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Comment by Zach_the_Lizard | Hacker News Reader

>The US is a country where it's very difficult to live without a car, except in certain major cities.

This is by design. As I mentioned in another comment, there was this 1950s utopian ideal amongst American planners that we'd all own cars, we could live tens of miles away from the city where we worked, modern planning would ensure traffic was amazing, and we could avoid all that nasty density business and all the 'others' that come with it.

No longer would white men have to live near black men. We could all just drive away to the suburbs where restrictive covenants meant we couldn't even sell to black people and restrictive zoning forcing large lot single family homes would ensure that, even if we could legally sell to them, they wouldn't be able to afford to live there anyways.

Racially motivated covenants can't be enforced any longer, but the land use control mechanisms put in place to ensure no poor people move to the pristine suburb still exist.

It is unfortunate that the Supreme Court upheld these laws, even sharing in their legal opinions that apartments are evil and a drain on society, so of course we should ban them.

If they had not upheld these laws, or these laws did not exist in the first place, I'm sure the US would have maintained its public transit friendly character to a great extent. Even LA had one of the largest, if not the largest, rail systems in the world. Imagine that.

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> As I mentioned in another comment, there was this 1950s utopian ideal amongst American planners that we'd all own cars, we could live tens of miles away from the city where we worked, modern planning would ensure traffic was amazing

It's interesting to note that these people were the techno-optimists of their time.

>It's interesting to note that these people were the techno-optimists of their time.

The thing is, people knew in this time period how inefficient cars were for moving people. Cars take up way more space than equivalent public transit and this was used in advertisements for streetcar companies (who were getting killed by congestion caused by cars).

Specifically: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7199/6853187005_135a28db2f_z.j...

The US is enormous. If we're all truly living far away from the cities then the space occupied by cars is not relevant. That wasn't their mistake - it was the energy costs and corresponding pollution.

This time, we'll get it right for sure.

Is is possible that some just don't like living in tight urban quarters? I'm not exactly sure why the race card must be played. I know plenty of folks who simply want big houses with big yards in which to spread out. It might even be innate human nature to not wish to live confined.

>Is is possible that some just don't like living in tight urban quarters? I'm not exactly sure why the race card must be played.

Sure is. I'm totally OK with people living this lifestyle.

What I don't appreciate is when these people take over land use policies in all of America and make this lifestyle required, outside of handful of pockets that had the fortune to be born before this lifestyle existed. I don't like that these policies have tremendous effects on house prices, the cost of transportation, and economic growth nationwide (to the point that economists from various viewpoints oppose them).

I would likewise be opposed to policies that legally mandated all people live in environments that look like Manhattan. Not everyone enjoys that lifestyle, and it would have massive ramifications on all aspects of society.

What I support is a relaxing of zoning and land use policies so that they become about the efficient movement of people and goods and public safety, which is how they started out.

I do not support land use policies that are meant to force me to live a certain way. Let the me decide how I want to live. Don't tell me what I like or should like.

The race card was played in real estate and metropolitan planning long ago, to great detrimental effect on blacks. You can't separate the creation of the American suburb from America's 20th century racial history.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

Also:

http://wpsa.research.pdx.edu/meet/2012/greer.pdf

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...

>> No longer would white men have to live near black men.

Today's youth think the suburbs was about race now? It was about a lot of people don't actually like living in a concrete jungle, that was what it was about.

>Today's youth think the suburbs was about race now? It was about a lot of people don't actually like living in a concrete jungle, that was what it was about.

Race was a huge motivator. Why else would we have racial covenants? Funny how the growth of suburbs came at roughly the same time that schools started integrating and integration accelerated suburban growth. We had Federal suburban housing subsidies available almost exclusively for whites.

We have a name for this phenomenon: White Flight.

Pre-1950s we had racial covenants, but we didn't social engineer lifestyles in suburbs to build them around cars. Streetcar suburbs for instance looked similar to the cities they were connected to. Smaller and less dense, but walkable urban places in their own right. Look at places like Del Ray, Alexandria, Virginia for an example.

In cities themselves we tended to build highways in poor, mostly minority, neighborhoods. The white neighborhoods wouldn't be leveled nearly as often.

I think you might be confusing crime and race although they happen to be tied closely together. My family decided to moved out of the city when they were followed home one day. Not sure race had anything to do with it but crime definitely did.

You are ignoring the key part of what he said. Why else would there be racial covenants explicitly excluding non-caucasians?

