Post

A lot of people assume that the housing market circa 1975-2005, when urban housing was cheap even without new development thanks to rapid sprawl and white flight, is the natural state of the world and not an historically anomalous period shaped by housing and transportation policy choices.

I think about this a lot. So many people would do with looking at a chart about what happened to the population of all our cities during the 20th century with a little more rigor

It’s funny because SF is by far the least dramatic version of this. Probably the city least impacted by white flight. It’s weird neighborhood activists treat the place like it was ever New York in the 70’s.

St. Louis checking in

Yeah St Louis has to be the most dramatic example of this. They obliterated that downtown

in 1981, the nytimes was writing about how SF was becoming a city only the rich could afford. New York in the 1970s it was never. what's especially funny is all the pull quotes could have been written in the 90s, 2000s, 2010s, ... www.nytimes.com/1981/06/09/u...

*cough* public school districts were being desegregated. *cough*

Are you suggesting desegregation caused white flight? Because that is a harmful urban myth. Developers & gov’t were pulling whites from cities well before WWII. Little deseg happened until 1965 or ever outside the South where it was short lived (+/- 15 yrs) despite successful educational results. 1/

Long time urban residents likely prefer those times to the "better" alternative of today. A poor person in a poor area doesn't feel out of place and their access to jobs and amenities allowed them far higher material comfort than their income would normally allow.