Levittown
granolashotgun.com
granolashotgun.com
> People ... couldn’t imagine returning to the city which continued to decline.
I begin to wonder whether the demise of the city was really caused by the government subsidies of the suburban lifestyle. It's not that Levittown isn't sustainable anymore, it's that it never was, not on a long term scale. Low density living should be expensive because it is expensive. The government chose to invest in suburbs instead of the city. The city rotted without investment, exacerbating the problem.
It's only the last couple decades as governments tightened their coffers that the suburbs have had to carry their own load- and they can't.
I think this is a key point, really well expanded upon here: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
They consult with cities to target a 20-to-1 "return on investment" when taking on infrastructure projects. That means that the costs to build street or water pipes should result in 20x that cost in economic activity.
As suburbs reached their apex many cities risked insolvency. As cities begin syphoning people from suburbs some of them too will experience insolvency issues.
But, yes, as housing preferences shift it affects pricing and viability of different neighborhoods, at least at the margin.
Then you run the math on property taxes vs. maintenance costs. If repairing the road, pipes, etc to one additional house costs more money than that house contributes via property tax (over a period of 25 years or so), then the suburb is considered insolvent. It could raise property taxes, or allow additional development, but without those actions the suburb remains insolvent.
Post war capital was invested in suburbs instead of urban cores which then decayed.
Redlining also meant urban areas inhabited by minorities were cut off from capital. Not only couldn't minorities get loans, but even their often white landlords couldn't.
Automobiles allowed workers to locate their families in cheap suburbs while sucking at the corporate teat in Urban Cities. At least until too many people spoiled a good thing as auto congestion built up.
Leaded gasoline caused brain damage which effected dense urban areas the most, resulting in high crime rates.
The last 40 years has seen a reversal of that at least for some urban cities. Capital is being invested in cities. Hard redlining is gone. Replaced by jacking minorities with exploitative loan products. Suburban congestion has made suburbs much less attractive. The decline of lead pollution means urban cities are again 'safe'.
I'd say unleaded gasoline is not the most important factor. For Europe, I think it was drug use.
Also, European countries have some of the lowest crime rates in the world. If the young of the 2000s were under its influence, the effect is not large(not larger than 1-2 homicides per 100K people).
I believe that drug abuse during the 80s and 90s was the culprit of high crime rates in Europe. People addicted to drugs(heroin, crack, cocaine, etc.) committed lots of crimes. In the late 90s and early 2000s, Europe managed to lower drug abuse and then crimes dropped. For Mexico, there is likely another explanation. Like drug trafficking for instance.
Having said this, I think leaded gasoline has adverse effects on public health. I believe it can create mental problems on people.
However, not everyone exposed to leaded gasoline will develop those problems. And among those affected, not all of them will become criminals only because of lead poisoning. Therefore, I don't think that the majority of criminals during the 90s were so because of leaded gasoline. I think that other factors were more important, like drug abuse.
Presumably, desperate circumstances will make it manifest as violent/property crime. But there are probably other manifestations that slide under the criminal justice radar too, like domestic violence and general aggression/bullying among communities in less desperate circumstances.
Personally I think cultural normalization of violence and quality of policing plays a role in the level of violence. But socio-economic factors really don't.
This is exactly the problem that finance exists to solve.
To be frank, I think nothing has been as destructive as zoning. Here in Hamilton, Ontario, I'm in a single-family zoned area, and the two closest consumer businesses are a brewery (with outlet), about 200m away, and a couple convenience stores, 600m away. The brewery is only there because of a specific zoning bylaw. Most everything else is more than 1.2km away or farther.
Everywhere else in the country is really different. DC didn't even experience the 2008 great recession
But if you look at places from the Northeast (excluding BOS/NYC/PHL) towns, all the way to Midwest to the South that had factories close and not come back, those are still cratered and going down. There simply isn't enough economic activity to support populations, so reduced demand, plus whatever demand there is can't afford to pay much.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2011/10/suburban-sprawl-ponzi-s...
Overall, these articles are an interesting insight into the hidden financials of urban development. And, sadly, the failings of those financial schemes.
> And there it is. The dreaded wig shop. Flagship of retail desperation and harbinger of doom. Next stop, evangelical day care centers and government offices to fill the void.
What's wrong with any of those businesses? Wig shops seem popular in a lot of places, especially with black women. People willing to spend on beauty are usually a good draw for a mall. Day cares bring in predictable revenue per kid. I've been to mall DMVs and gone shopping afterward.
