BACKGROUND
Suburbs first emerged on a large scale in the 19th and 20th centuries as a result of improved rail and road transport, which led to an increase in commuting. In the United States, Boston and New York spawned the first suburbs. The streetcar lines in Boston and the rail lines into Manhattan made daily commutes possible. No metropolitan area in the world was as well served by railroad commuter lines at the turn of the twentieth century as New York, and it was the rail lines to Westchester from the Grand Central Terminal commuter hub that enabled its development. Westchester's true importance in the history of American suburbanization derives from the upper-middle class development of villages including Scarsdale, New Rochelle and Rye serving thousands of businessmen and executives from Manhattan.
POST-WAR EXPANSION
The suburban population in North America exploded during the post-World War II economic expansion. Returning veterans wishing to start a settled life moved in masses to the suburbs. Levittown developed as a major prototype of mass-produced housing. At the same time, African Americans were rapidly moving north for better jobs and educational opportunities than were available to them in the segregated South. Their arrival in Northern cities and hostility of many white Americans further stimulated white suburban migration. 1950 was the first year that more Americans lived in suburbs than elsewhere.
The growth of suburbs was facilitated by the development of zoning laws, redlining, and numerous innovations in transport. After World War II, availability of Federal Housing Administration mortgage loans stimulated a housing boom in American suburbs. In the older cities of the northeast, streetcar suburbs originally developed along train or trolly lines that could shuttle workers into and out of city centers where jobs were located. This practice gave rise to the term bedroom community, meaning that most daytime business activity took place in the city, with the working population leaving the city at night for the purpose of going home to sleep in the suburbs.
Economic growth in the United States encouraged the suburbanization of American cities that required massive investments for new infrastructure and homes. Consumer patterns were also shifting at this time, as purchasing power was becoming stronger and more accessible to a wider range of families. Suburban houses also brought about needs for products that were not needed in urban neighborhoods, such as lawnmowers and automobiles. During this time commercial shopping malls were being developed near suburbs to satisfy consumers' needs and their car-dependent lifestyle.
Zoning laws also contributed to the location of residential areas outside of the city center by creating wide areas or "zones" where only residential buildings were permitted. These suburban residences are built on larger lots of land than in the central city. For example, the lot size for a residence in Chicago is usually 125 feet (38 m) deep, while the width can vary from 14 feet (4.3 m) wide for a row house to 45 feet (14 m) wide for a large stand-alone house. In the suburbs, where stand-alone houses are the rule, lots may be 85 feet (26 m) wide by 115 feet (35 m) deep, such as in the Chicago suburb of Naperville. Manufacturing and commercial buildings were segregated in other areas of the city.
Levittown, Pennsylvania, c. 1959.
Levittown refers to seven large suburban developments created in the United States by William Levitt and his company Levitt & Sons. Built after World War II for returning veterans and their new families, the communities developed as a major prototype of mass-produced housing.
WHITE FLIGHT AND HYPERSEGREGATION
With the growth of the suburbs in the early and mid-20th century, a pattern of hypersegregation – a form of racial segregation that consists of the geographical grouping of racial groups – emerged. In the early-20th century, African Americans who moved to large U.S. cities typically moved into the inner-city to gain industrial jobs. The influx of new black residents caused many white Americans to move to the suburbs ("white flight"). During the 1940s, for the first time a powerful interaction between segregation laws and race differences in terms of socioeconomic status enabled white families to abandon inner cities in favor of suburban living. The eventual result was severe levels of urban decay that, by the 1960s, resulted in the crumbling urban "ghettos." Prior to national data obtained by the 1950 U.S. census, the migration pattern of disproportionate numbers of whites moving from cities to suburban communities was merely anecdotal. The first data set that potentially could prove white flight was the 1950 census data. But the original processing of this data, on older-style tabulation machine by the U.S. Census Bureau, failed to attain any such level of statistical proof. It was a rigorous reprocessing of the same mass of raw data, on a UNIVAC I by Donald J. Bogue of the Scripps Foundation, that scientifically proved the reality of white flight.
As industry began to move out of the inner-city, the African American residents lost the stable industrial jobs that initially brought them there, forcing them to stay in the area to create the inner-city ghettos that make up the core of hypersegregation.
New municipalities were established beyond the abandoned city's jurisdiction to avoid the legacy costs of maintaining city infrastructures. Instead, new governments spent taxes to establish suburban infrastructures. The federal government contributed to white flight and the early decay of non-white city neighborhoods by withholding maintenance capital mortgages, thus making it difficult for the communities to either retain or attract middle-class residents. In addition to encouraging white families to move to suburbs by providing them loans to do so, the government uprooted many established African American communities by building elevated highways through their neighborhoods. To build a highway, tens of thousands of single-family homes were destroyed. Because these properties were summarily declared to be "in decline," families were given pittances for their properties, and were forced into federal housing called "the projects." To build these projects, still more single family homes were demolished.
In some areas, the post–World War II racial desegregation of the public schools catalyzed white flight. In 1954, the US Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ordered the de jure termination of the "separate, but equal" legal racism established with the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case in the 19th century. It declared that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. Many southern jurisdictions mounted massive resistance to the policy. In some cases, white parents withdrew their children from public schools and established private religious schools instead. Upon desegregation in 1957 in Baltimore, Maryland, the Clifton Park Junior High School had 2,023 white students and 34 black students; ten years later, it had twelve white students and 2,037 black students. In northwest Baltimore, Garrison Junior High School's student body declined from 2,504 whites and twelve blacks to 297 whites and 1,263 blacks in that period. At the same time, the city's working class population declined because of the loss of industrial jobs as heavy industry restructured.