also see the emergence of the so-called "middle class" which was overwhelmingly white in its makeup because this housing freed up disposable income and it fostered intergenerational wealth from the investment into property that suburbia allowed for.
Although people of colour languished behind and were excluded from property ownership through the design of this bill and redlining, so they tended to stay stuck in inner city slums which cost a lot more for housing than a cheapz subsidised home loan in the suburbs offered.
Over time there was a strong push to "clean up" the inner city and to eradicate slums. You see these massive housing projects developing from the 1930s as cities became gentrified, and perhaps the most famous example of public housing projects is the much-maligned Pruitt-Igoe project (which has a fantastic documentary on it called The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.)
These projects concentrated poverty and "criminality" (if you'll excuse the shitty term for the sake of my vain attempt at brevity here) due to complex issues of economic and social exclusion, intergenerational trauma, drug/alcohol abuse etc. and they also were extremely exploitative. Some residents of Pruitt-Igoe were spending up to 3/4s of their income exclusively on housing, which perpetuated the cycle of poverty for black Americans.
So you have this dual effect of the middle class emerging and creating generational opportunity and wealth in the nascent (white) middle class while people of colour are excluded, stuck in expensive slums, and then they are shifted out of the slums and into public housing which was arguably worse than the slums in many ways as it disrupted the established communities and displaced local businesses in order for property speculators (especially slumlords) and property developers to cash in on the gentrification of the inner city.
Damn, this is good. You should repost it to c/effort.
Thanks for the compliment!
Your comment made me realise that I'm a massive dummy and, I think because my head has been completely immersed in other subjects, I entirely forgot about the Bonus Army events that occurred post-WWI in the US so there actually is direct evidence that the US government was completely and acutely aware of the potential social and political ramifications of veterans returning from the war and failing to find work and reintegrate into society can have. There's a decent argument for the events surrounding the Bonus Army being a causative factor for the downfall of Hoover's presidency too.
Living in DC is wild because the way people in the VA and MD suburbs post about it, you’d think our situation is indistinguishable from Port Au Prince.
This is so true but corporate media has such a grip on this topic. Sure conservatives are scared shitless, sure. I live in a small town and want to move to a small city or a big city if I can. I'm scared too! The messaging that cities are more dangerous started when I was a kid and has never stopped. It's hard to find positive takes and resources about why cities are safer / not dangerous.
They fear what they don’t know.
A guy got murdered in his car near a place I was working in Miami. I saw a guy pee on a burger king in LA. I saw a young woman’s coochie in a park in San Francisco. I met some die hard TЯ卐m₽ supporters in Pensilvania. My father almost got car jacked in Chicago.
Shit happens all over the place all the time. More shit happens where there are more people.
It's more than just not knowing - a lot of popular media feeds the idea that cities are all warzones directly in to their heads, making up whatever details are needed to keep up the narrative. The average chud lives in a comprehensive media bubble telling them that everything is NYC 1970s bad but worse, all the time, when the exact opposite is true - Cities are safer than they've ever been in the US, overall violent crime rates continue to fall, Cities are generally not the most violent places in America by a good margin.
It especially sucks when the urban fear mongering finally lets way to the shittiest politicians screwing over the city.
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Gossip posts go in c/gossip. Don't post low-hanging fruit here after it gets removed from c/gossip