> The buses only exist because the federal government mandates them as a condition of continued highway funding. It’s pointless.
What's pointless? The photos show people waiting at the bus stop, so clearly it's useful to someone.
Here's an entire book dedicated to discussing the government policies that drove separation: https://amzn.to/2Zz4Zeh (or get it from your local library!)
It's tough reading because a lot of things that happened were pretty ugly.
If you had dark colored skin you couldn't live there. That's as starkly about race as it can possibly get.
For the honor of living in an average small house in this economically depressed area you can look forward to shelling out ~$500,000 and paying $8,000+ a year in property taxes. That's the real obstacle for working people to come move to places like Levittown. A few decades ago young, working people looking to start a family could buy a house in a place like Levittown for 2-3x their annual income. Now its more like 8-10x of their annual income. It isn't economically sustainable, like much of the rest of our economic system, and it has absolutely nothing to do with racism.
This amounted to a big transfer of wealth to white Americans, that black Americans couldn't participate in. They were stuck paying rent for 67 years while their white "peers" were able to build equity, as they had access to cheap credit.
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
The median white family is worth $100k (almost entirely home equity). The average black family is worth $7,000. You don't think massive subsidies for white home ownership during the first half of the 20th century might have something.to do with it? Black people couldn't get mortgages. White people had theirs guaranteed by the Feds. It was a sweet deal. That equity didn't just evaporate.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/03/26/the-racial...
"the environment for individuals to achieve their dreams of an independent and secure home life"
"Levittown served two or three generations very well"
Each of these statements are simply not true. The benefit, the individuals, the generations- they were all white, by law (whites-only requirements were written into the covenants.you had to sign to buy a place). Sure, not everyone could take advantage, but everyone who could was white. This article is misrepresenting the history: this was for white benefit, white individuals, and white generations.
Did you intend to jump between median and mean here? I'd guess that using median for both would make your case even stronger.
> the Federal Housing Administration, which was established in 1934, furthered the segregation efforts by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods — a policy known as "redlining." At the same time, the FHA was subsidizing builders who were mass-producing entire subdivisions for whites — with the requirement that none of the homes be sold to African-Americans.
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
It surely makes me wonder about many of the claims in the piece.
Today's government subsidies are creating artificial booms of their own. Credit, higher education, housing. The busts, like the one described in this article, should come as a surprise to nobody, but they will. Mixed in with that surprise may be an interest in finding a scapegoat - and a leader willing to deliver it.
Population here has been exploding and new housing has been on the rise for the past five years. There is currently a ballot to slow new housing projects to 1% growth per year. On one hand, I wonder if it’s just artificial restriction of supply to help property values. On the other hand, I do see reason to limit growth to provide the infrastructure needed as growth continues. I’m not sure how to feel about it. Does anyone have any insight into whether artificial housing restrictions could benefit a municipality in the long term?
I think you can't answer that question without defining what is the intended outcome: what it's a 'benefit'?.
If you define the optimal result, in a tautological way, as "whatever the market decide", then, by definition, any restriction is going to be bad.
Otherwise, you need to decide what do you want to accomplish (by 'you' I mean the residents of the area) and choose a policy that makes sense.
Hicksville, for one, seems to be livelier than ever and full of South Asian families and businesses that have given it a new life (although it looks slightly lower-class than I remember).
I'd have to see data to convince me that an abnormal number of post-college children were still living at home.
Seems Eichler took cues from Lloyd-Wright and hired disciples, so the architecture looks nicer (although his didn’t have to contend with more continental climates), but from a usability and livability PoV, wonder if they deliver equally when it comes to providing a “home “
White soldiers, both via black soldiers being excluded from the GI Bill, and Levittown's own restrictive whites-only covenant. These racist limitations greatly reduced the necessary subsidies.
white male soldiers
Women soldiers were also excluded from the GI Bill.
>Women veterans, it turned out, were even more interested than their male counterparts in obtaining a college degree; more than 19.5% of 332,178 eligible women veterans elected to attend college after the war as compared to 15% of 15 million eligible male veterans.
[0] https://www.womensmemorial.org/history-highlight
>African Americans and women were entitled to the same benefits as white men under the GI Bill, but often faced difficulty trying to claim their benefits due to discrimination.
