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Suburbanization Pros And Cons

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In the 1964 election, “tens of thousands of southern Alameda County suburbanites drove to the polls. They voted in overwhelming numbers for the figurehead of mid-1960s liberalism, President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ).” The suburban centers were not always against liberalism, but external influences such as taxes, property rights, and externalities broke the bridge between California’s suburbs and liberalism. “In 1964 no threat to property markets seemed greater to either homeowners or the real estate industry than the Rumford Fair House Act.” According to Self, the suburban communities voted for LBJ in the 1964 general election, even though he campaigned for increased civil rights for minorities, indicating that the suburban break with liberalism …show more content…

This moment is where one of the first cracks in the suburban, liberalism bridge beings to fracture. Many black urban communities, especially Oakland, made several attempts to rejuvenate Oakland’s neighbors, but with little success, causing their focus to now be aimed outward, towards the suburbs. The urban cities argued that the method for distributing resources was flawed. The slogan “white noose” and “white strangulation of the black city” began to catch on. Taxes within the suburban communities that are to be used to support the urban communities were too low to sustain Oakland, and the only way to initiate tax reform was through localized voting. Self argues that how could tax reform manifest through policy if "they were politically isolated in Oakland." From 1963 – 1970, is the official break between the suburban centers of Alameda County and …show more content…

So the ability to even locate a possible job opportunity was a task in itself. Not only was the industrial organization of Oakland difficult to navigate, but the local job opportunity offices were against inner-city Oakland as well. The California State Employment Service (CSES) would prioritize local resident job seekers over Oakland job seekers; however, in employment markets in manufacturing, wholesale trade, and transportation were within these suburban areas and unionized. Unionized corporations were the best opportunity for African Americans to get a job in the suburbs. There were two vital issues with this tactic, one said previously by the CSES notifying Oakland job seekers last, and that the ability to get to these suburban areas was also a struggle. If an opportunity would arise for a black Oakland job seeker, to get to the job interview would take a significant amount of effort and even when the job seeker made it out to the job site, the position may already be filled, or not acquired at all due to either employer discrimination or unreliable transportation. Many employers did not want to risk the unreliability of black Oakland job seekers due to

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In this article, “Gentrification”, by Sherman Alexie, the author tells a story about his neighborhood. The authors story was one where he thought he was doing the right thing but yet once he had done it, he did not feel good about it at all. The author shows how there is still racism in America and that can change the way people see things. The author shows this through a personal story that happened awhile back.

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420 Words | 2 Pages

The overall argument of Robert O. Self’s Introduction, in the book “American Babylon,” are the different aspects of postwar Oakland and the East Bay, socially, economically, and politically. There are three key claims Self makes in the Introduction. First, Self claims there were two controversial political ideologies in postwar Oakland, one being black power, including politics of deference and empowerment, and second a neo-populist, conservative homeowner politics of white residents. Another claim Self makes is the idea that the postwar black struggle and politics of suburban building shaped the political culture in Oakland and the East Bay. The third key claim Self makes is the modernization of space; space as property, as a social imagination, and as a political scale.

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785 Words | 4 Pages

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

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729 Words | 3 Pages

Particularly in retail, the employees were the face of the business - the ones with whom the customers interacted. As a result of this, The employment of black salespeople… would undermine the thoroughly bourgeois atmosphere of high-end retail shopping… [and] store owners sometimes acted on their fears that black employees would steal from the cash register or pilfer store merchandise. (Sugrue,

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1580 Words | 7 Pages

The idea of equality for all people, regardless of their race, is instilled in the American society of today. Unfortunately, this idea has not always been present, which ultimately has caused many issues for America’s society in the past. As discussed in the book Our Town: Race, Housing, and the Soul of Suburbia, David L. Kirp focuses on the inequality that was found between the low-income blacks and the middle class whites in a South Jersey town, Mount Laurel. At the time, the whites had a goal of running the blacks out of the town by making the costs of housing expensive enough where blacks could not afford it. This lead to unequal treatment for the blacks who lived in Mount Laurel compared to the whites when it came to housing opportunities.

