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Comment by nmrm | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

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