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What we talk about when we talk about suburbs
Let's get the BS out of the way first.
First, the obvious one: In the last few decades, suburban growth hasn't been caused by racism. As a matter of fact, blacks and immigrants are moving to the suburbs at a faster rate than whites. Meanwhile, whites have moved into the cities.
Now let's talk about the supposed conspiracy to force people into the suburbs. The largest American cities of 1920 were all built before the car. Many of them have a ring of streetcar suburbs. Most of them have lost population. There is a plentiful supply of dense urban cores in America with lower population than they had a century ago, and yet all the demand is for building more suburbs. The population has spoken, and they don't want to live in cities, they want to live in suburbs, New York City, and nothing in between.
What about "fifteen minute cities?". I live in one, it's called a suburb. I can get to everything we need on a regular basis (groceries, parks, schools, kid's activities, a decent restaurant) in fifteen minutes. This is only possible with point-to-point, immediate-availability transportation. Mass transit simply doesn't work for this, as at-grade transit (busses, streetcars) are slower than bikes due to the number of stops, and grade-separated transit stations are so large and sparse that it's usually fifteen minutes just to get from the front door to the platform, plus half a headway.
If you want to drop one kid off at one activity, the other kid off at a different one, get a week's worth of Costco, and then pick them both up, while changing at least one of the activities every six months, you simply can't beat the car.
We have community in the suburbs. The great American self-organizing spirit is a live here. No matter what you're into (or your kids are into), there's some knitting club, drum club, or bike club. Even better, our city parks and rec centers are actually usable, and the staff and patrons are clean and pleasant.
Real problems with the suburbs
This doesn't mean we don't have real problems with the suburbs. We do, especially from a few decades ago. In a uniquely American fashion, the Garden City Movement mutated into ever-larger lawns, ever larger medians, and ever larger streets. This, plus Euclidean zoning, does mean that the only way you can get around is the car. While it's great to have the car as the primary method of family transportation, having it as the only means of transportation does constrain older kids.
There is a pointless bigness to much of our environment. The standard American family combination of a big truck for dad and big crossover for mom would probably be improved by exchanging them for a HiLux and a Golf. We insist on building houses with formal living and dining rooms that we never use, paired with the "breakfast nook" and "family room" that we actually use. And of course yards, but I repeat myself.
Suburbs in the 80s were also less pleasant. There weren't many good restaurants, and if you didn't want something from a chain store or an understocked, overpriced mom-and-pop, you were out of luck. If you wanted a specialized job, you were in for a brutal commute into the city. Amazon and work-from-home have fundamentally changed that. We don't have to be near "stuff" anymore, it all comes to us.
Real solutions from the suburbs
Right now, I live in a townhouse in a master-planned new urbanist suburb. It's medium density, I have no yard, and the houses barely have any. There's a mini-park every few blocks, the elementary school is in the neighborhood itself, some blocks are designed extra long to prioritize sidewalks and eliminate street crossing, and the "town center" has a supermarket, a coffee shop, and a few adequate restaurants. We go there all the time, often on our onewheels.
If you're not in the family stage of life, the town center also has a four-over-one mid-rise that's pretty nice.
We have all the human-scale upside of a streetcar suburb, and all the modern benefits of suburbia (close to 3k sq ft, a real two car garage, modern appliances). We even have ethnic diversity (upscale immigrants) and a low carbon footprint (modern insulation, and I have a place to charge my Tesla)
Surprisingly, people who complain about the suburbs never say that we should all move to a master-planned New Urbanist suburb.
I love it, I would recommend it to anyone, and I'm leaving.
What we're really talking about when we talk about suburbs
I'm moving to an 80s suburb, with all the problems I just described. It has a pointless bench on a lawn built in a roundabout. Every week I see someone mowing that stupid patch of grass. You can't walk anywhere.
I'm moving from my semi-New Urbanist paradise to this terribly-designed 80s suburb for the same reason that some people live in Minneapolis instead of San Diego. San Diego has better weather, beaches, hot girls in bikinis, and you'll never shovel snow again, but if your family lives in Minneapolis, you live in Minneapolis, you shovel snow, and you ride your polar bear to work. If I grew up in Manhattan, NY, I would want to live there - and if I lived in Manhattan, KS, I would want to live there too.