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Although innovation created pronounced opportunities for African Americans to move up north to urban areas during the Great Migration, just as many obstacles and hardships ensued as well. The documentary Take This Hammer by James Baldwin explores these adversities that are faced by African Americans in San Francisco, a city known for being quite progressive during

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920 Words | 4 Pages

In Walter Mosley 's fictional short story, "Equal Opportunity" (1995), he describes employment discrimination through the character of Socrates Fortlow, an African American ex-convict attempting to find employment. Socrates lives in an abandoned building in Los Angeles neighborhood called Watts. He has been out of “prison eight years, fifty-eight years old, and ready to start life over again,” (Mosley 1). Socrates faces several conflicts, attempting to gain employment, because of his (1) age, (2) race, and (3) where he lives. He has to travel far to look for a job because everyone on his side of town, especially, Crenshaw and Washington, both store owners in Watts, knew that he collected bottles and cans for money and “they would not hire

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White bankers perceived black bankers as uninspired and as only willing to work a 9 to 5 job; they narrowed down their ability to perform only because of historical racial issues. White bankers were supposed to be more energetic, intelligent and more suited for blue-collar jobs, mostly in dealing with wealthy white clients. The racial backdrop of a banker determined his/her career path at Cityside and not their interests or dexterity. This mentality was not only limited for the employees of the Cityside.

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738 Words | 3 Pages

Even if you are one of the poorest people in the town, if you are white, then you are still more significant in the social classes than a black person. Today, people are going through the same racial discrimination that was happening so long ago and will happen till the day our world is nonexistent anymore. In our society, people are judged for many things they can’t change. In the article, “Inequality, Race, and Remedy,” there was a study done that sent out approximately 1,300 résumés to apply for the same job.

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1162 Words | 5 Pages

San Francisco was once notorious for its urban renewal that lowered housing affordability for its displaced residents. Starting in the

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The rediscovery of Lucretius’ De rerum natura is considered to be one of the most contingent turning points of modern history. From its enlightened birth circa 55 BC- to its unearthing in the medieval Germany by humanist and book hunter, Poggio Bracciolini- the De rerum natura’s very existence is a miracle. In the Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Harvard humanities professor Stephen Greenblatt offers not only an explanation of Lucretius’ poem and its origins in Epicurus, but also explains the threat that De rerum natura posed to Catholic theology, and Lucretius’ influence on later philosophers, from Thomas More to Thomas Jefferson.

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545 Words | 3 Pages

I have lived in East Oakland my whole life. To the majority of people, the mention of East Oakland evokes thoughts of violence, shootings, and gangs. I was one of the people who believed in these stereotypes, and for a particularly long time. I was one of the people who saw Oakland as a wasteland, a place with nothing to offer me, and a place I had nothing to offer to.

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1090 Words | 5 Pages

Issue: Within the last decade, San Francisco has dramatically changed. San Francisco’s working class people and poor neighborhoods underwent drastic economic and racial changes from the 1990s to mid 2000s, resulting in the undeniable gentrification of the districts. San Francisco’s gentrification has reached a ridiculous new extreme, making it the most expensive city in the country, outstripping even Manhattan. The beginning of the issue was right after the dotcom and Tech industries started drastically moving to the Bay Area.

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9283 Words | 38 Pages

Situated in historically marginalized racial minority and urban communities it results in the impoverished community being ill-prepared to compete in neoliberalism’s rules of engagement because such communities have little economic, social or political power. The remainder of this essay will address current rebuilding strategies in Baltimore within the framework of the three strategies of urban neliberalization described above (see table 1 for outline). Before doing so it is important to provide context from the past ways racialized neoliberalization community building existed pre-late1900’s. While the label “neoliberalization” became synonymous with the evolving US political economy during the Reagan administration, many of its strategies have been in practice for decades previous, perhaps with greater government oversight, more social welfare, and not as much private ownership of public goods -as a white supremacist liberal political economic system (Kendall 2003). The right of the white individual to secure outcomes in their best interest through a free market system permeates the past liberal and current neoliberal political economies of the US.

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502 Words | 3 Pages

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)

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