Comment by nmrm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nmrm | Hacker News Reader

Levittown itself arguably embodied the best and worst of the postwar American story; it was a result of the entrepreneurship and ingenuity that has come to define the American spirit, but it also participated in the violent prejudice that has also been part of American history.

It really irks me when all the good stuff is attributed unquestionably to American Entrepreneurship, and for all the accompanying bad stuff there's a long and nuanced story with lots of historical context and no clear, single, indistinguishable cause.

This sort of thing is too common. Here's another instance of this sort of reasoning far closer to home: rugged entrepreneurship clearly explains the massive success of the US tech industry, but exploitative labor practices in hardware and device manufacturing are caused by a myriad of global geopolitical and economic circumstances that cannot be obviously explained by any one factor.

edit: to be clear, "the story is complicated and there's no one cause" is the correct answer in both cases. Obviously. But also, in many cases, entrepreneurship benefits either passively or actively from nascent conditions. For instance, large swaths of sub-urbanization were undoubtedly driven by white flight.

Suburbanization was promoted and enabled by federal loan programs which encouraged greenfield development, in distinction to urban housing development. The earliest of the federal housing loan programs were started in the 1930s, to remedy the failure of the banking system to provide stable long-term housing loans.

Note that the 1930s federal loan programs evaluated neighborhoods with racial delineations and evaluations. The federal "Home Owners Loan Corporation" initiated these neighborhood evaluations, and the policies were used by the later "Federal Housing Authority". In 1938, Congress established the "Federal National Mortgage Association". In 1944, Congress passed the "Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944" also known as the GI Bill, authorizing the Veterans' Administration to make low cost housing loans. All of these housing loan programs enabled the financing of suburban house building.

Quotation from the linked article:

"During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt had launched a federal agency called the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), meant to protect struggling homeowners from losing their homes. The HOLC later implemented a system of rating neighborhoods with letter grades to help more systematically discern property values. Later, the Federal Housing Authority continued to use those HOLC standards when issuing mortgages. As historian Jackson has written, “For perhaps the first time, the federal government embraced the discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace. Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy.”

For instance, large swaths of sub-urbanization were undoubtedly driven by white flight.

Um, no. Not in the case of Levittown.

Just after WWII, suburbanization was driven by the fact that a) there had been a terrible, deep and long recession just prior to the war 2) during the war, with two income families unable to have kids because hubby was off at war overseas and wifey was working in a factory at home, savings rates approaches 50% for some parts of the war (in part due to rationing -- people were encouraged to grow vegetable gardens so that what farmers grew could go to feed our soldiers overseas) 3) women who had been recruited to work in factories during the war were encouraged to go home and have babies and be full time wives so the returning soldiers could get jobs (and many women were very happy to do that) 4) a very high percentage of men had served in the military and now qualified for federal help with getting a house, as well as federal help with going to college.

This is the roots of the sudden large middle class you saw in the 1950's. And that is the root of the high demand for housing, which America worked hard to meet in record time. We are still living with the legacy of that decades later when our demographic has changed and it no longer serves us that well.

I have no doubt that this benefited whites more than blacks. But it was not rooted in whites trying to get away from blacks/cities/whatever per se.

Edit: My point about Victory Gardens was about the impact on personal finances. They also rationed sugar, cigarettes and other things. The point is that there were a lot of two income families who were not having children and there were also no luxury items to buy during the war. So personal savings rates were crazy high.

> Not in the case of Levittown.

Okay, even if, why does this matter? Lots of suburbanization was motivated by white flight.

> I have no doubt that this benefited whites more than blacks. But it was not rooted in whites trying to get away from blacks/cities/whatever per se.

Not being around minorities most absolutely, undeniably, as a matter of pure fact WAS a motivation for leivttown. Fuck, here's a quote saying as much from the contracts:

Originally, the Levitts’ racist policy was enshrined in the lease itself, which stipulated that “the tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be sued or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.”

No body was bothering to even try to hide it.

