An excerpt from the article:
If the petit-bourgeois American suburbs embody a sexist hierarchy, they exist in order to enforce a racist one. In the mid-20th century, white northern and western urbanites faced a choice: Stay in the cities where Jim Crow was driving a “Great Migration” of millions of black people, or flee to the new suburban residential developments, complete with racist exclusionary charters. The Federal Housing Administration made the choice easy: Its policy redlined neighborhoods where black people were settling as having low “residential security,” thus making financial services inaccessible. In white-only suburban communities, however, the FHA was pleased to guarantee home mortgages. “There goes the neighborhood,” said millions, and fled.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: pretty much every problem we have in the US is, at its heart, a consequence of bad zoning policy.
You read a fantastic article—which I have recommended dozens of times over the last several years—and came away with the worst conclusion. The zoning didn’t create the racism, the racism created the zoning; just as the zoning didn’t create the wealth inequality, wealth inequality created the zoning.
Trumpism is coming from petit bourgeois suburburbanites, but suburbia is not the cause of Trumpism. This is class war, not a zoning war.
This is also someone who just recently was aggressively arguing with me that sexism had nothing to do with Kamala losing, but pulled this out here:
If the petit-bourgeois American suburbs embody a sexist hierarchy, they exist in order to enforce a racist one
If by “bad zoning policy” you mean legislation and institutions that uphold white supremacy
