Is it because American inner cities have less historical architecture then the European ones so that well off Americans doesn’t mind them being ghettoized or is it your strong property rights that stops the building of crappy concrete blocks in the outskirts of your cities ?

32 comments

  1. >Is it because American inner cities have less historical architecture then the European ones so that well off Americans doesn’t mind them being ghettoized or is it your strong property rights that stops the building of concrete blocks in the outskirts of your cities ?

    I can tell you that the answer isn’t close to either of these options, and is much more complex and tied up in history and socioeconomics.

  3. For a long time, there was a lot of cheap real estate in the suburbs. So folks that lived in the city could get a new house on a big piece of land for cheaper than a small apartment in a crowded city. in addition, the transportation cost of commuting into the city wasn’t a big deal. Pre Covid, that transportation penalty was becoming more excessive so some people were moving back into cities. now post Covid, with the revolution in remote work we’re seeing that even businesses are leaving city centers. it’s really gonna be fascinating over the next 5 to 10 years to see what happens to commercial real estate in big cities. I wonder if a lot might be turned into residential real estate, and we see people fleeing back to city centers rejuvenating them.

  4. It might have a lot to do with the automobile. If you could afford one, you got one starting in the 1930s, 40s, and they represented a kind of freedom. You need one for the suburbs, and also starter homes were cheap in the burbs, in the beginning.

    The “white flight” is not purely racist, it was economic too, so it’s not like anyone who moved was racist, it’s that systemic racism created a situation where modest means / poverty was higher in minority communities, limiting their mobility.

  5. I used to spend an entire semester explaining this to my students/colleagues, how much detail do you want to go into?

    Neither of the explanations you gave reflect reality.

  6. It generally isn’t the inner core of cities that are poor. Some of the wealthiest neighborhoods tend to be in or near the downtown area, especially in the largest cities.

    The poorer areas of US cities tend to be located more in the outlying districts, with generally less convenient locations, but without the space of the suburbs.

  7. FWIW “inner city” and “ghetto” have certain negative connotations here.

    Our downtowns are doing well, all things considered. This isn’t the 1970s. There’s plenty of well off people in downtown Indianapolis

  8. I think it’s several factors all working together:

    * Car culture + the lack of public transit usage in America has played a role in terms of normalising commuting into cities to work; some places have even made this “easier” for suburban people by moving white collar offices to the suburbs themselves (you see this a lot in cities like Atlanta and Detroit)
    * Rooting from our rugged individualist culture, America has a strong tradition of prioritising land ownership – for many, it’s seen as a goal to own a piece of land that you can call “yours”, and many Americans grew up (myself included) being told to buy a house with land on it so you own the land, as opposed to a condo/apartment, which is easier to do in the suburbs
    * White Flight evolved in the mid-latter 20th century to “ghettoize” the inner cities, although that trend in America is actually reversing
    * America is a large, spread-out country that at one time had (and still has) plenty of land to go around; so the relative newness of our country not having had an existing medieval infrastructure, combined with our car culture, has led to a sense that commuting long distances has never really been an issue

  9. Cars, class, cheap land, race, and government structure.

    Car culture made it possible for affluent people to “escape” the cities when they became less desirable to live in.

    The large, affluent middle class of the mid-20th century here wasn’t matched anywhere in Europe until much later.

    Large expanses of relatively cheap property outside the cities here made suburban life more attractive economically, and for quality of life reasons. Drive out from the center of a major European metropolis, and what you hit first is smaller, already well-populated minor cities, towns and villages. In the US, in the mid-20th century, you hit farmland and undeveloped land. This meant that new houses could be built on large plots for sums that were within the means of large numbers of families.

    Race played a role (google “white flight”). When these changes happened, European countries were still virtually homogenous ethnically. “White flight” is a bit of an oversimplification, though, because brown neighbors was just as aggravating factor in the dissatisfaction of the people who left the inner cities (see below).