Yeah, no one bothered to hide their racism. It was part and parcel of the system. It was so part and parcel of the system that if they had, instead, been building luxury high rises in the big city, you would have seen similar stipulations. I thus see no reason to conclude that suburbanization was motivated by a goal of specifically getting away from blacks. It was motivated by people who had lived hand-to-mouth during the recession finally having the means and ability to buy a single family home of their own.

I am well aware that racism ran very, very deep at the time. For example, the federal minimum wage law was originally intended to get the South in line with other parts of the nation in terms of what it paid and it was a de facto attempt to outlaw the practice of paying blacks about half what whites got paid for the same work. It was passed prior to WWII. It was failing terribly. The initial result was that blacks got fired in droves (which is part of what drove blacks out of rural Southern states into big cities of the Northern states). They weren't able to make it stick at all until after WWII began.

So I know racism ran deep. It was open. It was intractable. And it was not, per se, the reason whites invented the suburbs and moved there. Unprecedented middle class wealth was the driving force behind the invention of the suburbs. Blacks tended to be left out because blacks were generally left out economically. They also would have been left out had well off whites invented some other housing solution. But leaving them out was not the raison d'etre for the invention of the suburbs.

> Okay, even if, why does this matter? Lots of suburbanization was motivated by white flight.

Anyways, this tangent is so completely unrelated to my original point that we might as well be quibbling over wording.

I too read the article, but "white flight" on Long Island happened after Levittown and in other areas. Howard Stern is actually a byproduct of this, his family refused to move.

Why would they try to hide it? They didn't think it was anything unusual, nor something to be ashamed of.

If you buy a new house today, it may come with stipulations that you keep your lawn cut to less than a certain height. That does not mean that short grass is a motivation for new housing developments. It's simply what everybody does.

The deed covenants on Long Island came from local requirements in Nassau and Suffolk county. It was there, but not necessarily directly related to the people building subdivisions.

The key issue that drove suburbanization and eventually the "white flight" phenomenon was transportation and infrastructure. There was no housing to be had in NYC, period. NYCs government was so corrupt, inept and broke that it couldn't build anything.

I grew up in Queens, much of which was horror show in terms of infrastructure and mostly built in the postwar era. My dad reduced his commuting time to Manhattan by nearly 30 minutes -- by moving or family 100 miles north.

Racial covenants existed in the cities as well. The Levitts weren't inventing anything new. Hell, there were convenants that would have restricted them.

They've done studies and the "victory gardens" never really contributed or impacted the food supply. It was more of a morale thing, way to sell bonds.

> 3) women who had been recruited to work in factories during the war were encouraged to go home and have babies and be full time wives so the returning soldiers could get jobs (and many women were very happy to do that)

This sounds like something straight out of a Communist playbook. If the govt today tried to tell women to quit jobs and have kids there would be a public outcry loud enough to hear from coast to coast.

Governments don't need to be that direct. Long maternity leave, large subsidy's for having children ect can all work without any heavy handed tactics.

Not to mention, good old social pressure.

I grew up in a suburb at the tail end of that era. In my view there were some other factors as well:

1. Raising a family on a single income was fathomable.

2. Things like day care centers and summer day camps weren't as prevalent.

I disagree - long maternity leave would encourage women to stay in the work force, and I strongly support this. I think, from seeing things first hand, we need 1 year maternity leaves to do things properly. Making women choose between raising/having children and going to work is no choice at all.

You have no idea what you are talking about. Just before the war, the world was in the depths of The Great Depression. Four years later, thousands and thousands of men returned home with generous government benefits and money in the bank. You very suddenly had a large, well-off middle class -- something the world had never seen before in known recorded history.

What you are saying is akin to claiming "That's nuts. Most lottery winners do not want to spend their newfound riches or indulge themselves in a life of luxury. They prefer to keep working in a coal mine." Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Not true. Some small percentage will do that. But most decide "It's party time!" and many promptly give their notice at work.

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