> This was only made possible by enormous federal subsidies for returning soldiers and huge investments in public infrastructure by the federal government.
> People ... couldn’t imagine returning to the city which continued to decline.
I begin to wonder whether the demise of the city was really caused by the government subsidies of the suburban lifestyle. It's not that Levittown isn't sustainable anymore, it's that it never was, not on a long term scale. Low density living should be expensive because it is expensive. The government chose to invest in suburbs instead of the city. The city rotted without investment, exacerbating the problem.
It's only the last couple decades as governments tightened their coffers that the suburbs have had to carry their own load- and they can't.
To expand a bit more here, the Strong Towns folks argue that city infrastructure project costs do not factor in long-term maintenance. Growth is the driver of revenue in the short term (building permit fees, more expensive single-family homes paying property taxes). Once growth slows or stops, the party is over. Maintenance costs kick in, and the errors made during the boom time are revealed in the form of broken streets, abandonment, blight, etc.
They consult with cities to target a 20-to-1 "return on investment" when taking on infrastructure projects. That means that the costs to build street or water pipes should result in 20x that cost in economic activity.
I think demise of cities was due to being starved for capital, redlining, automobiles, and crime due to lead pollution.
Post war capital was invested in suburbs instead of urban cores which then decayed.
Redlining also meant urban areas inhabited by minorities were cut off from capital. Not only couldn't minorities get loans, but even their often white landlords couldn't.
Automobiles allowed workers to locate their families in cheap suburbs while sucking at the corporate teat in Urban Cities. At least until too many people spoiled a good thing as auto congestion built up.
Leaded gasoline caused brain damage which effected dense urban areas the most, resulting in high crime rates.
The last 40 years has seen a reversal of that at least for some urban cities. Capital is being invested in cities. Hard redlining is gone. Replaced by jacking minorities with exploitative loan products. Suburban congestion has made suburbs much less attractive. The decline of lead pollution means urban cities are again 'safe'.
True, but there is recent evidence that is pretty much the gold standard for a perfect randomized experiment where they tracked children with high blood levels who did and did not receive interventions to lower it. Those receiving treatment committed violent crimes at a far lower rate than those who were exposed but had no intervention. https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/app.20160056
Vaguely relevant: there's reason to believe that the current Central American gang violence epidemic, which is driving the migrant crisis at the US/Mexico border is also due to leaded gasoline. Central America didnt' eliminate leaded gasoline until the 2000s.
Leaded gasoline was banned around the year 2000 in both the EU and Mexico. At that time, crime rates were dropping significantly in Europe, without elapsing 18-25 years.
Also, European countries have some of the lowest crime rates in the world. If the young of the 2000s were under its influence, the effect is not large(not larger than 1-2 homicides per 100K people).
I believe that drug abuse during the 80s and 90s was the culprit of high crime rates in Europe. People addicted to drugs(heroin, crack, cocaine, etc.) committed lots of crimes. In the late 90s and early 2000s, Europe managed to lower drug abuse and then crimes dropped. For Mexico, there is likely another explanation. Like drug trafficking for instance.
Having said this, I think leaded gasoline has adverse effects on public health. I believe it can create mental problems on people.
However, not everyone exposed to leaded gasoline will develop those problems. And among those affected, not all of them will become criminals only because of lead poisoning. Therefore, I don't think that the majority of criminals during the 90s were so because of leaded gasoline. I think that other factors were more important, like drug abuse.
That seems like a weird analysis. Leaded fuel was available but not exactly widespread in EU in 1999. Their timeline was similar to the American timeline: 1973-1996 phaseout for US, 1976-2000 phaseout for Europe.
Yes. Desperate circumstances contributed (and still do) but there is ample evidence that the huge uptick in urban crime in the 60s and 70s was due to leaded gasoline.
I think the lead hypothesis suggests that lead exposure inhibits impulse control, which can manifest as higher rates of violent crime but can also manifest in other ways.
Presumably, desperate circumstances will make it manifest as violent/property crime. But there are probably other manifestations that slide under the criminal justice radar too, like domestic violence and general aggression/bullying among communities in less desperate circumstances.
During the 2001 recession, 2008 financial crisis there were dire predictions that violent crime would go up. Misc property crime went up a bit and violent crime didn't. Violent crime perpetrated by young urban males continued to decline as well. In the face of high rates of unemployment.
Personally I think cultural normalization of violence and quality of policing plays a role in the level of violence. But socio-economic factors really don't.
Maybe it makes more sense to say losing population brings about viability issues. If people for whatever reason started to leave Oakland, I’m sure it would implode as much as a Vallejo would if they suddenly had an exodus.
Whether cities or suburbs, viability is pretty much driven by whether people want to live/work there or not. Some cities are more viable than others. Some suburbs are more viable than others.
I agree with you but disagree with parent who seems to claim suburbs were never viable. They are and so are cities but their viability rests on having a large enough tax base to be self sustaining.
As suburbs reached their apex many cities risked insolvency. As cities begin syphoning people from suburbs some of them too will experience insolvency issues.
Certainly. Plenty of suburbs (and even exurban towns) do quite well. As do many cities. One can argue about who is paying their "fair share" of infrastructure etc. but it's hard to buy the argument that the vast suburbs of elite cities today aren't "viable." Especially given that there actually isn't room for all those people (and companies) to locate in the city even if they wanted to.
But, yes, as housing preferences shift it affects pricing and viability of different neighborhoods, at least at the margin.
I agree that demand is there but one interesting challenge is tax revenue: many people moved to suburbs because the taxes are lower, and many will move again if they’re raised to the level needed to maintain city services & infrastructure. Toss in an aging population with many people unwilling to pay for services such as schools which their grown children no longer need (or climate change hardening which they won’t live long enough to need) and it’ll be an interesting fight in many suburbs across the country, with some finding a viable balance and others falling apart.
The "suburbs were never viable" claim is built upon a few facts about most US suburbs: 1) They are advertised partially based on the low property taxes in their municipalities. 2) They have restrictive building codes that prevent additional development from occurring. In other words, they are built all at once, to a finished state.
Then you run the math on property taxes vs. maintenance costs. If repairing the road, pipes, etc to one additional house costs more money than that house contributes via property tax (over a period of 25 years or so), then the suburb is considered insolvent. It could raise property taxes, or allow additional development, but without those actions the suburb remains insolvent.
Low density, low-rise areas also offer much higher survivability in a case of nuclear bombing. Thankfully, not a pressing concern at the moment, but 1950s were a different world.
There certainly appears to be some sort of sub-urbanity trap. Low density living isn't necessarily more expensive than living in a high density area, but that relies on certain economic modes that do not include much infrastructure. But those economic modes are not the ones that fit the needs of a modern office worker. Modern suburban living requires roads, water, electrical, police, and other services, where the cost tends to scale with area. When the tax base doesn't experience growth, the required services must funded through something like ballooning debt, which quickly leads to insolvency, or be curtailed. Both of which seem to form a feedback cycle.
