Reply to The Culprits Behind White Flight

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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.

For every old person interviewed in a book or on NPR about how wonderful their childhood ghetto was, there's at least 2-3 others who would be more than happy to talk about how moving to a clean new suburb with detached housing was an amazing experience and represented a huge improvement in their quality of life. Yet they're never interviewed because they don't fit the narrative any more.

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).

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:roll: You completely deny that racism had an impact. And then go on to blame the liberals and Jews? I'm done with this forum.
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Honey, did you read the post?

Let me quote it:

"People were certainly ignored. I won't deny that. And racial based redlining did happen."

Try not to take the poster out of context, will you? The original post alleges that a WASP ruling class was trying to reassert control. The respondent pointed out that the reality was far more complicated to suggest a wasp ruling class trying to control the masses. And he or she is right. Much of the move to the suburbs was driven by people looking for a better quality environment, trading cramped apartments and rownhouses in increasingly aging neighborhoods in polluted cities for cleaner and more spacious and new environments. Much of the urban clearances was because the original areas were slums. We forget that millions of Americans actually lived in conditions we would consider horrific today. Planners genuinely believed that new public highrises and midrises would be a big improvement, spurred on by the developments coming out of social housing in Europe. And yes, it is true, most of these planners and social workers were liberals and progressives and strongly driven by the New Deal philosophy. And yes, many were Jewish. That does not imply a Jewish conspiracy, but only to show that the picture of an evil Wasp hegemony playing political or social games is not only incorrect but unfair and deliberately provocative. 
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Sorry, but that is the equivalent of "I can't be racist, I have a black uncle". You're still a racist.[/quote]

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