Kenneth Jackson, the author of the book Crabgrass Frontier, provides an extensive overview of the history of and explains the causes to the suburbanization in the United States. He sees such development in the United States as unique due to the extent of cities’ suburban sprawl, the number of commuters, and the proportion of homeowners (190). Jackson explained that because of the inexpensive land, low construction cost, improvement in transportation technology and along with government’s involvement, Americans settle in the crabgrass frontier. However, Jackson describes that “[s]uburbs, then, were socially and economically inferior to cities when wind, muscle, and water were the prime movers of civilization…Even the word suburb suggested inferior …show more content…
The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) introduced long-term mortgage and guaranteed to lenders with low interest rate and extended payment period. The number of Americans who could purchase homes increased and Jackson pointed out how the American way of life transformed, which is to buy a home than to rent. It is said that “today, renters account for one-third of all households, suburbs house far more people than cities, and affordability has supplanted physical deficiency as the primary housing problem (Schwartz 2015, 17).” However, the HOLC and FHA excluded the black population such that the HOLC appraisal and rating system assessed neighborhoods with black inhabitants to be hazardous and the FHA concerned about white-black separation in terms of the investment values (201, 208). FHA helped the building industry to turn against the minority and inner-city housing market and its policies supported the income and racial segregation of suburbia (213). Policies from HOLC and FHA approved of ethnic segregation and created many suburbs that clearly oppose their objective to address the imbalance in the community. Jackson criticizes how these programs “hastened the decay of inner-city neighborhoods by stripping them of much of their middle-class constituency” (206). However, while Jackson helps make sense of the role of the government in the suburban movement, Jackson sees that the process of suburbanization will slow down in the future. As more minorities entered the middle class, the proportion of minorities in the suburb will increase such that the stimulus to “white flight” will drop. In addition, due to limited availability of energy, high cost of land, credit, and
Overall, the federal government was never really hands on in housing, that changed in the 1930’s when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was created to be apart of the New Deal. After the Great Depression, the FHA sought to rebuild the housing market by introducing the mortgage lending system, that is still used today. The FHA actually did quite the opposite, “instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy”, that took advantage of racial covenants and insisted properties that were insured by them to use those covenants. The FHA introduced redlining policies in many American cities and with the Home Owners Loan Coalition (HOLC), a federally-funded program created to help homeowners refinance their mortgages, it seemed that it would never end.
The Federal Housing Authority successfully discriminated against and confined African American families to the slums of Chicago by the use of redlining. “Redlining refers to a discriminatory pattern of disinvestment and obstructive lending practices that act as an impediment to home ownership among African Americans and other people of color”. Therefore, black families could not do what most white families could- get a mortgage loan and use it to pay for their property in full. Instead, they only had the option to “buy on contract” which Setter explains is, more or less on the installment plan.
The title of the documentary is “Suburban America: Problems & Promises”. The intended audience for this documentary is individuals that do not know the history of how suburban areas came about, and how they have changed and grown dramatically over the years. It also explains the political impact that the growing suburban areas has on our government and how expanding these areas can change the outcome of an election. Suburban areas grew after the soldiers came home after WWII. Many suburban areas in the beginning were segregated.
According to The Editorial Board New York Time’s, “The Housing Crisis Lives on for Minorities” December 26,2016, mortgage companies such as Fannie Mae are discriminating and being racist towards African-American and Latino homes. The writer emphasizes the neglection Fannie Mae had towards these minority homeowners and specifies the contrast between white areas and black areas. The mortgage crisis that ravaged the economy eight years ago, is a driving factor of the editorial. The writer is informing New York Times readers, educated citizens, and intellectuals about the racial allegations towards Fannie Mae. The Editorial Board affectively convinces their audience that there is an unjust gap between white and minority homes through the use of
When given the task to watch and understand the documentary "Suburban American: Problems and Promises" I was genuinely interested. Due to my interests in property development and real estate, I wanted to know the reasoning for why certain areas and region were considered appropriate locations for building a suburban neighborhood. Therefore, I started to realized that the audience that the movie was directed towards was people who are interested in the development of the Urban and Suburban areas of our previous and present generations. Also, this documentary should spark the interest in any American history fans, construction management and even people that are interested in civil rights movement. This documentary touches on all the reasons
The documentary that we needed to watch for this essay is titled "Suburban America: Problems & Promise. " The movie is produced and directed by Ron Rudaitis, and its intended audience are students, community leaders, educators, as well as anyone who is interested in learning about the challenges that suburbs face, their history, as well as the role that they played in shaping the American society. The primary purpose of the documentary is to inform its audience about suburbia. The film briefly focuses on informing the viewer about the history of suburbs.