> I begin to wonder whether the demise of the city was really caused by the government subsidies of the suburban lifestyle.
To be frank, I think nothing has been as destructive as zoning. Here in Hamilton, Ontario, I'm in a single-family zoned area, and the two closest consumer businesses are a brewery (with outlet), about 200m away, and a couple convenience stores, 600m away. The brewery is only there because of a specific zoning bylaw. Most everything else is more than 1.2km away or farther.
In fact, if the suburbs were going to be sustainable without extra government funding in the long run, they would have been developed without the government's helping hand in the first place.
This is exactly the problem that finance exists to solve.
I live in Bowie, Maryland, a Levittown suburb of Washington, DC. (We pronounce it BOO-ee, by the way, something Alexa doesn't seem to know.) Unlike the original Levittown, Bowie is doing well. I don't live in a Levitt home, but I did look at quite a few of them when I moved back to the DC area in 1998. I passed on them because I wanted a basement and Levitt houses don't usually have basements, due to the cost. It was interesting to see all the ways in which previous owners had enhanced and renovated these homes. The Smithsonian is having trouble finding one that hasn't been extensively modified. (I ended up in a townhouse, with no mad-science basement, alas, but at least I don't have a large yard to keep up.) When Bowie was built (1964) there was no doubt systematic discrimination against minorities but, interestingly, Prince Georges County is now one of the wealthiest African American-majority counties in the US.
I don't know why you think we didn't experience the Great Recession. Housing prices crashed all over the DC area, except in Washington proper, which had a lesser decline, due largely to very low inventory. In my area of Prince Georges County, my townhouse lost about 30% of its value and the mega-mansions down the road lost about 50% of their value. Several friends lost jobs and had a hard time finding new ones. Yes, DC is a unique environment in some ways, but we aren't immune to economic downturns.
The metropolitan areas around certain cities, such as DC, are in a much different situation than those that experienced a structural loss in value. Around DC, there might have been a temporary loss in value due to reduced economic activity, but overall, the value trends upwards.
But if you look at places from the Northeast (excluding BOS/NYC/PHL) towns, all the way to Midwest to the South that had factories close and not come back, those are still cratered and going down. There simply isn't enough economic activity to support populations, so reduced demand, plus whatever demand there is can't afford to pay much.
I grew up in Bowie and was in elementary school at the time mandatory busing in PG County. It was a nice place to grow up - clean, safe, basically white collar stereotypical suburb in the positive sense.
I was bussed my first year in High School. It worked out okay, but it was only my second year of living in Maryland and it didn't help me in the task of finding new friends.
The economic failings of these Boomer towns reminds me of this article in Citylab, about how cities pay for current infrastructure by selling more land for development. It's an unsustainable pyramid scheme.
Overall, these articles are an interesting insight into the hidden financials of urban development. And, sadly, the failings of those financial schemes.
Interesting, but I don't get a lot of the author's arguments.
> And there it is. The dreaded wig shop. Flagship of retail desperation and harbinger of doom. Next stop, evangelical day care centers and government offices to fill the void.
What's wrong with any of those businesses? Wig shops seem popular in a lot of places, especially with black women. People willing to spend on beauty are usually a good draw for a mall. Day cares bring in predictable revenue per kid. I've been to mall DMVs and gone shopping afterward.
> The buses only exist because the federal government mandates them as a condition of continued highway funding. It’s pointless.
What's pointless? The photos show people waiting at the bus stop, so clearly it's useful to someone.
Google tells me there aren't a lot of wig stores, so customers will usually seek out stores - meaning they can often be put in low-traffic low-rent areas.
Typically pieces about the Levittowns (there were many such towns) contain at least a cursory acknowledgement of the racism and redlining that surrounded the sales of these homes. A generation of non-minority boomers were able to take advantage of, and build wealth from government subsidies.
Levitt & Sons would not sell homes to African Americans... the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) conditioned essential financing for this and similar projects on the restriction of home sales to those of "the Caucasian race", as stipulated in housing rent and sales agreements and deed covenants.
If you had dark colored skin you couldn't live there. That's as starkly about race as it can possibly get.
Yes, 67 years ago in 1952. Anyone can live there now if they have the money. Unfortunately, the problem in Levittown, like the problem with the rest of Long Island (and many other areas of the country) are that housing prices are massively inflated and taxes are insanely out of proportion of the services you get back for paying them.
For the honor of living in an average small house in this economically depressed area you can look forward to shelling out ~$500,000 and paying $8,000+ a year in property taxes. That's the real obstacle for working people to come move to places like Levittown. A few decades ago young, working people looking to start a family could buy a house in a place like Levittown for 2-3x their annual income. Now its more like 8-10x of their annual income. It isn't economically sustainable, like much of the rest of our economic system, and it has absolutely nothing to do with racism.
White people got loan guarantees from the government in 1967 to move there. The whole thing was directly subsidized. People moving in today are not subsidized.
This amounted to a big transfer of wealth to white Americans, that black Americans couldn't participate in. They were stuck paying rent for 67 years while their white "peers" were able to build equity, as they had access to cheap credit.
Which is all relevant to when this happened 60 years ago and not to working people today who were born generations after that happened. Talking about, "white America" like its some sort of monolith is idiotically reductionist. The generational disparity in wealth is magnitudes of order greater than the racial disparity. Start crying about the old people if you want a group to blame.
You can't blame the old black people, because they don't own homes. The rate of home ownership among whites is far and away greater than that for blacks. The average white person has some home equity. The average black person has next to none. The old people you're thinking about blaming are the old white people who took advantage of the whites-only, government sponsored, subsidized housing projects in the pre and post war years. The reason why all those old people in homes are white is because they were the only ones allowed to buy in the '50s!
The median white family is worth $100k (almost entirely home equity). The average black family is worth $7,000. You don't think massive subsidies for white home ownership during the first half of the 20th century might have something.to do with it? Black people couldn't get mortgages. White people had theirs guaranteed by the Feds. It was a sweet deal. That equity didn't just evaporate.
He didn't jump between them, looking at the article, they're both the median, I think he just said average because in a surprising number of places "average" isn't always synonymous with "mean", it's more synonymous with "measure of central tendency", so the mean, median, and mode can all be called the average as long as you've established which one you're talking about first.
I don't blame the old black people, because they were only 10% of the population. You are so obsessed with race and racism that you can't see the forest through the trees. The very real historic discrimination against blacks and other minorities has nothing to do with this article about the crumbling city of Levittown, no matter how much you want to make it about race. The economic problems that exist in Levittown, for working people, and for younger people would exist and be just as bad whether or not we ever had a racial issue. People who inject race and identity nonsense into every issue are a distraction and a roadblock from solving most issues - especially systemic economic issues that have nothing to do with race.
