Social Effects Of Suburbanization

In the mid 1900’s, the United States began investing heavily in infrastructure, building forty eight thousand miles of interstate road. The new efficient transportation network caused much national economic prosperity by reducing the cost of manufacturing and expanding the range of markets. However, the system destroyed urban areas by inflicting social divide and institutionalised racism. Cities fell victim to suburbanization, social minorities faced targeted demolition of their homes and once thriving city cultures, encapsulated in their diversity, decayed. The transportation and economic growth caused by the interstate highway system masked perverse social effects and civil rights violations.
Prior to the interstate highway system, infrastructure
“White flight” crippled urban areas, removed a large tax base, and drained schools of students from more stable and academically inclined families. Between 1950 and 1990, research showed that many central cities had population declines of seventeen percent, despite the seventy-two percent increase in metropolitan areas as a whole. Furthermore, the population of cities would have grown by about eight percent had the interstate highway system not been built. Although the highways benefited those who moved, the less privileged who remained in the cities suffered from lowered property values that led to under-development. Kansas City was a microcosm of this national trend. A study in the Kansas City’s central business district showed that the population in 1940 was 8,563 persons, but in 1970 it was 4,550 persons. The study also found that wealthy corporations began moving their commercial offices to industrial parks in the suburbs, in turn increasing their suburban workforce and city's unemployment.” This destroyed the city’s social organizations, thereby increasing the number of Kansas' crimes, gangs, drug trafficking and broken families. Unfortunately, the social damage caused by highways was not confined to
When building the Cross-Bronx Expressway, he pointedly ignored the low-income population in Tremont, by using millions of dollars to aggressively displace 1,530 families and destroy 159 buildings. Robert Moses once explained in response to criticism, "I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without removing people, as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs." Moses tried to justify ghetto clearance by claiming that removing people was unavoidable collateral damage in the drive for progress. However, before building the Cross Bronx Expressway, he rejected a proposal of an alternate route that would have cut through a small portion of Crotona Park; this option would have impacted only two percent of the families in the region, thus sparing hundreds of families. Clearly, there were less disruptive ways to build the highway despite his claim that they did not exist. Nationwide, similar events occurred where highways were purposefully directed through cities to clear the less affluent. Such clearing never happened in rich neighborhoods as expressed by Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia. To study this discriminatory treatment, he examined a highway that was supposed to be built on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., but was successfully quashed by the wealthy residents of the city's