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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Older relatives say that U.S. cities were very pleasant places decades ago. My grandmother has photos of herself and her friends having fun on the sidewalks of Detroit in the 1930s and the place looked prosperous with lots of nicely dressed people (white and black) patronizing the businesses. I blame lack of strong police work and deinstitutionalizing of crazies.[/quote]

Yeah even pictures of breadlines during the Great Depression, people seemed put together more

[/quote]

Yes, American cities used to have dignity because people invested in them and we had a tax structure far more similar to what Singapore and others have now. We had terrible monopolies, but we didn’t have people hiding vast fortunes abroad or using corporations to extract wealth from entire economies.

One side of my grandparents mostly worked in factories and lived within walking or trolley distance. They could and did take a trolley downtown from a neighborhood that still had outhouses and could see affordable classical music performances, visit the main library, or go to live theater (fine arts theater, not vaudeville) on maid and factory worker wages. All of those things were underwritten by Rockefellers and Carnegies, and the trolleys and sidewalks paid for by taxes.

Those relatives who were older during the Great Depression always said that they would have never been seen without tidy and clean clothes, even if they were shabby. But those same relatives also lamented how much worse clothing was after the 1950s and how low quality everything became. A coat could last 20 years and be cheaply relined and last another 20. Good luck buying a coat on factory or maid wages that lasts 20 years now, let alone finding someone to re-line it. Their lives lacked opportunity, they were in poor health, and they didn’t have material wealth, but they had a much better community and lifestyle than people of similar socioeconomic standing would have today.[/quote]

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