It's fair to criticise an article that says "Levittown served two or three generations very well and that should be celebrated." without even mentioning that it only served one population well: whites. That's who it served. The same exact piece could have been written and it could have at least made passing mention of the explicitly whites-exclusive founding of the project. The history of projects like these is important, the modern state of them is important, and pretending that they didn't also intertwine with race in America is just being (un)intentionally blinkered.
Sorry, I would suggest its being (un)intentionally blinkered to inject race (or any other "identity") into every issue. The article didn't mention anything about how we slaughtered the Native Americans, and stole their land, either - or they would still be living where Levittown was. That happened, and it was terrible, but its not all germane to the subject at hand. This article is about the crumbling of Levittown, which would have been exactly the same whether or not people were discriminated against during the initial building of the town 60+ years ago.
"solving big national problems for mutual benefit"
"the environment for individuals to achieve their dreams of an independent and secure home life"
"Levittown served two or three generations very well"
Each of these statements are simply not true. The benefit, the individuals, the generations- they were all white, by law (whites-only requirements were written into the covenants.you had to sign to buy a place). Sure, not everyone could take advantage, but everyone who could was white. This article is misrepresenting the history: this was for white benefit, white individuals, and white generations.
There's a reason white Americans (speaking generally) have generational wealth from home ownership, and black Americans don't. It's policies like the ones that created whites-only Levittowns. It's not that long ago! It's within a couple generations of everyone.
> the Federal Housing Administration, which was established in 1934, furthered the segregation efforts by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods — a policy known as "redlining." At the same time, the FHA was subsidizing builders who were mass-producing entire subdivisions for whites — with the requirement that none of the homes be sold to African-Americans.
In this case, it's hard to separate race from white migration to the suburbs. You can argue how much was driven by deliberate policy and how much was the result of organic segregation. Nonetheless, it was real and contributed to the fact that even many of today's "elite" US cities were losing population 20 years ago.
> it's hard to separate race from white migration to the suburbs.
Here's an entire book dedicated to discussing the government policies that drove separation: https://amzn.to/2Zz4Zeh (or get it from your local library!)
It's tough reading because a lot of things that happened were pretty ugly.
OP is not “injecting race”. They are pointing out a significant, intentional part of US federal and state policy at the time that the article doesn’t even mention.
The very history of these neighborhoods involved race. They were built for white people wanting to live in a nice, white place. These places didn't serve "two or three generations very well" as the article states. The first generation would have been a white one. At lest part of the second generation served would have been white through inheritance. And the third generation was (is!) still recovering from the racist policies that made Levittowns possible in the first place.
> This was only made possible by enormous federal subsidies for returning soldiers and huge investments in public infrastructure by the federal government. ...
Today's government subsidies are creating artificial booms of their own. Credit, higher education, housing. The busts, like the one described in this article, should come as a surprise to nobody, but they will. Mixed in with that surprise may be an interest in finding a scapegoat - and a leader willing to deliver it.
Population booms and recessions make me wonder how my current town will survive after the influx of new residents. I grew up not too far from Levittown, PA, and now live in Lakewood, CO.
Population here has been exploding and new housing has been on the rise for the past five years. There is currently a ballot to slow new housing projects to 1% growth per year. On one hand, I wonder if it’s just artificial restriction of supply to help property values. On the other hand, I do see reason to limit growth to provide the infrastructure needed as growth continues. I’m not sure how to feel about it. Does anyone have any insight into whether artificial housing restrictions could benefit a municipality in the long term?
The houses that I've seen in Levittown and the nearby towns don't seem particularly empty - is the residential market dying as well or is it actually just the commercial properties?
Hicksville, for one, seems to be livelier than ever and full of South Asian families and businesses that have given it a new life (although it looks slightly lower-class than I remember).
the article is talking about the Levittown in PA. btw fuck Hicksville, its overcrowded and has turned into Jackson Heights of Queens. Try driving thru Hicksville at 5PM
Ah thanks for the correction re: PA. I saw that they were New York Sicilians and didn't pay attention to the fact that I didn't recognize the mall's name.
there is a Levittown on Long Island, New York and its doing just fine economically even though you can tell that the children of the boomers who enjoyed the previous decades aren't so comfortable. Most youth still lives with their parents and drives shit cars.
Levittown, NY is a pretty interesting place. It was designed for your typical 1950s family with a single car. Nowadays, most people have two cars so you see a ton of cars parked in the street. Also, it's outrageously expensive to buy on Long Island.
You also have way more people living at home into their 20s and 30s, so you get 4-5 cars per house. When cops and prison guards are making $200,000 a year someone has to pay for it.
And yet we get constantly told that there’s no space for homes and that it’s too expensive to live anywhere. There are plenty of opportunities out there but when everyone wants to live in only the most desirable areas it creates local shortages.
Do those Levitt houses have the same cachet as Eichler houses do in the Bay Area? They were both post war answers to demand for quick cookie cutter houses that people would like to live in.
Seems Eichler took cues from Lloyd-Wright and hired disciples, so the architecture looks nicer (although his didn’t have to contend with more continental climates), but from a usability and livability PoV, wonder if they deliver equally when it comes to providing a “home “
>This was only made possible by enormous federal subsidies for returning soldiers
White soldiers, both via black soldiers being excluded from the GI Bill, and Levittown's own restrictive whites-only covenant. These racist limitations greatly reduced the necessary subsidies.
this isn't my domain of expertise, but the wikipedia article on the subject notes discrimination in housing loans after the war but does not seem to indicate that blacks were actually excluded from the GI bill
>Women veterans, it turned out, were even more interested than their male counterparts in obtaining a college degree; more than 19.5% of 332,178 eligible women veterans elected to attend college after the war as compared to 15% of 15 million eligible male veterans.
>African Americans and women were entitled to the same benefits as white men under the GI Bill, but often faced difficulty trying to claim their benefits due to discrimination.
WAACs and WASPs wore military uniforms but were designated as civilians and didn't were counted as veterans until 1977 when Congress retroactively granted them veteran status.
From December 1942 until VJ-day there were relatively few enlistments into the armed forces as restrictions against the direct recruiting of men in the age group acceptable for service (18-37) were in effect. There were, however, 483,605 other enlistments into the Army and Navy during the period July 1, 1944, to June 30, 1945, but only 1.3 percent were African Americans. Although African Americans constitute approximately 11 percent of the population, aged 18 through 37, only 0.8 percent of Army enlistees and 1.4 percent of Navy enlistees during the period July 1, 1944, to June 30, 1945, were of that race.
So, sounds like the white part doesn't matter too much? Yes it was terrible that they were excluded from the GI bill, but only a very small fraction of soldiers in ww2 were black. It was very unlikely they would have made a difference in the outcome of such suburbs.
Of course. And it's an just just as unjust if it only excludes one. And yet, it's a smaller injustice if it's only 0.8% than if it's 11%. As unjust, but a smaller injustice.