[1] https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/postwarera...
To summarize:
1. Women veteran had the same education benefits as their male counterparts under the law.
2. However, women veteran faced discrimination when trying claim their benefits.
3. Despite the discrimination, women veterans still managed to attend college at a higher rate than male veterans.
From December 1942 until VJ-day there were relatively few enlistments into the armed forces as restrictions against the direct recruiting of men in the age group acceptable for service (18-37) were in effect. There were, however, 483,605 other enlistments into the Army and Navy during the period July 1, 1944, to June 30, 1945, but only 1.3 percent were African Americans. Although African Americans constitute approximately 11 percent of the population, aged 18 through 37, only 0.8 percent of Army enlistees and 1.4 percent of Navy enlistees during the period July 1, 1944, to June 30, 1945, were of that race.
So, sounds like the white part doesn't matter too much? Yes it was terrible that they were excluded from the GI bill, but only a very small fraction of soldiers in ww2 were black. It was very unlikely they would have made a difference in the outcome of such suburbs.
May have had an impact on those 6,286 African Americans who were excluded.
You're focusing only on the raw numbers of people rather than the the effect on everybody of that community. You can bet if 10% of white people had the same discrimination visited upon them that police, lawyers, and legislation would be involved tout suite.
Read up on mortgage redlining during the most prosperous period of the 20th century keeping people out of the progress enjoyed by the majority. Injustice is not zero sum, don't use arguments from proportion when there is a fraught history and politics that makes continuing the discrimination much, much worse than if it was one white person against another white person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_and_the_G.I....
https://www.curbed.com/2019/6/13/18662753/nice-try-podcast-l...
Oxford Valley Mall is far from dead. The food court is always pretty lively on Fridays and Saturdays. The Forever 21 next to the food court is constantly packed with teenagers. I literally went there not long ago with my girlfriend and we had to stand in line at the register. Not exactly dead.
The guy just went on a random Tuesday instead of a Saturday. Of course it's going to be dead. The parking lot also has a really good theater seating style movie theater. Both Oxford Valley Mall and Neshaminy Mall are on Route 1 going north out of Philadelphia and also have I-95 going by. Also the Mall has Sesame Street Theme Park right outside it's parking lot and across the street is a whole other plaza containing a Best Buy, A Home Depot, a Lowes, and a bunch of other stuff. Honestly the only reason the mall can't keep full is cause of all the competitions nearby. The area itself is actually super nice just to the west of the mall with lots of properties rising in value.
I used to run a Gaming LAN Center in 2005 in Neshaminy Mall. The area is served by FIOS and Comcast.
As to why buses come to the mall? Really? Old people like to walk around during the day in the mall just for fun. People also use the bus to get to and from work. Most of the routes are going to and from Philly with a few connecting the various regional rail stations. Growing up we all wished there was just one bus from the center of Newtown to the mall so we wouldn't have to ask our parents to take us.
If you actually stay just around Levittown there's a lot of old crap from the 60s in a clearly abandoned and/or ruined state but that's not really indicative of the area.
While Levittown does have its problems (see the Fairless Hills overdose sign), its no where near as bad as this article makes it seem.
This is a good point, and one not well-explained in the article. I agree, what's the big deal? The Columbia Mall in Howard County, MD (the 3rd wealthiest county in the US) has the Mall as a primary stop for many buses. What does a bus coming to the mall have anything to do with the quality of a neighborhood?
Oh damn, I remember that. Was it called Ultra Zone or something? I lived in Jersey but I'd meet my PA friends there sometimes.
I mean, half of Levittown, PA is part of the Pennsbury School District, home of "The Best Prom in America" (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/04/23/be...).
Levittown is very close to a bunch of wealthy Philly suburbs, but it, itself is not wealthy. The main "strip" no longer exists, taken over by the shopping plazas nearby and the mall, but never really replaced. It's also surrounded by Rt 1 and I95, making it rather difficult, if not impossible to walk around anywhere.
I most disagree with your statements about the mall. It's usually about as empty as the pictures show. Way back when Boscovs left, that was pretty much the end. Sears and JCPenny left more recently but after they did, so did the rest of the mall. Now it's hardly as busy or useful as it used to be. Macys will probably leave too, someday.
Easy to way to know where the rust belt is wherever you can expect your vehicle to rust due to salting the roads in winter.
None of these things are true of the area. I've lived here for 25 years.