I'm moving there for the same reason people hate suburbs: community. People talk about how suburbs are alienating and have no third spaces. I'm moving for the community, which is my wife's extended family. The third space was her grandparent's house. Now it is her parent's house, and someday (hopefully far in the future) it will be our house.
We might prefer one physical environment to another, but the main factor for where people live is the human environment - family, jobs, schools, crime.
That's also what people are really talking about when they complain about suburbs. They complain that suburbs are isolating and atomizing, which is obviously not true if you have family there.
What we really talk about when we talk about suburbs is social climbing. The suburbs are associated with the middle class, and if you're a social climber, you have to denounce the suburbs. A century ago, when industrial working class families lived in urban flats and townhomes, the social climbers made a point of talking about how they escaped the city.
When us proles couldn't afford cars, the social climbers flaunted their cars. Now that us proles can afford cars but can't afford Manhattan, the social climbers disdain cars and flaunt their apartments.
A century from now, if a shingle-sided split-level becomes expensive, you'll see disaffected young social climbers sneer that the 70s suburb is the pinnacle of human organization, unlike whatever form of housing the proles of that day live in.
There is a reason many of those urban cores lost their population and it isn't just because the people there decided they wanted to move out one day because of changes in technology or lifestyle. Without the increased crime rates, race riots, and domestic terrorism of the 60's and 70's, America's cities would probably look much more similar to those in Europe.
My understanding is that a family home is explicitly not a third place, because a third place is by definition a neutral public meeting ground with a semi-rotating cast of characters who have no obligation to be there. It might be possible to make one's house a third place by hosting enough open and regular events and parties, but that would be quite unusual, and would be made unnecessary if more typical meeting spaces e.g. coffee shops, bars, bowling alleys, dance clubs, etc. were common enough to meet people's need for socializing.
Suburban Atlanta and DFW and Houston have seen rapid growth even in areas with race issues and high crime rates. People are willing to put up with racial tensions and crime to live in low-density suburbs but not high density urban areas.
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The more I've learned about that era, the angrier I've become at the "Civil Rights" advocates and other leftists that implemented policies that destroyed American cities almost completely. This wasn't some force of nature, it was a set of deliberate choices by people that just hate bourgeois white culture and were happy to destroy it. There was always going to be some degree of shift and decline in Great Lakes cities that lost manufacturing, but the abject ruin that Detroit became wasn't a foregone conclusion.
If your go-to example (per your comment below) of "policies that destroyed American cities" is Shelley v Kramer, which simply prevented blatant, intentional racial discrimination, then you probably don't have much cause to be angry.
If anything was destroyed, it was bourgeois black culture, as middle class blacks moved out of Harlem, the Central Avenue area of Los Angeles, etc..
Why?
Have you ever been to the area where the Shelley House is located in North St. Louis? Sadly enough, what you see there today is better than what it was after the civil rights revolution. Whatever your opinions about racial discrimination are, the people supporting using it in restrictive covenants predicted their area would turn to ghettoized trash and that is exactly what happened. The Shelley House on Labadue Avenue in St. Louis, Missouri, is an excellent example of exactly what the above user was claiming and was angry about. The only argument is whether or not the intentional policy decisions of the SCOTUS contributed to what happened and what we see today.
Do you happen to know when that area of St. Louis became a hollowed out ghetto?
Because it is wrong, and because people can always come up with some rationalization for mistreating their outgroup, and because black parents have the same right to move to an area where their children will have a better life as everyone else, even assuming that the area they are trying to leave is bad because other black people live there.
except the "rationalization" for mistreating the outgroup in this circumstance predicted what would happen and then what they predicted proceeded to happen at enormous social cost, including in the exact "outgroup" you're claiming to be concerned with here
"rights" aren't some natural phenomena and neither is your vague "rights" morality, they're intentional decisions and those decisions have costs
The Shelley decision demonstrates that quite well which makes your response odd. Your post is essentially "it's wrong," which is fine, but it's not particularly interesting.
Neither is your consequentialist morality. Not that you bother to actually weigh all of the consequences
And yours is essentially "it has costs," which is not particularly interesting. All policies come with costs.