It's a greater injustice that a minority had even the meager crumbs offered by the system stolen by white people kicking them while they're down.
You're focusing only on the raw numbers of people rather than the the effect on everybody of that community. You can bet if 10% of white people had the same discrimination visited upon them that police, lawyers, and legislation would be involved tout suite.
Read up on mortgage redlining during the most prosperous period of the 20th century keeping people out of the progress enjoyed by the majority. Injustice is not zero sum, don't use arguments from proportion when there is a fraught history and politics that makes continuing the discrimination much, much worse than if it was one white person against another white person.
Maybe not relevant to the piece but something not mentioned is that not only would the builders of Levittown only sell to whites but home buyers had to sign a contract not to sell their house to any poc
Levittown, NY is a pretty interesting place. It was designed for your typical 1950s family with a single car. Nowadays, most people have two cars so you see a ton of cars parked in the street.
I grew up 15 minutes from Levittown, PA. I even had to do an undergrad research project on it. The development is boring and pointless but packed with lower middle class families. A place where there's only a driveway for one or two cars but there's always 3 or 4 per house and parked all in the street. The houses themselves are all full. The area just west and north of Levittown is actually one of the oldest rich suburbs in America containing Newtown, PA and Washington's Crossing with estates from the 16th century and acres of land.
Oxford Valley Mall is far from dead. The food court is always pretty lively on Fridays and Saturdays. The Forever 21 next to the food court is constantly packed with teenagers. I literally went there not long ago with my girlfriend and we had to stand in line at the register. Not exactly dead.
The guy just went on a random Tuesday instead of a Saturday. Of course it's going to be dead. The parking lot also has a really good theater seating style movie theater. Both Oxford Valley Mall and Neshaminy Mall are on Route 1 going north out of Philadelphia and also have I-95 going by. Also the Mall has Sesame Street Theme Park right outside it's parking lot and across the street is a whole other plaza containing a Best Buy, A Home Depot, a Lowes, and a bunch of other stuff. Honestly the only reason the mall can't keep full is cause of all the competitions nearby. The area itself is actually super nice just to the west of the mall with lots of properties rising in value.
I used to run a Gaming LAN Center in 2005 in Neshaminy Mall. The area is served by FIOS and Comcast.
As to why buses come to the mall? Really? Old people like to walk around during the day in the mall just for fun. People also use the bus to get to and from work. Most of the routes are going to and from Philly with a few connecting the various regional rail stations. Growing up we all wished there was just one bus from the center of Newtown to the mall so we wouldn't have to ask our parents to take us.
If you actually stay just around Levittown there's a lot of old crap from the 60s in a clearly abandoned and/or ruined state but that's not really indicative of the area.
Off topic: by the way, this your comment (and some earlier ones) are showing up as dead. I vouched for this one to unhide it, but you may want to email the mods to see why your account is flagged.
As someone from this area (I used to work at the Chick Fil A by the mall!), I agree with some of your points, but not all of them.
Levittown is very close to a bunch of wealthy Philly suburbs, but it, itself is not wealthy. The main "strip" no longer exists, taken over by the shopping plazas nearby and the mall, but never really replaced. It's also surrounded by Rt 1 and I95, making it rather difficult, if not impossible to walk around anywhere.
I most disagree with your statements about the mall. It's usually about as empty as the pictures show. Way back when Boscovs left, that was pretty much the end. Sears and JCPenny left more recently but after they did, so did the rest of the mall. Now it's hardly as busy or useful as it used to be. Macys will probably leave too, someday.
I remember that gaming center! The Oxford Valley Mall has definitely lost some luster since the 90s, but yeah, these photos are painting a bleaker picture than reality.
This is a good point, and one not well-explained in the article. I agree, what's the big deal? The Columbia Mall in Howard County, MD (the 3rd wealthiest county in the US) has the Mall as a primary stop for many buses. What does a bus coming to the mall have anything to do with the quality of a neighborhood?
>It is made up mostly of places in the Midwest and Great Lakes, though definitions vary. Rust refers to the deindustrialization, or economic decline, population loss, and urban decay due to the shrinking of its once-powerful industrial sector.
None of these things are true of the area. I've lived here for 25 years.
> This was only made possible by enormous federal subsidies for returning soldiers and huge investments in public infrastructure by the federal government.
> People ... couldn’t imagine returning to the city which continued to decline.
I begin to wonder whether the demise of the city was really caused by the government subsidies of the suburban lifestyle. It's not that Levittown isn't sustainable anymore, it's that it never was, not on a long term scale. Low density living should be expensive because it is expensive. The government chose to invest in suburbs instead of the city. The city rotted without investment, exacerbating the problem.
It's only the last couple decades as governments tightened their coffers that the suburbs have had to carry their own load- and they can't.
“It’s not that Levittown isn’t sustainable anymore, it’s that it never was.”
I think this is a key point, really well expanded upon here: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
To expand a bit more here, the Strong Towns folks argue that city infrastructure project costs do not factor in long-term maintenance. Growth is the driver of revenue in the short term (building permit fees, more expensive single-family homes paying property taxes). Once growth slows or stops, the party is over. Maintenance costs kick in, and the errors made during the boom time are revealed in the form of broken streets, abandonment, blight, etc.
They consult with cities to target a 20-to-1 "return on investment" when taking on infrastructure projects. That means that the costs to build street or water pipes should result in 20x that cost in economic activity.
I think demise of cities was due to being starved for capital, redlining, automobiles, and crime due to lead pollution.
Post war capital was invested in suburbs instead of urban cores which then decayed.
Redlining also meant urban areas inhabited by minorities were cut off from capital. Not only couldn't minorities get loans, but even their often white landlords couldn't.
Automobiles allowed workers to locate their families in cheap suburbs while sucking at the corporate teat in Urban Cities. At least until too many people spoiled a good thing as auto congestion built up.
Leaded gasoline caused brain damage which effected dense urban areas the most, resulting in high crime rates.
The last 40 years has seen a reversal of that at least for some urban cities. Capital is being invested in cities. Hard redlining is gone. Replaced by jacking minorities with exploitative loan products. Suburban congestion has made suburbs much less attractive. The decline of lead pollution means urban cities are again 'safe'.
Lead pollution hypothesis is one of many plausible explanations and shouldn’t be presented as fact.
True, but there is recent evidence that is pretty much the gold standard for a perfect randomized experiment where they tracked children with high blood levels who did and did not receive interventions to lower it. Those receiving treatment committed violent crimes at a far lower rate than those who were exposed but had no intervention. https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/app.20160056
Are you saying that inner city crime is by brain damage, rather than by living in desperate circumstances?
Vaguely relevant: there's reason to believe that the current Central American gang violence epidemic, which is driving the migrant crisis at the US/Mexico border is also due to leaded gasoline. Central America didnt' eliminate leaded gasoline until the 2000s.