Sure, fear of crime was one of the mechanisms of white flight, but American fear of crime has a big racial component to it. Historically, America has kept black people poor, confined them to poor neighborhoods, and then blamed blackness for the high crime rates that go with poverty and desperation.

This game continues today. Donald Trump recently tweeted something with totally made up statistics blaming black people for murders of whites:

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/11/that-racist-trump-tweet-abou...

It wasn't just wrong and it wasn't just racist. It was literally neo-nazi propaganda.

I wonder if the guy is stupidly ignorant or willfully ignorant. He has said some really despicable things.

The scary part is that he has gained a large following of people who think he's just saying "what everyone's thinking". There are many, many people in the U.S. who hear what he says, and then think, "Yeah! That's so true!" on their gut instinct without having any background knowledge on the subject. I'm living in the U.S. and it's a scary momentum.

""Yeah! That's so true!" on their gut instinct without having any background knowledge on the subject. I'm live in the U.S. and it's a scary momentum."

This happens on the other side of the fence, and no one bats an eye about it. In fact, they call it democracy, or something like that.

Snarkiness aside, if these people agree with him, then that is their vote. Really, we can't have democracy if we don't call it democracy when people vote the way we don't like them to. It's the same as free-speech: we can't suddenly abandon it if we don't like what's being said.

Right, but this conflation comes up with most political arguments and I think it's a straw man. I don't think that people shouldn't have the right to follow Trump, but it's also true that people are free to hate certain types of people. That doesn't mean it isn't scary.

Populism does have both right and left forms (and others besides), but that doesn't mean that it isn't inimical to democracy. It is not hard to find historical examples of populists who have used the vote to seize power. Democracy is a lot more than voting, and it's certainly more than having one last free vote for a populist who ends free voting.

There's also a particularly ugly history of populists stirring up racial hatred as a means to power, which I think is especially dangerous.

I don't think Trump is really in either of those categories. He's optimized for feeling confident and saying things that (some) people want to hear.

It's not that he's lying, because he doesn't even know what the truth is. I also think he doesn't know that he doesn't know that. In this regard, I think of him as like a sophisticated bot: he doesn't track input in terms of true or false facts, but in terms of word-strings to say that are useful for his particular purposes. Any belief necessary to sound convincing is generated from the word strings.

My grandfather was a master salesman and as best I can tell, this was his basic approach to managing reality.

I think the reason these threads about suburbs explode is because people who grew up in suburbs that have never had restrictive covenants and have nothing whatsoever to do with racism feel personally attacked. Plus as another commenter said, not everyone wants to live in a concrete jungle. So if someone wants to have a back yard and not hear constant traffic noise, let them.

I can understand why they'd feel that way, but a request to acknowledge the actual facts of history is not actually a personal attack. It's frustrating when people take it that way, as it makes the discussion about white people's feelings, thus reinforcing the notion that the white person's narrative is and should be the dominant one.

You're still assuming race where none is given when you describe suburban feelings as "white people's feelings". It's unhelpful to the cause of racial equality and righting past wrongs to talk about the "white person's narrative" as if that's what I'm doing here. My narrative isn't white, black, brown, red, yellow, green, purple, or rainbow; it's just mine. So let's just talk about people as people and their lives as they want to describe them, rather than in terms of racial narratives.

Suburbs are broadly white. Many of them were established to be explicitly white. Some older, inner suburbs, which have become more diverse, are now experiencing white flight of their own. Suburban feelings tend to be white people's feelings. It's a generalization, but as a white guy who when to school in the 'burbs, I'm comfortable with that.

> My narrative isn't white, black, brown, red, yellow, green, purple, or rainbow; it's just mine.

If you narrative is American, race is an inescapable part of that. Saying your narrative has no race is basically to say that it's white. We white people can talk as if race doesn't exist because we have made whiteness the default, the perspective, the unmarked case. But non-white people in America don't talk like that.

If you're looking for an expanded version of how this works, search for critiques of "I don't see race", which has been thoroughly examined and found wanting.

I don't find this narrative compelling. People naturally mention the things that make them different from those around them. White people living in Taiwan might talk about being white in Taiwan. White nerds in a white neighborhood talk about being nerds more than being white. This has nothing to do with racial domination.

If White Man's Burden motivates you to make the world better then so be it, but I find the idea incredibly divisive and at the height of hubris.

Well, running with the nerd example, non-nerds never talk about being non-nerds while the ostracize the nerds. They can treat nerds as weird and other and never think of themselves as a particular thing other than "normal". They don't have to think about that because they dominate the dialog and become the unmarked case.

