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Comment by spennant | Hacker News Reader

Typically pieces about the Levittowns (there were many such towns) contain at least a cursory acknowledgement of the racism and redlining that surrounded the sales of these homes. A generation of non-minority boomers were able to take advantage of, and build wealth from government subsidies.

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One that handles this well: https://www.curbed.com/2019/6/13/18662753/nice-try-podcast-l...

The lack of acknowledgement shocked me. I had to do a quick search to make sure I wasn't mistaken.

It surely makes me wonder about many of the claims in the piece.

I had to jump back to HN comments to see if sb pointed this out. I remember reading about them in the book "Color of Law"

Why does that matter? Why do we have to inject race into everything?

Levitt & Sons would not sell homes to African Americans... the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) conditioned essential financing for this and similar projects on the restriction of home sales to those of "the Caucasian race", as stipulated in housing rent and sales agreements and deed covenants.

If you had dark colored skin you couldn't live there. That's as starkly about race as it can possibly get.

Yes, 67 years ago in 1952. Anyone can live there now if they have the money. Unfortunately, the problem in Levittown, like the problem with the rest of Long Island (and many other areas of the country) are that housing prices are massively inflated and taxes are insanely out of proportion of the services you get back for paying them.

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.

https://www.zillow.com/levittown-ny/

White people got loan guarantees from the government in 1967 to move there. The whole thing was directly subsidized. People moving in today are not subsidized.

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...

Which is all relevant to when this happened 60 years ago and not to working people today who were born generations after that happened. Talking about, "white America" like its some sort of monolith is idiotically reductionist. The generational disparity in wealth is magnitudes of order greater than the racial disparity. Start crying about the old people if you want a group to blame.

You can't blame the old black people, because they don't own homes. The rate of home ownership among whites is far and away greater than that for blacks. The average white person has some home equity. The average black person has next to none. The old people you're thinking about blaming are the old white people who took advantage of the whites-only, government sponsored, subsidized housing projects in the pre and post war years. The reason why all those old people in homes are white is because they were the only ones allowed to buy in the '50s!

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 median white family is worth $100k (almost entirely home equity). The average black family is worth $7,000.

Did you intend to jump between median and mean here? I'd guess that using median for both would make your case even stronger.

He didn't jump between them, looking at the article, they're both the median, I think he just said average because in a surprising number of places "average" isn't always synonymous with "mean", it's more synonymous with "measure of central tendency", so the mean, median, and mode can all be called the average as long as you've established which one you're talking about first.

I don't blame the old black people, because they were only 10% of the population. You are so obsessed with race and racism that you can't see the forest through the trees. The very real historic discrimination against blacks and other minorities has nothing to do with this article about the crumbling city of Levittown, no matter how much you want to make it about race. The economic problems that exist in Levittown, for working people, and for younger people would exist and be just as bad whether or not we ever had a racial issue. People who inject race and identity nonsense into every issue are a distraction and a roadblock from solving most issues - especially systemic economic issues that have nothing to do with race.

It's fair to criticise an article that says "Levittown served two or three generations very well and that should be celebrated." without even mentioning that it only served one population well: whites. That's who it served. The same exact piece could have been written and it could have at least made passing mention of the explicitly whites-exclusive founding of the project. The history of projects like these is important, the modern state of them is important, and pretending that they didn't also intertwine with race in America is just being (un)intentionally blinkered.

Sorry, I would suggest its being (un)intentionally blinkered to inject race (or any other "identity") into every issue. The article didn't mention anything about how we slaughtered the Native Americans, and stole their land, either - or they would still be living where Levittown was. That happened, and it was terrible, but its not all germane to the subject at hand. This article is about the crumbling of Levittown, which would have been exactly the same whether or not people were discriminated against during the initial building of the town 60+ years ago.

"solving big national problems for mutual benefit"

"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.

Wow, I had no idea HN had become Reddit. To celebrate, I’ll also leave a reddit style comment!

At Reddit hardly anyone complains that Reddit is turning into Reddit.

There's a reason white Americans (speaking generally) have generational wealth from home ownership, and black Americans don't. It's policies like the ones that created whites-only Levittowns. It's not that long ago! It's within a couple generations of everyone.

> 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...

In this case, it's hard to separate race from white migration to the suburbs. You can argue how much was driven by deliberate policy and how much was the result of organic segregation. Nonetheless, it was real and contributed to the fact that even many of today's "elite" US cities were losing population 20 years ago.

> it's hard to separate race from white migration to the suburbs.

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.

OP is not “injecting race”. They are pointing out a significant, intentional part of US federal and state policy at the time that the article doesn’t even mention.

The very history of these neighborhoods involved race. They were built for white people wanting to live in a nice, white place. These places didn't serve "two or three generations very well" as the article states. The first generation would have been a white one. At lest part of the second generation served would have been white through inheritance. And the third generation was (is!) still recovering from the racist policies that made Levittowns possible in the first place.

How is it "injecting" if it happens to just be a thing that's relevant? It's like "injecting" mathematics into computer science.

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