FHA that made RRCs an important condition of mortgage insurance continued to enact their policies to segregate white families to new and exclusive suburbs. Even after the courts prohibited explicit racial zoning, FHA believed that African American families threaten home value and their insurability. “the FHA took the position that the presence of African Americans in nearby neighborhoods was nonetheless a consideration that could threaten FHA insurability” (quoted in Making Ferguson, pp. 16). The effects of their actions of racial segregation persists even today in most neighborhoods. (Making Ferguson, pp.
Many Americans across the U.S today just want what is best for their family, which includes great education and a superb community. Numerous Americans wish to accomplish the success the findings a house of their dreams just as the Myers had done in the primarily white Levittown
Black and white real estate professionals took advantage of the demand for better-quality housing in the black community by using practices such as blockbusting, racial steering, and other forms of housing discrimination to charge blacks a premium for housing (Malega and Stallings 3). This resulted in white flight which is how suburbs were created. Residential segregation was higher in northern states and cities compared to the south. It is proven that blacks with lower income are separated from whites. White households regardless of income level lived in neighborhoods that were about 80 percent white whereas high-income black households lived in neighborhoods that were less than 50 percent white (Malega and Stallings 3).
For the past few decades, the term “gentrification” became a trend in most of the developing and developed countries in the world. Not only because of the contributions it made to the countries, but also the changes and reshaping it made in the political, economic, cultural and social aspects of every state that has a prevalent cases of it. Since 1964, the year when the term gentrification was first utilized, it was already associated with different social, political and economic issues because of the effects it left and made to the people that were involved in every cases especially to the rich and poor and their gaps. The term was first described as the movement of middle class families into the former lower-class neighborhoods. Gentrification,
Lance Freeman, an associate professor of urban planning in Columbia, wanted to investigate if there was any displacement going on in two predominantly black neighborhoods that was briskly gentrifying. Much to his dismay, he couldn’t find any correlation between gentrification and displacement. What was surprising to Freeman was his discovery, “poor residents and those without a college education were actually less likely to move if they resided in gentrifying neighborhoods”. (Sternbergh, 19) Freeman adds, “The discourse on gentrification, has tended to overlook the possibility that some of the neighborhood changes associated with gentrification might be appreciated by the prior residents.” (Sternbergh, 19)
Residential segregation is when different groups of people live in different neighborhoods, often based on level of income or race. There are a few causes contributing to this problem, which result in consequences. There is also the question of opportunity. Some black people will never have the opportunity to move out of black neighborhoods and into multi-racial neighborhoods because of the difference in quality of education, healthcare and the problem of crime (Pappas, 2012). In this section, we will be discussing the residential segregation associated with race and the various factors contributing to the cause of this separation to help us answer our problem formulation.
The amount of crime that is within a neighborhood is a huge factor in whether or not the neighborhood has a high property value or not. This is exemplified in a movie directed by John Singleton, Boyz N the Hood. The neighborhood of Crenshaw, located in Los Angeles, California, is presented as being riddled with crime and violence. This is the culture found within the impoverished black neighborhoods. Despite what it may seem at first, the root of this problem is not found with the people themselves, but a problem with the urban development itself.
Different studies have worked emphasized on the case to develop index and parameters to define segregation boundary. Reardon and O’Sullivan (2004) developed segregation index to measure and compare the geographic scale of racial residential segregation in large metropolitan areas in the U.S.[4, 12]. In fact, the literature review lead us three major types of segregation: (1) “segregation as port of entry for immigrants; (2) segregation as a centralized or collective reaction, related to neighborhood hostility, discrimination in the housing market and the role of the state in exclusionary urban development; and (3) segregation as decentralized discrimination in terms of market preferences” [13,
Muller concluded after analyzing the process of suburbanization that suburbia evolved into a self‐sufficient urban entity, containing its own major economic and cultural activities, that is no longer an appendage to the central city. P.O. Muller also concluded that suburban cities are ready to compete with the central city for leading urban economic activities such as telecommunications, high‐technology industries, and corporate headquarters. In addition to expanding residential zones, the process of suburbanization rapidly creates distinct urban regions complete with industrial, commercial, and educational