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Are we pretending that the immigrants in northern cities were wealthy and educated?
No. But by the early 50s they had been here for 20-30+ years, and had already carved out their place in the community. They were as unlikely to welcome the newcomers as anyone else.
- Cars were becoming more portable, faster, safer, more efficient
- The United States and Soviet Union were at odds during this time, people moved into more spaced living conditions in the suburbs, often with underground bomb protection bunkers (fear of nuclear war bombs)
- The infrastructure and sanitary conditions in the inner city at the time were awful; lots of diseases, issues, drainage and sewer systems inefficient or lacking, so on and so forth
- The middle class was beginning to explode in size and people were having more children and needed more personal space than the big city to raise them in (enter suburbs)
- Household sizes in the inner city were beginning to drop, as families began looking to suburbs as superior living environments as opposed to the inner, compact, built up big city
Maybe in the UK, not in America. The biggest shift to suburbanization in America occurred prior to WWII on the backs of rail initially. First it was the affluent rail burbs and commuter rail but the real shift was the streetcar suburbs.
https://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/censr-4.pdf, Figure 1-15.
Percentage of people living in the suburbs grew 215% from 1910 to 1950. From 1950 to 1990 by a slightly smaller 192%. While cars continued the trend both before and after 1950, the trend to suburbanization was slower from after 1950 than it was before. It's a great misconception that suburbanization was something new in 1950. It was not. It was a continuation at a reduced rate. The facts don't comport with a lot of people's preconceptions (and in general). I used have the same misconception as well. It's a culturally ingrained misconception that is refuted by facts that most people aren't aware of and others, while aware, cannot accept.
NYC didn't have open sewers in 1950. Cities were much better places to live by 1950 (and long before that). What changed was transportation, first railroad, then streetcar, then automobile. The drop in city population was in the 1970s and 1980s. Open sewers were LONG gone. Principal cities as a whole were not losing population share in 1950-1960. Certainly, there was the desire to get away from industry, especially heavy industry, but that wasn't something that suddenly happened in 1950. Sacramento had a lot of suburbs spring up to support blue collar factory and railroad workers long before 1950 just like everywhere else did.
Household size has been falling for the last 120 years. People were not having larger families in 1950. More affluent? Certainly. Much higher prosperity enabled people to demand more personal space for their small families as well as pay the costs associated with becoming far, far more mobile than they had been previously.
I don't think 1950 was the major shift, it's just remembered as such.
Basically, there were four different stages in suburbanization, which are roughly as follows.
1. The invention of the electric streetcar allowed for the development of the earliest neighborhoods which we would consider to be suburban today around 1900 or so. That is to say, neighborhoods which were almost exclusively residential (with perhaps a smattering of retail), not really built on a walkable scale, and dominated by single-family housing with generous setbacks from the street.
2. Mass car ownership among the upper-middle class really began to be a thing by the 1920s. Although there are a limited amount of these "early automotive suburban" neighborhoods, they are very similar in terms of layout (if not housing style) to the postwar suburbs, with driveways, garages, curved roads, and an overall car reliant structure.
3. The push to the suburbs in the 1950s was because very little housing was built for a 15+ years due to the one-two whammy of the Great Depression and World War 2. Urban housing prices rose due to the constrained demand once the economy began to get back on track, and many people continued to live with their parents even after they got married and had children of their own due to a lack of options. People would have moved to any new housing options just to get out of their overcrowded city apartments, thus they moved in large numbers to the suburbs.
4. The last stage was the "white flight" era, which peaked in the 1970s. Unlike the 1950s, when people were just moving to the suburbs because it was cheap and houses were available, people by this era were actively fleeing the cities because crime was rising rapidly, and there were urban riots in nearly every major U.S. city at some point.
One important thing to remember is in a lot of cities, suburban-style development happened within city borders for a good deal of the earlier portion of this period. Often the majority of streetcar and early automotive suburbs were actually inside city limits. This meant even though the core "old urban" neighborhoods began declining in population (often starting in 1900) the growth in outer city neighborhoods masked this decline. The 1950s merely marked the Rubicon after which the growth envelope had pushed outside of city limits. There simply wasn't enough undeveloped land in many cities in the Northeast and Midwest left for continued population growth.
While certainly many of the influences already mentioned contributed to *some* depopulation of major US cities in the 1950's most were still holding onto, and or gaining. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larges...tion_by_decade
Major shifts in urban population started later in the 1960's when "white flight" out of cities to suburban areas began. This was in response to everything from Civil Rights actions (desegregation of schools, neighborhoods, etc...), to violence (race riots). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Newark_riots#Impact
As pointed out in the last link while racial riots/tensions are often cited as one of the causes of "white flight", there were other elements as well.
Industry and businesses either were closing or moving from cities to the suburbs (all those new corporate parks..) and with them often went whites. What you had left in many American inner cities were the poor, lower middle class and largely minorities. This along with whites and others who for various reasons couldn't or wouldn't move.
Ironically it is the grand-children, great grand-children and even children of those who fled cities in the 1960's and 1950's (if not some of the same now older persons) who are returning to many American cities, and that is causing all sorts of problems.
Here in NYC whites are moving back to areas they long fled (Lower East Side, East Village, Harlem, large areas of eastern Brooklyn, etc...) and are pushing blacks and others out via economic displacement. You see this all over including places like Paris, London, Berlin, San Francisco, etc..
