Reply to The Culprits Behind White Flight

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Your last paragraph just slayed me.

It's just as bigoted as the so called bigots it alleges.

I took a number of courses in urban planning, including history. Many of you are forgetting or ignoring that by the 1950s large stretches of American cities were downright derelict. You talk of closely knit neighborhoods. Fine, they were closely knit. They were often also slums with no sanitation or proper running water or indoor toilets and squalid housing. They were filthy. They were overcrowded. There was practically no investment in American cities between 1920-1945 so when the country emerged from WWII large portions of many American cities, particularly the older east coast cities, were very, very rundown, with ageing housing stock and squalid conditions.

Having said that, there were certainly excesses committed by the post-war planning system. Robert Moses' highways did bulldoze their way through perfectly fine and decent neighborhoods. The wishes of poorer, whether white or black, areas were ignored for the sake of building large new infrastructure (mostly highways) that were seen to benefit the entire region (which it did). People were certainly ignored. I won't deny that. And racial based redlining did happen. But it's also dangerous to castigate the planners as bigoted wasps when their crime was to believe in bring about a better and more liveable environment for people and to clean up derelict slums and run down areas. Most of these planners were staunch Democrats and liberals and products of the New Deal and its vision for improving America. Many if not most were not actually WASPs as it is. Many were Jewish (Robert Moses, for example).

[/quote

Parts of this reminds me of a simple Sociology section in one chapter of one of my college texts: Take every wealthy urban neighborhood and then find the most poor/crime ridden. They are always geographically the furthest apart. This isn't an accent. It's systemic and deliberate. Racial inequity runs through almost every vein of this county's history. It's practically impossible to completely eradicate. [/quote]

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