Many european countries eliminated unleaded gasoline during the same time. And crime rates dropped much sooner.
I'd say unleaded gasoline is not the most important factor. For Europe, I think it was drug use.
Can you elaborate?
Leaded gasoline was banned around the year 2000 in both the EU and Mexico. At that time, crime rates were dropping significantly in Europe, without elapsing 18-25 years.
Also, European countries have some of the lowest crime rates in the world. If the young of the 2000s were under its influence, the effect is not large(not larger than 1-2 homicides per 100K people).
I believe that drug abuse during the 80s and 90s was the culprit of high crime rates in Europe. People addicted to drugs(heroin, crack, cocaine, etc.) committed lots of crimes. In the late 90s and early 2000s, Europe managed to lower drug abuse and then crimes dropped. For Mexico, there is likely another explanation. Like drug trafficking for instance.
Having said this, I think leaded gasoline has adverse effects on public health. I believe it can create mental problems on people.
However, not everyone exposed to leaded gasoline will develop those problems. And among those affected, not all of them will become criminals only because of lead poisoning. Therefore, I don't think that the majority of criminals during the 90s were so because of leaded gasoline. I think that other factors were more important, like drug abuse.
That seems like a weird analysis. Leaded fuel was available but not exactly widespread in EU in 1999. Their timeline was similar to the American timeline: 1973-1996 phaseout for US, 1976-2000 phaseout for Europe.
Can you talk about how increasing crime (prior to the drop you talked about) is related to increasing drug use, any numbers behind that?
Yes. Desperate circumstances contributed (and still do) but there is ample evidence that the huge uptick in urban crime in the 60s and 70s was due to leaded gasoline.
Are you saying the rectangle’s area is caused by its length, rather than its width?
I think the lead hypothesis suggests that lead exposure inhibits impulse control, which can manifest as higher rates of violent crime but can also manifest in other ways.
Presumably, desperate circumstances will make it manifest as violent/property crime. But there are probably other manifestations that slide under the criminal justice radar too, like domestic violence and general aggression/bullying among communities in less desperate circumstances.
During the 2001 recession, 2008 financial crisis there were dire predictions that violent crime would go up. Misc property crime went up a bit and violent crime didn't. Violent crime perpetrated by young urban males continued to decline as well. In the face of high rates of unemployment.
Personally I think cultural normalization of violence and quality of policing plays a role in the level of violence. But socio-economic factors really don't.
Yes. Read the paper. All confounding factors are controlled. It is the holy grail of causality.
What about possible unknown unknown confounding factors?
Maybe it makes more sense to say losing population brings about viability issues. If people for whatever reason started to leave Oakland, I’m sure it would implode as much as a Vallejo would if they suddenly had an exodus.
Whether cities or suburbs, viability is pretty much driven by whether people want to live/work there or not. Some cities are more viable than others. Some suburbs are more viable than others.
I agree with you but disagree with parent who seems to claim suburbs were never viable. They are and so are cities but their viability rests on having a large enough tax base to be self sustaining.
As suburbs reached their apex many cities risked insolvency. As cities begin syphoning people from suburbs some of them too will experience insolvency issues.
Certainly. Plenty of suburbs (and even exurban towns) do quite well. As do many cities. One can argue about who is paying their "fair share" of infrastructure etc. but it's hard to buy the argument that the vast suburbs of elite cities today aren't "viable." Especially given that there actually isn't room for all those people (and companies) to locate in the city even if they wanted to.
But, yes, as housing preferences shift it affects pricing and viability of different neighborhoods, at least at the margin.
I agree that demand is there but one interesting challenge is tax revenue: many people moved to suburbs because the taxes are lower, and many will move again if they’re raised to the level needed to maintain city services & infrastructure. Toss in an aging population with many people unwilling to pay for services such as schools which their grown children no longer need (or climate change hardening which they won’t live long enough to need) and it’ll be an interesting fight in many suburbs across the country, with some finding a viable balance and others falling apart.
The "suburbs were never viable" claim is built upon a few facts about most US suburbs: 1) They are advertised partially based on the low property taxes in their municipalities. 2) They have restrictive building codes that prevent additional development from occurring. In other words, they are built all at once, to a finished state.
Then you run the math on property taxes vs. maintenance costs. If repairing the road, pipes, etc to one additional house costs more money than that house contributes via property tax (over a period of 25 years or so), then the suburb is considered insolvent. It could raise property taxes, or allow additional development, but without those actions the suburb remains insolvent.
Low density, low-rise areas also offer much higher survivability in a case of nuclear bombing. Thankfully, not a pressing concern at the moment, but 1950s were a different world.
There certainly appears to be some sort of sub-urbanity trap. Low density living isn't necessarily more expensive than living in a high density area, but that relies on certain economic modes that do not include much infrastructure. But those economic modes are not the ones that fit the needs of a modern office worker. Modern suburban living requires roads, water, electrical, police, and other services, where the cost tends to scale with area. When the tax base doesn't experience growth, the required services must funded through something like ballooning debt, which quickly leads to insolvency, or be curtailed. Both of which seem to form a feedback cycle.
> I begin to wonder whether the demise of the city was really caused by the government subsidies of the suburban lifestyle.
To be frank, I think nothing has been as destructive as zoning. Here in Hamilton, Ontario, I'm in a single-family zoned area, and the two closest consumer businesses are a brewery (with outlet), about 200m away, and a couple convenience stores, 600m away. The brewery is only there because of a specific zoning bylaw. Most everything else is more than 1.2km away or farther.
What are you referring to that changed in government over the last couple decades?
In fact, if the suburbs were going to be sustainable without extra government funding in the long run, they would have been developed without the government's helping hand in the first place.
This is exactly the problem that finance exists to solve.
I live in Bowie, Maryland, a Levittown suburb of Washington, DC. (We pronounce it BOO-ee, by the way, something Alexa doesn't seem to know.) Unlike the original Levittown, Bowie is doing well. I don't live in a Levitt home, but I did look at quite a few of them when I moved back to the DC area in 1998. I passed on them because I wanted a basement and Levitt houses don't usually have basements, due to the cost. It was interesting to see all the ways in which previous owners had enhanced and renovated these homes. The Smithsonian is having trouble finding one that hasn't been extensively modified. (I ended up in a townhouse, with no mad-science basement, alas, but at least I don't have a large yard to keep up.) When Bowie was built (1964) there was no doubt systematic discrimination against minorities but, interestingly, Prince Georges County is now one of the wealthiest African American-majority counties in the US.
I don't think anything about Bowie or PG county is notable given its location. The entire DC area is propped up by the defense industry.
