Middle Class Exodus to the Suburbs (1966)

Transcript

Hide -

to guide people and new development in this particular area. Our society will never be great until our cities are great. These are the words of President Lyndon Johnson spoken in the height of America's current urban crisis. But some years ago in the height of America's industrial revolution an inventor named Henry Ford made a proclamation that has since become closely related. I will build a motor car for the great multitude he said. So low in price that no man will be unable to own one and enjoy with his family the blessing of ours of pleasure in God's great open spaces. And in 1966 American cities have yet to subdue the cumbersome paralysis and deformity left

in the wake of Mr. Ford's ingenuity. Of equal significance is the fact that those who profit at most from what the automobile could bring into downtown the industry that people the revenue soon discovered that the same facility made it possible for them to live further and further away from that downtown and away from the congestive noisy snarle of motorization. Urban sprawl was born, subdivisions, shopping centers, suburban. Downtown residences and eventually business areas were left to those who could lease to Ford their maintenance. The resultant depreciation and plight burled into and enveloped the city then began a subtle but rapid encroachment into the surrounding areas. We must seriously consider what Fred Vigman stated in his 1955 publication, Crisis of the Cities. The great suburbs where the absentee classes there will coalesce into the cultural social

units of the future. Already, ever larger segments of suburbia have less reason to come into the city. Stores, social centers, and the light follow the line of the greater wealth on the periphery of the city. And then, we must wonder not only if, but how downtown and in turn the city as a whole is to survive.

Middle Class Exodus to the Suburbs (1966)

In the decades after World War II, the population of suburban areas more than doubled while the population of central cities shrank. Many of the new suburbanites were members of a growing white middle class who had grown up in cities but chose to buy their own home and raise their family in the suburbs. These affluent suburbanites may still have worked in cities, but their homes and much of their spending were in the suburbs (along with the associated property and sales tax revenue). Notably, formal and informal mechanisms–such as restrictive covenants that banned sale to people of color; zoning laws that effectively excluded poor people; and informal, discriminatory real estate broker practices–kept the suburbs nearly all white. Those who remained in the cities were disproportionately likely to be poorer people of color, often living in slums, and thus were the most in need of the social services that city governments were increasingly ill-equipped to provide.

The clip, from a 1966 episode of Local Issues called “To Save a City” produced by WMVS in Milwaukee, illuminates the crucial role of the automobile and the growth of the highway system in facilitating this suburbanization; the prototypical suburban father drove into work on government-constructed freeways connecting the city and suburbs. The video clip illuminates a trend about Milwaukee that was emblematic of the country as a whole: Even while the U.S. economy thrived in the 1950s and 1960s, slum conditions prevailed in significant portions of American cities.

Local Issue; 19; To Save a City | WMVS (Television station : Milwaukee, Wis.) | August 7, 1966 This video clip and associated transcript appear from 9:30 - 12:00 in the full record.

View Full Record