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Notes -
Americas Bad Cities are costing you
This is where Cremieux goes through the loss of agglomeration effects due to American cities being awful low density places. The loss of the American City he largely blames on the Great Migration and the associated crime waves. He then goes thru how white flight has mostly only occurred with black populations especially ADOS and occurs less with immigrants from Africa.
One of the things with woke is it made people think about ways to refute their ideas. One of them is that white people just hate black people so they did white flight. Turns out the data and original source material people started to look rediscover showed a rise in crime before white flight. People accepted those narratives for decades because we had already mitigated the costs and it was just easy to go with the old narratives. We also accepted a narrative that Americans just liked to live in the suburbs. The actual answer for the preference is crime was too high in cities.
The costs of mitigation Cremieux lists is likely not the full costs. It’s likely everything about city design has been done to allow for unofficial segregation. Often this has been done thru zoning to keep prices high. High home prices means high prices for everything in safe cities as your working class either needs to be able to buy housing in the community or compensated for a long community.
Not being able to do official segregation has basically made the American urban lifestyle very expensive and even more expensive if you have kids. You can’t just buy a cheap house and send your kids to public schools because of the demographics. Which forces you to either live in an expensive suburb or use private schools. This also means you largely can’t be poor in your nice community because your community refuses to have low costs of living options because that would allow the more criminally inclined people to move in.
Today we talk about foreign migration and not domestic internal migration. Once you do mass migration you can’t unring tbe bell. You are now stuck with new demographics. In the case of the great migration I think it basically destroyed Americans urban environments. And now American cities suck. And we had to convince ourselves that we loved living in the suburbs instead of the suburbs being a mitigation for good schools/safety.
I am also open minded that the Great Migration led to increased American wealth because people opposed sharing economic resources and it had a macro effect of limiting socialism in the US and the political paths Canada/Europe went down.
I imagine that it was a significant factor, but I don't know if largely blaming it is justified. My understanding is that suburbanization was already moving fast in the 1950s, when US violent crime rates were quite low. And the rate of suburbanization did not accelerate much in the 1960s and 1970s compared to the 1950s, even though violent crime rates began moving up sharply in the 1960s.
It would be interesting to find detailed data on suburbanization by year to compare to violent crime rates by year.
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.
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