That's why, e.g., people on the autism spectrum recently came up with the term "neurotypical", so that they could try to create an equal footing in the discourse. In that construction, aspies and neurotypicals are just different kinds of people, both equally "normal".

Casting what I'm saying as "White Man's Burden" is either incredibly ignorant or a dick move, and I can't tell which. But to be clear, I'm up to the opposite.

The whole "White Man's Burden" [1] shtick rests upon the notion that white people are better, and therefore should help the benighted dark peoples. I, on the other hand, think races are fundamentally equal, and it's only an accident of history that leaves me with more privilege. I'm thus using it here to educate white people ignorant of the US's long history of ingrained racial prejudice.

Non-white people need no education on the topic. In the same way that nerds are forced to understand what nerdiness means to non-nerds, non-white people are forced to understand white notions of race, even as most white people see themselves as typical, average, default, "normal" and so never think about the topic in any depth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man's_Burden

This is probably one of the most insightful threads i've read on hacker news in the entire year of 2015. Reasonable and positive discourse explaining racial disparity and discrimination. At the same time, expressing the poignancy of the topic without woe is me tripe. Job well done sir... Job well done.

So are you saying higher crime rates in those areas is caused by poor people or black people? Because you're not saying that there isn't more crime where black people live...

I am saying higher crime rates in those areas are caused by endemic structural and personal white racism.

>Why else would there be racial covenants explicitly excluding non-caucasians?

Late to the party but I think Jews were also usually excluded.

It goes a lot deeper than that, even.

Racism was an early motivator behind minimum wage laws [1],[2]. It was also the origin of gun control [3]. Funny how the passage of time can turn our perspective in different ways.

[1] http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/16/the-racist-history-of-the-...

[2] http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2718/racist_origins_of...

[3] http://www.constitution.org/cmt/cramer/racist_roots.htm

Today's olds also think the suburbs were about race. E.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-teachers-07.htm is

http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1017_reg.html

People who think it was only about wanting to live with a little more greenery around are mainly white suburbanites who haven't looked at the history.

    mainly white suburbanites who haven't looked at the history.

Many of them are mainly white suburbanites who are uncomfortable with the implications of the history, and choose rather to ignore it or paper it over (with "well, our family was different because...).

Perfectly understandable, of course.

Oh, definitely. And so much of what they hear doesn't fit with the actual history, so it's easy to ignore their first encounters with the facts as weird aberrations. I was shocked when I finally learned this stuff.

You may want to look at Redlining which for example controlled who got mortgages or not based on race.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

> In the United States, redlining is the practice of denying services, either directly or through selectively raising prices, to residents of certain areas based on the racial or ethnic makeups of those areas. While some of the most famous examples of redlining regard denying financial services such as banking or insurance,[2] other services such as health care [3] or even supermarkets,[4] can be denied to residents to carry out redlining.[5]

I have found it very interesting to inspect the redlining maps from this era -- many of the divisions they reflected and enforced up to the 1960s-1970s are still loosely in place today, right down to the "that's the wrong side of the street" level. (http://www.urbanoasis.org/projects/holc-fha/digital-holc-map...)

Further to your point, another practice that re-distributed whites to the suburbs, to the benefit of shady property developers, is blockbusting. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting) It also had nothing to do with green lawns and everything to do with racism.

It's American parochialism. Suburbs, highways, and cars also exist in countries that don't have the US's unique racial history.

Suburbs, highways, and cars exist outside the US as I can attest (I used to live in Japan), but they are not the same suburbs and highways. Compare relatively car centric Naha, Japan to Houston. Very different development patterns because Japan doesn't have the same restrictions that America has. The car is not held above all other modes in Japan, efficiency be damned.

Some places have imported the American car centric suburb, but they will learn over time the lesson America has started to learn.

That cars enable upward mobility and easy access to jobs devoid of the ever reaching control from the central planning agencies?

More power to them.

That cars block upward mobility because of the great costs of vehicle, upkeep, fuel, and parking.

If you don't live in a state where insurance is absurdly expensive, don't live somewhere gas is absurdly expensive that is also very spread out (California, Alaska) and aren't insistent upon driving something new you can easily have a reliably car for under $3k or even under $2k and drive it for ~$500/yr in various fees (insurance) before gas. Add in a $120 set of tires and rims every other year (because you don't buy new, you buy used). If you live in a blue collar neighborhood maintenance usually costs next to nothing because you trade services with your neighbors or church congregation or have relatives or close friends that will do things at cost.