I don't think 1950 was the major shift, it's just remembered as such.
Basically, there were four different stages in suburbanization, which are roughly as follows.
1. The invention of the electric streetcar allowed for the development of the earliest neighborhoods which we would consider to be suburban today around 1900 or so. That is to say, neighborhoods which were almost exclusively residential (with perhaps a smattering of retail), not really built on a walkable scale, and dominated by single-family housing with generous setbacks from the street.
2. Mass car ownership among the upper-middle class really began to be a thing by the 1920s. Although there are a limited amount of these "early automotive suburban" neighborhoods, they are very similar in terms of layout (if not housing style) to the postwar suburbs, with driveways, garages, curved roads, and an overall car reliant structure.
3. The push to the suburbs in the 1950s was because very little housing was built for a 15+ years due to the one-two whammy of the Great Depression and World War 2. Urban housing prices rose due to the constrained demand once the economy began to get back on track, and many people continued to live with their parents even after they got married and had children of their own due to a lack of options. People would have moved to any new housing options just to get out of their overcrowded city apartments, thus they moved in large numbers to the suburbs.
4. The last stage was the "white flight" era, which peaked in the 1970s. Unlike the 1950s, when people were just moving to the suburbs because it was cheap and houses were available, people by this era were actively fleeing the cities because crime was rising rapidly, and there were urban riots in nearly every major U.S. city at some point.
One important thing to remember is in a lot of cities, suburban-style development happened within city borders for a good deal of the earlier portion of this period. Often the majority of streetcar and early automotive suburbs were actually inside city limits. This meant even though the core "old urban" neighborhoods began declining in population (often starting in 1900) the growth in outer city neighborhoods masked this decline. The 1950s merely marked the Rubicon after which the growth envelope had pushed outside of city limits. There simply wasn't enough undeveloped land in many cities in the Northeast and Midwest left for continued population growth.
I take issue with the term "fleeing" as if people were dropping everything and hopping in the car and running off, like in some of those old sci-fi movies, e.g. "Night of the Living Dead", filmed in your area. A lot of people agonized over the decision to leave an area where their families had lived for a few generations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BugsyPal
Ironically it is the grand-children, great grand-children and even children of those who fled cities in the 1960's and 1950's (if not some of the same now older persons) who are returning to many American cities, and that is causing all sorts of problems.
Here in NYC whites are moving back to areas they long fled (Lower East Side, East Village, Harlem, large areas of eastern Brooklyn, etc...) and are pushing blacks and others out via economic displacement. You see this all over including places like Paris, London, Berlin, San Francisco, etc..
Something tells me you are quite young. Generations of young people have wanted to live "in the city". From the beatniks, to the hippies (those that didn't want to live in communes), to the hipsters of today. There is a section of every major city I'm familiar with that has always been an "in" place to live for those who liked city living, e.g. Shadyside/Squirrel Hill/Highland Park in Pittsburgh; Dundee/Happy Hollow (where Warren Buffet lives) in Omaha; Park Hill/Cherry Creek/Washington Park in Denver, Lincoln Park in Chicago, Uptown in Minneapolis, etc.
I take issue with the term "fleeing" as if people were dropping everything and hopping in the car and running off, like in some of those old sci-fi movies, e.g. "Night of the Living Dead", filmed in your area. A lot of people agonized over the decision to leave an area where their families had lived for a few generations.
Something tells me you are quite young. Generations of young people have wanted to live "in the city". From the beatniks, to the hippies (those that didn't want to live in communes), to the hipsters of today. There is a section of every major city I'm familiar with that has always been an "in" place to live for those who liked city living, e.g. Shadyside/Squirrel Hill/Highland Park in Pittsburgh; Dundee/Happy Hollow (where Warren Buffet lives) in Omaha; Park Hill/Cherry Creek/Washington Park in Denver, Lincoln Park in Chicago, Uptown in Minneapolis, etc.
Except these are not counter culture or whatever; but largely affluent to upper middle class whites/persons. They are bringing with them however the same attitudes and whatever of their class/background, and that is where the rubber is meeting the road.
The Upper West Side of Manhattan, once dominated by liberal/hippy-dippy/leftist and so forth is slowly becoming like its neighbor across Central Park; affluent and all that goes with it.
Except these are not counter culture or whatever; but largely affluent to upper middle class whites/persons. They are bringing with them however the same attitudes and whatever of their class/background, and that is where the rubber is meeting the road.
The Upper West Side of Manhattan, once dominated by liberal/hippy-dippy/leftist and so forth is slowly becoming like its neighbor across Central Park; affluent and all that goes with it.
.
I was just saying what people called them back then, didn't mean to imply they were so counter-cultural. I was one of these "young hippies", but I wasn't all that counter culture. I mean, I had a very conventional job (nursing), as did my spouse (engineer). But that's what young adults were called, and we wore different clothing styles than our parents, different hairstyles, drove different (and smaller) cars, etc. And heck, even the hippies, maybe even especially the hippies, were actually from fairly affluent backgrounds. They just lived it a little differently.
I don't know NYC, but there are parts of Denver (Highlands) that were once ethnic blue-collar neighborhoods that are now "hipster" territory, so I hear what you're saying. Maybe that's just because there are so many Millennials.
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