    The local services that provide quality of life in communities, here in the US, are funded at the local level, and they are mostly funded by *property taxes*. When property values decline in an area, it causes a cyclical problem where the funding for services is strained, causing schools and essential services to struggle, which makes the wealthier people relocate out, which further erodes property values and therefore the tax base. When minorities moved into an urban area, they didn’t just bring their brown skins, they brought economic and social issues that are the consequence of being a hereditary underclass in a prejudiced society. They increased the population density because they packed more family members, and more *families*, into a home, and they didn’t climb the wealth ladder as they got older because of racial discrimination and exploitation. Adding more people to an area, and more of the social ills that attend poverty, while decreasing the pool of money used to address those ills and maintain crucial services, is a recipe for decline. The fact that whites were raised to distrust these black and brown people was a factor for sure, but the plain economics of the situation provided ample rational motivation to GTFO if you could.

  10. I took a class on this in college. It’s neither of those things. It mostly comes down to different ways government subsidized housing.

    Cities before fairly recent times were dirty, crowded, and just generally uncomfortable pretty much everywhere in the world. Late 19th and early 20th century cities just kinda sucked.

    In the US, beginning in the late 1940s with Levittown, New York, private companies built large amounts of larger housing relatively far away from cities where people could get more land and be away from the crowding and stink.

    This could have been a one-off experiment, except for the fact that the US federal government went all in on this strategy. From 1949 to 1968, the US Federal Housing Administration insured most loans in “desirable” neighborhoods, which it defined as white, suburban neighborhoods. Because those mortgages were federally insured, they were offered at way lower interest than non-insured mortgages.

    This meant that if you were white, there was an incredibly cheap supply of houses in the suburbs, and a huge number white Americans left the cities. At the same time, government investment in cities cratered and cities got less white, leading to a white American perception of cities as dangerous places.

    While this policy ended in 1968, the houses are still there, and the idea of raising a family in the suburbs remains a part of American, especially white American, culture.

    All of this primarily happened because of US government intervention. In places that didn’t have intervention, the city centers, which have closer access to work and entertainment, kept more value. Instead, low income housing went to areas outside the city center which were unclaimed or had less powerful/connected claimants.

    It’s also worth noting that this trend is kinda reversing in the US. The truly wealthy are generally leaving the suburbs to move back to the cities, and most new suburban developments are lower-middle class and diverse, rather than the upper crust whiteness traditionally associated with American suburbs.

  11. Funny, but there’s been a trend of inner city neighborhoods gentrifying over the past 30 years.

    Younger generations prefer walkable areas with lots to do and at one point those city neighborhoods were cheaper than alternatives in the suburbs.

  14. There’s no way to answer this in a simple Reddit comment. Factors include economics, racism, transit infrastructure, cultural preference for privacy and space, the sheer size of the country, lack of top-down planning, and on and on and on. It’s also not true that suburbs = wealthy, there are poor, middle-class, and wealthy suburbs, and everything in between. There are also wealthy urban neighborhoods, although it is true that the *term* “inner-city” in the US codes as poor (and almost always minority), while in Australia it codes as posh.

    It is a fascinating topic, though, I’ll give you that.

  16. There are many reasons, some of which are above, but one very important reason which isn’t mentioned was the racial desegregation of schools usually called forced busing of the 1960s.
    Students were no longer able to attend the schools in their neighborhoods often and kids from outside the neighborhood were brought into to “mix up the races” in the schools. Most people did not like this, even blacks, but of course whites had the ability to get out of the forced government program by moving to new school districts-the suburbs.
    This led to all kinds of consequences, and most never led to integration of the schools as blacks now made up the majority in their new schools. Consequences that left the interior of cities void of whites living there, but still working there. The housing in the cities deteriorated. Tax dollars to fund education dried up in the inner cities as people built shopping mallls and new schools in the suburbs. Massive new interstates were built to carry people daily from the suburbs to the interior to work.
    This program coupled others from this time destroyed inner cities, and built up the suburbs. 20-30 years ago began massive efforts by cities to reverse the decline, such as building parks, which has often worked and lured many people to rebuild the old downtown homes and move back to the city.

