I was delighted to see Tim Lee cite Adam Gordon, a housing policy expert who wrote a brilliant article in the Yale Law Journal on how New Deal housing policy shaped U.S. cities and exacerbated the black-white wealth gap. Tim does an able job of summarizing Gordon’s argument. And in his conclusion, Tim explains how the federal government super-sized the suburbs:

Young, upwardly mobile families in the market for a first home (at least the white ones) went where they could get the best deal, and thanks to federal guarantees that was the suburbs. Meanwhile, urban areas were starved of capital thanks to state laws that banned private parties from making long-term loans in those areas. Not surprisingly, suburban home construction boomed during this period, while urban areas stagnated.
To someone who wasn’t paying close attention, it would have appeared that people were freely choosing to move to the suburbs. But hidden subsidies (not to mention other policies like eminent domain abuse and urban freeway construction) were subtly tilting the playing field in favor of suburbia. Our cities (and black Americans in particular) are still recovering from the severe damage the government did to them during this period.

I wanted to briefly mention a related argument. In his brilliant book White Flight, Princeton historian Kevin Kruse describes how segregationists in Georgia wanted to dismantle the state’s public schools by establishing a statewide voucher program. The idea is that white parents could then choose to send their children to schools that deliberately excluded non-white children, thus preserving a segregated school system. Kruse’s broader argument is that the battle against desegregation shaped the modern U.S. conservative movement.

One conclusion I drew from reading his book, however, is that had the segregationists succeeded in dismantling the public schools, Georgia’s cities might not have experienced massive white flight. This, in turn, might have prevented a larger deterioration in the condition of Atlanta’s urban core, given African Americans greater access to employment opportunities, and led to a smaller, denser metropolitan region, with the environmental and public health benefits that entails.

Basically, the advent of integrated public schools led many white parents to leave Atlanta’s boundaries and settle in monolithically white suburban school districts. And so the end result was the same as it might have been under the worst-case voucher scenario, i.e., complete segregation. The difference is that under the voucher scenario, at least some parents might have chosen integrated schools — a number that would most likely have grown as whites and blacks living relatively close to each other learned to share institutions in a spirit of mutual respect. Short-circuiting this learning process led directly to the feared consequence of allowing free choice and made it impossible to achieve a healthier equilibrium.

One gets the impression that this was a case of the desire to immanentize the eschaton back-firing.