Everywhere else in the country is really different. DC didn't even experience the 2008 great recession
I don't know why you think we didn't experience the Great Recession. Housing prices crashed all over the DC area, except in Washington proper, which had a lesser decline, due largely to very low inventory. In my area of Prince Georges County, my townhouse lost about 30% of its value and the mega-mansions down the road lost about 50% of their value. Several friends lost jobs and had a hard time finding new ones. Yes, DC is a unique environment in some ways, but we aren't immune to economic downturns.
The metropolitan areas around certain cities, such as DC, are in a much different situation than those that experienced a structural loss in value. Around DC, there might have been a temporary loss in value due to reduced economic activity, but overall, the value trends upwards.
But if you look at places from the Northeast (excluding BOS/NYC/PHL) towns, all the way to Midwest to the South that had factories close and not come back, those are still cratered and going down. There simply isn't enough economic activity to support populations, so reduced demand, plus whatever demand there is can't afford to pay much.
I grew up in Bowie and was in elementary school at the time mandatory busing in PG County. It was a nice place to grow up - clean, safe, basically white collar stereotypical suburb in the positive sense.
I was bussed my first year in High School. It worked out okay, but it was only my second year of living in Maryland and it didn't help me in the task of finding new friends.
The economic failings of these Boomer towns reminds me of this article in Citylab, about how cities pay for current infrastructure by selling more land for development. It's an unsustainable pyramid scheme.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2011/10/suburban-sprawl-ponzi-s...
Overall, these articles are an interesting insight into the hidden financials of urban development. And, sadly, the failings of those financial schemes.
Interesting, but I don't get a lot of the author's arguments.
> And there it is. The dreaded wig shop. Flagship of retail desperation and harbinger of doom. Next stop, evangelical day care centers and government offices to fill the void.
What's wrong with any of those businesses? Wig shops seem popular in a lot of places, especially with black women. People willing to spend on beauty are usually a good draw for a mall. Day cares bring in predictable revenue per kid. I've been to mall DMVs and gone shopping afterward.
> The buses only exist because the federal government mandates them as a condition of continued highway funding. It’s pointless.
What's pointless? The photos show people waiting at the bus stop, so clearly it's useful to someone.
Google tells me there aren't a lot of wig stores, so customers will usually seek out stores - meaning they can often be put in low-traffic low-rent areas.
Typically pieces about the Levittowns (there were many such towns) contain at least a cursory acknowledgement of the racism and redlining that surrounded the sales of these homes. A generation of non-minority boomers were able to take advantage of, and build wealth from government subsidies.
One that handles this well: https://www.curbed.com/2019/6/13/18662753/nice-try-podcast-l...
The lack of acknowledgement shocked me. I had to do a quick search to make sure I wasn't mistaken.
It surely makes me wonder about many of the claims in the piece.
I had to jump back to HN comments to see if sb pointed this out. I remember reading about them in the book "Color of Law"
Why does that matter? Why do we have to inject race into everything?
Levitt & Sons would not sell homes to African Americans... the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) conditioned essential financing for this and similar projects on the restriction of home sales to those of "the Caucasian race", as stipulated in housing rent and sales agreements and deed covenants.
If you had dark colored skin you couldn't live there. That's as starkly about race as it can possibly get.
Yes, 67 years ago in 1952. Anyone can live there now if they have the money. Unfortunately, the problem in Levittown, like the problem with the rest of Long Island (and many other areas of the country) are that housing prices are massively inflated and taxes are insanely out of proportion of the services you get back for paying them.
For the honor of living in an average small house in this economically depressed area you can look forward to shelling out ~$500,000 and paying $8,000+ a year in property taxes. That's the real obstacle for working people to come move to places like Levittown. A few decades ago young, working people looking to start a family could buy a house in a place like Levittown for 2-3x their annual income. Now its more like 8-10x of their annual income. It isn't economically sustainable, like much of the rest of our economic system, and it has absolutely nothing to do with racism.
https://www.zillow.com/levittown-ny/
White people got loan guarantees from the government in 1967 to move there. The whole thing was directly subsidized. People moving in today are not subsidized.
This amounted to a big transfer of wealth to white Americans, that black Americans couldn't participate in. They were stuck paying rent for 67 years while their white "peers" were able to build equity, as they had access to cheap credit.
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
Which is all relevant to when this happened 60 years ago and not to working people today who were born generations after that happened. Talking about, "white America" like its some sort of monolith is idiotically reductionist. The generational disparity in wealth is magnitudes of order greater than the racial disparity. Start crying about the old people if you want a group to blame.
You can't blame the old black people, because they don't own homes. The rate of home ownership among whites is far and away greater than that for blacks. The average white person has some home equity. The average black person has next to none. The old people you're thinking about blaming are the old white people who took advantage of the whites-only, government sponsored, subsidized housing projects in the pre and post war years. The reason why all those old people in homes are white is because they were the only ones allowed to buy in the '50s!
The median white family is worth $100k (almost entirely home equity). The average black family is worth $7,000. You don't think massive subsidies for white home ownership during the first half of the 20th century might have something.to do with it? Black people couldn't get mortgages. White people had theirs guaranteed by the Feds. It was a sweet deal. That equity didn't just evaporate.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/03/26/the-racial...
> The median white family is worth $100k (almost entirely home equity). The average black family is worth $7,000.
Did you intend to jump between median and mean here? I'd guess that using median for both would make your case even stronger.
He didn't jump between them, looking at the article, they're both the median, I think he just said average because in a surprising number of places "average" isn't always synonymous with "mean", it's more synonymous with "measure of central tendency", so the mean, median, and mode can all be called the average as long as you've established which one you're talking about first.
I don't blame the old black people, because they were only 10% of the population. You are so obsessed with race and racism that you can't see the forest through the trees. The very real historic discrimination against blacks and other minorities has nothing to do with this article about the crumbling city of Levittown, no matter how much you want to make it about race. The economic problems that exist in Levittown, for working people, and for younger people would exist and be just as bad whether or not we ever had a racial issue. People who inject race and identity nonsense into every issue are a distraction and a roadblock from solving most issues - especially systemic economic issues that have nothing to do with race.
It's fair to criticise an article that says "Levittown served two or three generations very well and that should be celebrated." without even mentioning that it only served one population well: whites. That's who it served. The same exact piece could have been written and it could have at least made passing mention of the explicitly whites-exclusive founding of the project. The history of projects like these is important, the modern state of them is important, and pretending that they didn't also intertwine with race in America is just being (un)intentionally blinkered.
Sorry, I would suggest its being (un)intentionally blinkered to inject race (or any other "identity") into every issue. The article didn't mention anything about how we slaughtered the Native Americans, and stole their land, either - or they would still be living where Levittown was. That happened, and it was terrible, but its not all germane to the subject at hand. This article is about the crumbling of Levittown, which would have been exactly the same whether or not people were discriminated against during the initial building of the town 60+ years ago.