  17. It’s way more complicated than this nowadays.

    Starting in the 1950’s and 1960’s, with the desegregation of schools and the start of busing as a means to integrate schools, we had the phenomenon of “white flight” in urban areas.

    Those who could, moved out of the cities, and those who stayed tried to keep black people out of their neighborhoods through efforts such as redlining. They also tended to move their kids to private and parochial schools. White people who couldn’t afford to relocate out of these neighborhoods or pay for private school were less likely to move.

    Suburbs started to spread further and further out over time.

    This carried on for over half a century.

    Eventually, however, suburbs started becoming urban centers of their own, and with that came more diversity. By that point, low socioeconomic status and things like property crimes had become a stereotypical feature of “urban” living, and people were getting sick of long commutes.

    In many urban areas, we started to see “gentrification” as lower cost properties started to be bought up and redeveloped for a new market of wealthier people interested in a shorter commutes and the convenience of urban infrastructure.

    People who move to an area for the lower cost of living eventually attract wealth that increases the property values in that area which eventually excludes people who can’t afford to stay there.

    This is all extremely general, and every city has their own history.

    Further, suburbs are very different from rural areas.

    Rural areas are largely the poorest areas in the US for a variety of reasons, but mostly due to a lack of economic opportunity and low populations.

    At any rate, I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “crappy concrete blocks.”

    I think you are relating architecture and building quality to urbanization in a way that doesn’t apply in the US.

  18. American first ring suburbs are kinda meh too. Take LAs Compton and Inglewood for example. And in Houston while meyerland is nice, third ward isn’t, and sharpstown west of that went meh when it had its own flight to the suburbs

    This generally means those suburbs are literal targets for gentrification: lower costs for a new generation looking for a place to live and displacing those who slotted in in the 60s and 70s after the first white flight to newer burbs

  19. Most of the downtown area apartments are actually really high end in the city close to me. A lot of the city is actually really nice, it’s more of a situation of which neighborhood are you in type of deal and not really like the whole city is “ghetto”. Some neighborhoods are rough but most of the criminality is contained in them and most people know not to go around there. Suburbs are quite nice tho

  20. Socioeconomically, people want land. If they can’t get land, they want a central location.

    In America, there has been plentiful land, which means that larger plots are available at a middle class price. So, anyone of means accepts the trade-off to go to the suburbs and enjoy property.

    In Europe, there are many areas where land is generally out of the reach of the average person, but central locations are more readily available. In this situation, the middle class prices out lower classes, and the lower classes have to move further outside the city center. However, once in the suburbs, they still can’t afford land, and end up in crowded apartments anyway.

    Things change a bit for rural areas, but you’ll still find more landowners at a lower socioeconomic demographic in the US compared to Europe.

  21. European cities tend to be built around walking. If you live in the middle of the city then most you’ll ever have to walk is only half the distance of the city in any direction, if you live on the suburbs it means if you want to get all the way across town you have to walk through the entire city. Meaning wealthier folks would live in the center and poorer folks on the suburbs

    In the US most cities were redesigned around the car, so that need for walkability is pretty much none existent. Meaning folks that live in the inner city tend to be poorer and folks that can afford to commute live in the suburbs

  22. I know the socioeconomic reasons can be debated until you are blue in the face but as an American im sure glad it is this way. There is nothing worse than the crush of people, lack of privacy, the crime, the homeless being everywhere, and cost of a large city. For the price of renting an apartment in a major American city you can buy yourself a mansion in a less populated area.

    In the US we have an excess of land. European countries are much smaller and have to smash way more people in a given area than we will ever have to. The dream is being able to own enough land you don’t actually have to see any other people/neighbors from your property.

  23. Because cars are expensive and the vast majority of small cities have little or no light rail.

    Not to mention, the people building low cost housing in the 1970s opted to put the developments in the inner cities.