I not expressing concern for any particular outgroup. The principle would be the same, regardless of the outgroup. Hence my generalization about people in general, not these specific people.
As I noted, racial discrimination in housing prevented black parents from moving to areas where their children would have a better life. If a white parent could afford to move to some suburb with good schools, he or she was free to do so. But a black parent was out of luck. As you implicitly acknowledge, that is in fact a bad thing (or, if you prefer, it has costs). If you did not believe that it is a bad thing, you would argue that it does not matter, but you don't. Instead, you merely argue that the alternative had high costs.
Your post minimized/denied there were costs to the Shelley decision. I pointed out the doom-and-gloom predictions of the party who originally filed suit were proved correct. Despite your claims it wasn't a good example to validate the anger the OP was claiming, it's a great example.
none of this is accurate
not a consequentialist, did not implicitly acknowledge that, didn't argue it was and the post was to argue the costs of the particular example you picked which you were implying wasn't much or at all; when asked you moved on to "it's wrong"
it's low-effort non-response and belittling with zero explanation or support
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This is an incorrect reading of the cited discussion. I was responding primarily to the destruction of American cities that occurred during the '60s and '70s, someone else mentioned that suburbanization began before that era, and I noted that this may well have something to do with Shelley. I don't think any single policy accounts for the damage that was done in the name of equality, but that the aggregated weight of civil rights policies, leftist approaches to crime and business, and the Great Society policies accumulated to basically ruin urban cores.
I will certainly agree that the civil rights policies have been terrible for black culture as well though.
Nevertheless, your implication that the "destruction of American cities" was the result of intentional efforts to destroy white bourgeois culture" is ahistorical. If you mean that efforts to end obviously unjust social practices had some negative unintended consequences, then why not say that, instead of "my outgroup evil"?
No, it was, it's just that some suburbanization would have happened anyway. The destruction of American cities was the result of ethnic cleansing engaged in to drive white people out of the cities, which was then called "white flight".
Not if the term, "ethnic cleansing" has any meaning.
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You say tomayto, I say tomahto? What's the difference between "obviously unjust social practices" and "white bourgeois culture", from the perspective of the people driving the changes in question?
I was of course referring to blatant racial discrimination. Practices which were seen as obviously unjust by most people at the time, which is why both major political parties found it politically advantageous to pledge in their platforms to enact civil rights legislation as early as 1948. (I assume that a link to the 1948 Democratic Party platform is unnecessary).
Edit: Apparently, I was mistaken in my assumption that a link showing that the Democratic Party also had a civil rights plank in 1948 was unnecessary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Democratic_National_Convention
The democrats were the segregationist party, and more generally post-1975 political divisions don’t map well onto earlier ones, so if anything democrats would be more likely to oppose civil rights law.
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The people who disproportionately influenced the end of blatant racial discrimination disproportionately despised "white bourgeoise culture", and saw destroying it as a good thing. The song I linked is famous because it captured the essence of the social critique being leveled against the mainstream of its time. Listen to the song, note the problems the song is asserting exist, and then tell me those "problems" weren't addressed.
Hating bad things doesn't make one good. Virulent racists hate rape and murder a whole lot; that doesn't make their solutions net-positive. The "end of blatant racial discrimination", as your phrasing appears to concede, succeeded in altering surface detail without addressing the core of the problem. Lots and lots of black people lived in misery and died violently as a result.
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Any specific sources that expand on this? I'm curious to hear more from this angle.
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To be fair, suburbanization began in earnest shortly after WWII (and as far as I can tell, in America but not in Europe); the ethnic cleansing of the cities only accelerated it.
I don't object to people moving to outer rings because they have families and want the space, I only object to neighborhoods being deliberately ruined.
I do think Shelley v. Kraemer times up suspiciously well with the shift to the suburbs though.
I think the effect of covenants has been blown out of proportion, particularly by lefties. I did title work in Western PA for a decade and never saw a racial covenant; they were never a big thing in this area, but it had little effect on suburbanization. Hell, if those redlining maps that people keep bringing up are correct, Pittsburgh was significantly less segregated in the 1930s then it is now; back then no neighborhood was more than 50% black if memory serves.
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