Car-dependent development was the workaround that government officials devised to keep housing segregation in effect after the Supreme Court ruled it illegal. If one needed a car to get around those new subdivisons, poor people couldn’t live there. If Black people were largely poor, and if government programs like the GI Bill were denied to Black people, well, that wasn’t a segregation law, so it wasn’t illegal, right?
Subsidizing the white middle class with government money so that they could afford to buy cars happened to work well for the capitalists, too.
(By the way, this isn’t a conspiracy theory. The people doing it weren’t shy, and left explicit, written records of their racist intent.)
Car-dependent development was the workaround that government officials devised to keep housing segregation in effect after the Supreme Court ruled it illegal. If one needed a car to get around those new subdivisons, poor people couldn’t live there. If Black people were largely poor, and if government programs like the GI Bill were denied to Black people, well, that wasn’t a segregation law, so it wasn’t illegal, right?
Subsidizing the white middle class with government money so that they could afford to buy cars happened to work well for the capitalists, too.
(By the way, this isn’t a conspiracy theory. The people doing it weren’t shy, and left explicit, written records of their racist intent.)