"solving big national problems for mutual benefit"
"the environment for individuals to achieve their dreams of an independent and secure home life"
"Levittown served two or three generations very well"
Each of these statements are simply not true. The benefit, the individuals, the generations- they were all white, by law (whites-only requirements were written into the covenants.you had to sign to buy a place). Sure, not everyone could take advantage, but everyone who could was white. This article is misrepresenting the history: this was for white benefit, white individuals, and white generations.
Wow, I had no idea HN had become Reddit. To celebrate, I’ll also leave a reddit style comment!
At Reddit hardly anyone complains that Reddit is turning into Reddit.
There's a reason white Americans (speaking generally) have generational wealth from home ownership, and black Americans don't. It's policies like the ones that created whites-only Levittowns. It's not that long ago! It's within a couple generations of everyone.
> the Federal Housing Administration, which was established in 1934, furthered the segregation efforts by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods — a policy known as "redlining." At the same time, the FHA was subsidizing builders who were mass-producing entire subdivisions for whites — with the requirement that none of the homes be sold to African-Americans.
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
In this case, it's hard to separate race from white migration to the suburbs. You can argue how much was driven by deliberate policy and how much was the result of organic segregation. Nonetheless, it was real and contributed to the fact that even many of today's "elite" US cities were losing population 20 years ago.
> it's hard to separate race from white migration to the suburbs.
Here's an entire book dedicated to discussing the government policies that drove separation: https://amzn.to/2Zz4Zeh (or get it from your local library!)
It's tough reading because a lot of things that happened were pretty ugly.
OP is not “injecting race”. They are pointing out a significant, intentional part of US federal and state policy at the time that the article doesn’t even mention.
The very history of these neighborhoods involved race. They were built for white people wanting to live in a nice, white place. These places didn't serve "two or three generations very well" as the article states. The first generation would have been a white one. At lest part of the second generation served would have been white through inheritance. And the third generation was (is!) still recovering from the racist policies that made Levittowns possible in the first place.
How is it "injecting" if it happens to just be a thing that's relevant? It's like "injecting" mathematics into computer science.
> This was only made possible by enormous federal subsidies for returning soldiers and huge investments in public infrastructure by the federal government. ...
Today's government subsidies are creating artificial booms of their own. Credit, higher education, housing. The busts, like the one described in this article, should come as a surprise to nobody, but they will. Mixed in with that surprise may be an interest in finding a scapegoat - and a leader willing to deliver it.
Population booms and recessions make me wonder how my current town will survive after the influx of new residents. I grew up not too far from Levittown, PA, and now live in Lakewood, CO.
Population here has been exploding and new housing has been on the rise for the past five years. There is currently a ballot to slow new housing projects to 1% growth per year. On one hand, I wonder if it’s just artificial restriction of supply to help property values. On the other hand, I do see reason to limit growth to provide the infrastructure needed as growth continues. I’m not sure how to feel about it. Does anyone have any insight into whether artificial housing restrictions could benefit a municipality in the long term?
>>"Does anyone have any insight into whether artificial housing restrictions could benefit a municipality in the long term?"
I think you can't answer that question without defining what is the intended outcome: what it's a 'benefit'?.
If you define the optimal result, in a tautological way, as "whatever the market decide", then, by definition, any restriction is going to be bad.
Otherwise, you need to decide what do you want to accomplish (by 'you' I mean the residents of the area) and choose a policy that makes sense.
The houses that I've seen in Levittown and the nearby towns don't seem particularly empty - is the residential market dying as well or is it actually just the commercial properties?
Hicksville, for one, seems to be livelier than ever and full of South Asian families and businesses that have given it a new life (although it looks slightly lower-class than I remember).
The article is about Levittown PA
the article is talking about the Levittown in PA. btw fuck Hicksville, its overcrowded and has turned into Jackson Heights of Queens. Try driving thru Hicksville at 5PM
Ah thanks for the correction re: PA. I saw that they were New York Sicilians and didn't pay attention to the fact that I didn't recognize the mall's name.
What’s so bad about Jackson Heights?
do I automatically get downvotes from HN mods for saying 'fuck' ? are you guys sharpening your censorship skills before YC opens china office?:)))
Users downvoted. No mods were involved. I imagine they downvoted because of the snarky swipe you took at some other place, but who can say?
One thing though: please don't break the guidelines by going on about downvotes like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
there is a Levittown on Long Island, New York and its doing just fine economically even though you can tell that the children of the boomers who enjoyed the previous decades aren't so comfortable. Most youth still lives with their parents and drives shit cars.
Wikipedia has list of Levittowns
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown#Places
So better than 2x US median household income. http://www.city-data.com/city/Levittown-New-York.html
I'd have to see data to convince me that an abnormal number of post-college children were still living at home.
Levittown, NY is a pretty interesting place. It was designed for your typical 1950s family with a single car. Nowadays, most people have two cars so you see a ton of cars parked in the street. Also, it's outrageously expensive to buy on Long Island.
You also have way more people living at home into their 20s and 30s, so you get 4-5 cars per house. When cops and prison guards are making $200,000 a year someone has to pay for it.
And yet we get constantly told that there’s no space for homes and that it’s too expensive to live anywhere. There are plenty of opportunities out there but when everyone wants to live in only the most desirable areas it creates local shortages.
Do those Levitt houses have the same cachet as Eichler houses do in the Bay Area? They were both post war answers to demand for quick cookie cutter houses that people would like to live in.
Seems Eichler took cues from Lloyd-Wright and hired disciples, so the architecture looks nicer (although his didn’t have to contend with more continental climates), but from a usability and livability PoV, wonder if they deliver equally when it comes to providing a “home “
>This was only made possible by enormous federal subsidies for returning soldiers
White soldiers, both via black soldiers being excluded from the GI Bill, and Levittown's own restrictive whites-only covenant. These racist limitations greatly reduced the necessary subsidies.
this isn't my domain of expertise, but the wikipedia article on the subject notes discrimination in housing loans after the war but does not seem to indicate that blacks were actually excluded from the GI bill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_and_the_G.I....
It was de facto due to redlining and restrictive covenants.
okay, but that is not the same as being excluded from the GI bill
I'll one up you:
white male soldiers
Women soldiers were also excluded from the GI Bill.
These sources disagrees with you:
>Women veterans, it turned out, were even more interested than their male counterparts in obtaining a college degree; more than 19.5% of 332,178 eligible women veterans elected to attend college after the war as compared to 15% of 15 million eligible male veterans.
[0] https://www.womensmemorial.org/history-highlight
>African Americans and women were entitled to the same benefits as white men under the GI Bill, but often faced difficulty trying to claim their benefits due to discrimination.
[1] https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/postwarera...
To summarize:
1. Women veteran had the same education benefits as their male counterparts under the law.
2. However, women veteran faced discrimination when trying claim their benefits.
3. Despite the discrimination, women veterans still managed to attend college at a higher rate than male veterans.
WAACs and WASPs wore military uniforms but were designated as civilians and didn't were counted as veterans until 1977 when Congress retroactively granted them veteran status.