If you're not trying to visibly live the suburban upper middle class lifestyle personal freedom of movement can be had relatively cheaply.

If you can walk to work, shoes can be had for under $100, much cheaper than even the cheapest car. This same pair of shoes can even last more than a year and would be needed regardless of mode of transportation.

If you can bike to work, a cheap crappy bike can be acquired off Craigslist for at most a couple hundred.

If you're in a place like NYC, a monthly subway pass is roughly $120 and can handle all of your travel needs for the whole month, not just travel to and from work. No need to shell out $2K - $3K up front; that much money could pay for travel for over a year on the NYC subway and buses. You won't have to worry about your car getting stolen, getting in an accident, break downs, traffic, etc.

>If you're not trying to visibly live the suburban upper middle class lifestyle personal freedom of movement can be had relatively cheaply.

If you're not trying to force everyone into an autocentric lifestyle, then freedom of moment can be had for lower prices, or even free if walking to work is possible.

Agreed. And for comparison, AAA has the average annual cost to own and operate a car at $8698 this year:

http://newsroom.aaa.com/2015/04/annual-cost-operate-vehicle-...

> ~$500/yr in various fees (insurance) before gas. Add in a $120 set of tires and rims every other year (because you don't buy new, you buy used). If you live in a blue collar neighborhood maintenance usually costs next to nothing because you trade services with your neighbors or church congregation or have relatives or close friends that will do things at cost.

So, 560$/year without gas? 522.26$ a year is public transit for me.

So I’d save 40$ a year, plus all the gas.

And my commute times are lower, I’m never stuck in traffic, and even if the commute might be long on some days, I can continue working or browsing the web during it.

And carry groceries for you and the rest of your family home via shoes/bike/public transit.

Which is not an issue, because I pass a grocery store every day, so I can buy every day only a few items, meaning I never have to carry much.

And if I want to buy furniture – these are a thing: https://yeswecandoalmostanythingbybike.files.wordpress.com/2... (Or I can just rent a car).

I’ve been doing this for over a year now, no issues.

On the uni campus is a small mall, too, or I can take 2 bus stations to the downtown area where I can literally buy anything, and it’s easy to transport, too.

Hell, I’ve seen 2 students who bought one of these https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Handtruc... and transported 3 boxes of beer with them in the bus.

Lots of old people use normal hand trolleys for transporting groceries via transit or by foot.

There are trailers for bikes.

It’s really not an issue. (Also, while still living with my parents, we all buy our own stuff ourselves – even my 12yo sister does so. That reduces the amounts one person has to buy, too)

> That cars enable upward mobility and easy access to jobs devoid of the ever reaching control from the central planning agencies?

Suburbs have extreme central planning. Go peruse your local town's zoning and land use ordinances. You'll see exactly the number of parking spaces you must provide, exactly how big your lawn must be at a minimum, how many apartments you can have in an apartment building (or if it's even allowed to build an apartment building), whether or not you can charge for parking, and even where it's legal to walk.

No, cars didn't free you from central planning. They enslaved you to it and tricked you into thinking cars are free market transportation.

If I did not have a vehicle I would be forced to live along a route dictated by the likes of yourself. Whereupon I would be forced to choose jobs that would be only along the transit route; whereupon rents / prices for residential and commercial ownership increases as more people compete for a route oriented locations.

Your last line of enslavement is quite amusing when logic is applied: Telling the rat that it is in a clear jar that it is not free is demeaning, but who is telling the rat this; a fellow rat who is also enslaved in a clear jar.

The suburbs were about a lot of things (some were built in the 30s as utopian projects by the US Government) but mass suburbanization was driven by FHA loans to veterans, which were not available to blacks.

> Today's youth think the suburbs was about race now? It was about a lot of people don't actually like living in a concrete jungle, that was what it was about.

Ugh. You realize that people can do things for more than one reason?

For that matter, "people" isn't monolithic. One person can have a mix of reasons, and a different person can have an entirely different mix of reasons.

For real? Did you not learn about white flight in high school?

That doesn't surprise me. I grew up (non-white, children of recent immigrants) in a white-flight created midwest suburb. For obvious reasons, they didn't teach us about white flight in school. I learned about it from white adults in the community who did leave the city for racially motivated reasons.

