
Levittown: The Imperfect Rise of the American Suburbs - Mz
http://www.ushistoryscene.com/uncategorized/levittown/
======
kghose
This was a very insightful article, which deserves more upvotes than it has.
It was very informative for me from the point of view of contemporary American
history, especially as we hear of the rising "trend" (aren't they all trends)
of younger folk giving up on suburbia and moving back to the cities.

If nothing else, it introduced me to the song "Little Boxes".

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erdle
Forget the cite, but the first American suburb layouts were actually based on
cemetery plots. Because you can't build cemetery plots on top of each other,
they were forced to create all the artificial winding roads and figure out how
to maximize space.

So if you grew up in a suburb, your grave will essentially be the same.

~~~
aptwebapps
This is a little hard to credit. What's so efficient about winding roads? A
tree laid out on a grid would be much or more efficient, wouldn't it?

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nmrm
_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.

~~~
Mz
_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.

~~~
nmrm
> 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.

~~~
Mz
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.

~~~
nmrm
> 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.

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autokad
i don't see how this has relevance on HN. sure its interesting (or at least
you may find it so) but so is a cat jumping into a box. I dont see how this
has anything to do with compute science / entrepreneurship / Tech

~~~
thrownaway2424
This article is more relevant, and better written, than 99.9% of the
Techcrunch, inside baseball, Ayn Rand worshipping bullshit that makes the
front page on this site.

~~~
autokad
most of the articles are about programming, data mining, cryptography, etc.
you must be going to a different
[http://news.ycombinator.com/news](http://news.ycombinator.com/news) website.

if those topics for you are too 'inside baseball' for you, perhaps you should
try another news site. one that's not labeled 'hacker news' might be a great
place to start.

as far as Ayn Rand worshiping articles, what ever.