You beat me to it rhizome...
From wikipedia:
From December 1942 until VJ-day there were relatively few enlistments into the armed forces as restrictions against the direct recruiting of men in the age group acceptable for service (18-37) were in effect. There were, however, 483,605 other enlistments into the Army and Navy during the period July 1, 1944, to June 30, 1945, but only 1.3 percent were African Americans. Although African Americans constitute approximately 11 percent of the population, aged 18 through 37, only 0.8 percent of Army enlistees and 1.4 percent of Navy enlistees during the period July 1, 1944, to June 30, 1945, were of that race.
So, sounds like the white part doesn't matter too much? Yes it was terrible that they were excluded from the GI bill, but only a very small fraction of soldiers in ww2 were black. It was very unlikely they would have made a difference in the outcome of such suburbs.
You say it doesn’t matter, and then immediately say it was terrible. Which is it?
May have had an impact on those 6,286 African Americans who were excluded.
Of course. And it's an just just as unjust if it only excludes one. And yet, it's a smaller injustice if it's only 0.8% than if it's 11%. As unjust, but a smaller injustice.
It's a greater injustice that a minority had even the meager crumbs offered by the system stolen by white people kicking them while they're down.
You're focusing only on the raw numbers of people rather than the the effect on everybody of that community. You can bet if 10% of white people had the same discrimination visited upon them that police, lawyers, and legislation would be involved tout suite.
Read up on mortgage redlining during the most prosperous period of the 20th century keeping people out of the progress enjoyed by the majority. Injustice is not zero sum, don't use arguments from proportion when there is a fraught history and politics that makes continuing the discrimination much, much worse than if it was one white person against another white person.
Were there any black people already in the military in Dec '42?
Nice Try! just released a great episode about Levittown in Concord Park:
https://www.curbed.com/2019/6/13/18662753/nice-try-podcast-l...
There was a great Dollop podcast episode about this: https://thedollop.libsyn.com/310-levittown-the-whitest-subur...
Maybe not relevant to the piece but something not mentioned is that not only would the builders of Levittown only sell to whites but home buyers had to sign a contract not to sell their house to any poc
Referenced in the musical Little Shop of Horrors in Somewhere That's Green with the words "Not fancy, like Levittown"
Levittown, NY is a pretty interesting place. It was designed for your typical 1950s family with a single car. Nowadays, most people have two cars so you see a ton of cars parked in the street.
I grew up 15 minutes from Levittown, PA. I even had to do an undergrad research project on it. The development is boring and pointless but packed with lower middle class families. A place where there's only a driveway for one or two cars but there's always 3 or 4 per house and parked all in the street. The houses themselves are all full. The area just west and north of Levittown is actually one of the oldest rich suburbs in America containing Newtown, PA and Washington's Crossing with estates from the 16th century and acres of land.
Oxford Valley Mall is far from dead. The food court is always pretty lively on Fridays and Saturdays. The Forever 21 next to the food court is constantly packed with teenagers. I literally went there not long ago with my girlfriend and we had to stand in line at the register. Not exactly dead.
The guy just went on a random Tuesday instead of a Saturday. Of course it's going to be dead. The parking lot also has a really good theater seating style movie theater. Both Oxford Valley Mall and Neshaminy Mall are on Route 1 going north out of Philadelphia and also have I-95 going by. Also the Mall has Sesame Street Theme Park right outside it's parking lot and across the street is a whole other plaza containing a Best Buy, A Home Depot, a Lowes, and a bunch of other stuff. Honestly the only reason the mall can't keep full is cause of all the competitions nearby. The area itself is actually super nice just to the west of the mall with lots of properties rising in value.
I used to run a Gaming LAN Center in 2005 in Neshaminy Mall. The area is served by FIOS and Comcast.
As to why buses come to the mall? Really? Old people like to walk around during the day in the mall just for fun. People also use the bus to get to and from work. Most of the routes are going to and from Philly with a few connecting the various regional rail stations. Growing up we all wished there was just one bus from the center of Newtown to the mall so we wouldn't have to ask our parents to take us.
If you actually stay just around Levittown there's a lot of old crap from the 60s in a clearly abandoned and/or ruined state but that's not really indicative of the area.
Off topic: by the way, this your comment (and some earlier ones) are showing up as dead. I vouched for this one to unhide it, but you may want to email the mods to see why your account is flagged.
All of this. I grew up in Levittown, PA. This entire article is false. Just look at the housing prices in Falls or Middletown Townships.
While Levittown does have its problems (see the Fairless Hills overdose sign), its no where near as bad as this article makes it seem.
As someone from this area (I used to work at the Chick Fil A by the mall!), I agree with some of your points, but not all of them.
Levittown is very close to a bunch of wealthy Philly suburbs, but it, itself is not wealthy. The main "strip" no longer exists, taken over by the shopping plazas nearby and the mall, but never really replaced. It's also surrounded by Rt 1 and I95, making it rather difficult, if not impossible to walk around anywhere.
I most disagree with your statements about the mall. It's usually about as empty as the pictures show. Way back when Boscovs left, that was pretty much the end. Sears and JCPenny left more recently but after they did, so did the rest of the mall. Now it's hardly as busy or useful as it used to be. Macys will probably leave too, someday.
I remember that gaming center! The Oxford Valley Mall has definitely lost some luster since the 90s, but yeah, these photos are painting a bleaker picture than reality.
I mean, half of Levittown, PA is part of the Pennsbury School District, home of "The Best Prom in America" (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/04/23/be...).
> As to why buses come to the mall? Really?
This is a good point, and one not well-explained in the article. I agree, what's the big deal? The Columbia Mall in Howard County, MD (the 3rd wealthiest county in the US) has the Mall as a primary stop for many buses. What does a bus coming to the mall have anything to do with the quality of a neighborhood?
>I used to run a Gaming LAN Center in 2005 in Neshaminy Mall.
Oh damn, I remember that. Was it called Ultra Zone or something? I lived in Jersey but I'd meet my PA friends there sometimes.
Yoo!! My brother and our friend used to wreak havoc on the Halo competitions you held at that Gaming Center.
Thank you for enabling those memories to happen.
Live near Levittown and have talked to residents about it. The entire rust belt is going to shit itself soon and who knows how it'll play out.
Most of the article is about Levittown, PA. Its no where near the rust belt.
The "rust belt" and it's socio-economic realities meander quite a bit throughout the NE
Except this particular area isn't the "rust belt".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_Belt
Easy to way to know where the rust belt is wherever you can expect your vehicle to rust due to salting the roads in winter.
>It is made up mostly of places in the Midwest and Great Lakes, though definitions vary. Rust refers to the deindustrialization, or economic decline, population loss, and urban decay due to the shrinking of its once-powerful industrial sector.
None of these things are true of the area. I've lived here for 25 years.