Historians don't tend to agree. White Flight is a well-studied and well-documented phenomenon, as much a part of our history as the Red Scare and other cultural memes of the 20th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

Could then-suburbs be a result of socio-econmic divide rather than racism? Poor people / minorities get left behind. Maybe a then-bonus was homogenous grouping (which, historically, people tend to prefer), but it seems that a driving factor would be to get out of crowded space. The covenants, yeah, racist people did and do exist, but was that the majority? In your linked Wikipedia, it says that the desegregation of schools happened much earlier than the White Flight, and that many whites stayed and, sometimes violently and often politically, tried to prevent minorities from moving in to their areas. Could it be the more racist of the whites stayed in the cities (covenants aside)? Without more information, I don't see this yet as suburbs == racism bolstered by the availability of the car. Edit: apparently I replied to the wrong comment. And mobile makes it hard to rectify.

The creation of whites-only suburbs was intentional and racist. The Federal Housing Administration started in 1934 and helped back home loans for white Americans. It helped get them out of the cities and invest in home ownership. The FHA explicitly refused to back loans for black people or even people who lived near black people. [1]

The result was "redlining," where banks and lenders would draw lines on a map to delineate where blacks were allowed to live and who could get home loans in the white neighborhoods. [2]

This is still something that happens now. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution won a Pulitzer in the '80s for a series demonstrating how banks would rather give money to a poor white family to buy a home in a "white" neighborhood than a middle- or even upper-class black family. [2]

You're partially right in the sense that race and income are strongly correlated, but keeping black people out of the suburbs across the country was no accident.

If you're interested in a long but fantastic read on the effects of discriminatory policies on minorities over the years, Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" is a good place to begin. [3]

[1]: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-raci...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

[3]: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case...

I thought the suburbs were mostly about crime. Look at Detroit. Is someone necessarily racist for not wanting to live there? It's a complex issue but you have tumblr-fied it.

If suburbs were about crime, people would merely have moved to them, as they existed (just using transit, not cars).

They wouldn't have set up command and control economy experimental land use policies and subsidies that had never been done before if they just wanted breathing room or to be away from the city. That sort of life could already be had, but that wasn't enough.

Those other people could flee crime too since they could afford a train ticket, and you wouldn't want one of those others in your neighborhood, would you? Of course not. We've got to set things up so they don't follow us. What don't they have? Cars. If we build a new society that forces everyone to have cars, 'they' can't follow us.

You're making a lot of limiting assumptions about what people are willing to do to be safe. Few things will make people react broadly and strongly than to regain a sense of familial safely.

Don't forget the gigantic highway lobby and GM's role in funding the destruction of rail in cities across the country. Remarkably successful strategy. Eventually were convicted iirc, but it was too late.

Cities did their best to kill transit without GM's meddling. For instance, capping fares on all public transit meant that over time the fare in inflation adjusted terms fell. Public transit was being starved to death from this, even in places where cars could never compete such as New York.

The subways there went bankrupt from the fare cap as the city had some obsessive need to take over the subway systems.

Cars didn't pay anything for road wear, and they didn't (and still don't) pay anything towards congestion. They clogged the streets, made streetcars slower, and essentially freeloaded.

Utilities were forced to divest from streetcar ownership, which forced the streetcar companies to pay retail electricity prices instead of wholesale ones.

At the time GM came around, public transit was already hurting. GM was able to do what they did because the companies were hurting and could be bought cheaply.

As someone who lives near Phoenix Arizona, I can see that at least out here it seems to be a result of the fact that the city only really came into existence fairly recently. Compared to much older places like London, which obviously predates the automobile, New forms of transportation were taken into account when zoning regulations and other things were made. As an example, all of our major roads are spaced 1 mile apart and are at right angles to each other in a nice grid. I'm happy living in the suburbs just because it means I get more house for my money.

>Compared to much older places like London, which obviously predates the automobile, New forms of transportation were taken into account when zoning regulations and other things were made. As an example, all of our major roads are spaced 1 mile apart and are at right angles to each other in a nice grid.

There's a difference between designing streets wide enough to accommodate cars--no windy medieval footpaths that eventually got paved in Phoenix--and forcing businesses and all new housing to provide free parking spaces to drivers. One is taking cars into account, another is forcing them on everyone.

It should be noted, however, that Phoenix is old enough it predates cars and its wide streets and grid layout are for other reasons. Grids are efficient, allowing someone on foot to cover a larger area in a given time period than would otherwise be the case. They also allow for efficient navigation; if you name your streets like DC's or Manhattan's, it's easy to get between any two corners. They also minimize property disputes. Streets were wide to allow wagons and the like to turn around easily and for aesthetic reasons.

That this happened to be useful for cars is an accident.

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