  24. Just at first blush, I don’t think this is true:

    > … when in Europe the ghettos are generally in the suburbs while the Middle Class generally lives in the inner cities?

    Further, the first half of the question *used to be somewhat true*, back about 40 or 50 years ago, when we saw a lot of ‘white flight’ from urban centers. (Yes, race is involved.) But there has been a movement towards urban renewal over the past few decades as urban centers have become more desirable. In a very large city (like New York) you do get a mix of wealthy and poor neighborhoods—as you do just about anywhere where there is a substantial population. And it is true that urban centers tend to be more expensive for simple land-use reasons.

    But I don’t believe the premise of the question is true for either America or for Europe—and may be OP generalizing limited personal experience with American entertainment products which tended to portray urban centers as centers of decay.

    It’s why I like looking at the statistics.

  26. Classism, Racism, Transportation, Work, Industry, Developmental planning, there are a myriad of reasons that we could write a book about.

  27. Uh….you’re kind of starting from a misconception here, cities have every income bracket. There are deeply poor areas, which have the most issues and thus you hear about them most, but there are also middle and upper class neighborhoods in the dense centers.

    A lot of people enjoy the additional space and home size in the burbs when they want to start a family, but tons of young professionals, childfree couples and some families are living in the dense areas of cities in nice places.

    The confusion here may stem from the bit where they decided to use “inner city” as a euphemism for ghetto awhile ago, even if much wealthier neighborhoods could accurately be described the same way.

  28. What are you talking about?

    Being near the downtown city center is usually very wealthy and expensive.

  30. Nothing you’ve asserted is correct and you just couldn’t resist getting in an insult. How is this asked in good faith?

  31. Lots of relevant answers in this thread but I thought I’d address’s OP’s question about “crappy concrete blocks” which I am assuming refers to “public housing,” i.e. housing built by the government expressly for the purpose of helping out the lower-income. In the 70s and 80s there indeed were large public housing projects built in the US (Cabrini-Green in Chicago comes to mind) which were intended as large modern comfortable places to live, but because of lack of maintenance, degenerated over the years into effectively slums.

    Large public housing projects fell out of favor and the government tried to meet the need by creating “Section 8 vouchers” which allows the renter to choose their own apartment and the government pays the landlord directly — these apartments could be anywhere, for anyone, not dedicated exclusively to public housing. Not all landlords take Section 8 so this program has its own issues but in general it has resulted in a greater distribution of affordable housing.

  32. First off, American inner cities aren’t ghettoized. Some parts of some cities may be be ghettoized, but many aren’t. But Urban decay is a thing and that may be what you’re thinking of.

    The development of the American suburb led to urban decay disproportionately affecting black neighborhoods in cities. After WWII, technologies developed for the war effort went to building housing which was heavily aimed at returning soldiers. Millions of troops had come back from Europe ready to raise a family and now the dream of having your own house, complete with a yard and garage was possible for young couples, provided you weren’t black. Because of cars and the infrastructure supporting them, it was easy to live outside the densely packed cities and to travel into them for work. This meant many people left the cities for the newly build suburbs. When a large amount of people leave a city, they take business with them. A places that serves breakfast to people on their way to work at the office is has lost customers. A store that sells magazines to someone passing buy has lost business. A person who cleans apartments now has lost clients. Because most of these suburbs did not sell homes to blacks, the areas hit harder by the loss of business were black neighborhoods.

    There is also the matter of how officials treat sections of cities. If an area has lost a lot of people, they may make the decision to cut services to that area in order cut back on spending. A bus stop may be removed because it is no longer seen as useful. So an area that has lost business will now find it all that much harder to keep other businesses or bring more. Poor urban planing can also have unintended consequences. Single use zoning often is detrimental to the well being of areas. Residential neighborhoods while charming sounding, frequently become targets for crime especially if the neighborhood is mid to nigher income with many working set hours, the area can be left empty and free of witnesses for exptended periods. Financial areas aren’t great for things like delis as there is a rush of business before and after work hours adn during breaks but next to no business during work hours.

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