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Notes -
It’s likely true that suburbanization was increasing as cars became viable but I think it’s also fair that city crime and decline of amenities also encouraged suburbanization. Some % of the population would have preferred to remain in cities if the QOL in cities had not declined.
University of Chicago is probably the most obvious area where declining QOL prevented the formation of an industrial cluster around the university.
Most things do have multi-factors but I do think declining QOL significantly accelerated the move to suburbs.
I dunno.
I could believe that suburbanization depressed prices in inner cities, which proceeded to attract the kinds of people who can afford them, and that has a feedback loop where the presence of said people depresses the prices ("gentrification" works both ways).
The difference back in the '40s-'90s was that very cheap new technology (and a massive domestic manufacturing base) made building outwards attractive, and building outwards was still perfectly legal, so everyone except the very poor could afford to do it (and at that point, out of sight, out of mind). Evaporative cooling in the lower priced areas occurred. And then the demand for low-skill labor started drying up in the late '70s.
(One notes that once there's nothing for an unemployed man to do, he will turn to sex work- which for men is waging war- and if there is no organization willing or able to point him at a foreign enemy he will simply start a civil war at home, or "turn to crime" for short.[1, 2])
One might even point out that, if that is true, that suburbanization led to desegregation. City people are notoriously authoritarian more or less out of necessity- the number of people affected by poor behavior is drastically higher, compounded with there being far more poor per square mile.
So as normal people increasingly left for new land, they found that they didn't need to defend themselves from the [urban] poor any more (and further are now subject to other selection effects: that people who look like the urban poor, who make it out to the suburbs, are as far away from "urban poor" as you can get).
Naturally, with far less exposure to them, one would naturally be more sympathetic to the notion [that "looks like an urban poor" and "is an urban poor" are incompatible], and so as soon as they solidify as a voting bloc they will use that as a weapon and claim that people who are using the easiest, lowest-information proxy for who is urban poor are morally corrupt for doing so (or "racist" for short).
Which is easy to say, when the moral hazard is in your favor.
[1] Especially when a government agency is selling an incredibly cheap war-enhancing drug to those men rather than financing an expeditionary force to fight such a war themselves, perhaps contra Iran?
[2] One will also note that "fighting a civil war at home" is specifically what a very famous part of American law is meant for; the urban poor are exercising their rights appropriately. This fact makes a lot of people uncomfortable and led to a bunch of hysteria, mostly about "assault handguns". The right to do this is important specifically because it makes a threat clear: alienate a population because the Chinaman is a better worker than the domestic urban poor, and the urban poor have the right and responsibility to make you pay for it. Unfortunately for the urban poor, anyone who could organize a proper resistance... all left for the suburbs (or got killed themselves).
Have you, uh, been downtown in a US city in the past ten years?
So, about that.
One notes that, for the last 50 years, "Muhrasism" was the room temperature in which one raised one's children. Again, mostly championed by the people who no longer had to deal with the urban poor.
Now these people, born and raised in the [technically, pagan] religion of Muhrasism (which they brought with them, just like Italians brought the Mafia, and it functions the same way), are back in the city- because they can't afford to live elsewhere.
They're not wealthy enough to pay the penalty for blasphemy against this religion (one notes the current blasphemers are "responsible for a significant chunk of space architecture" and "wrote a stupendously successful series of children's novels"- anyone capable of being a real turning point gets shot to death by jihadists), so the religion persists.
I think I generally understood you here but still find much of it impenetrable.
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