Changing Nature Cities

• The Changing Nature Cities

  • Government Policies, white flight to the suburbs and the black American Great Migration northwards contributed to big changes in American cities such as Detroit and Chicago
  • Increasing black people lived together in ghettos- personal choice
• Whites contributed to the growth of large, urban ghettos

  • Used restrictive covenants to exclude black Americans from white neighbourhoods- even though the Supreme Court declared these covenants legally unenforceable-1948
• Whites contributed to the growth of large, urban ghettos

  • Lending institutions, developers & city officials made it difficult for black Americans to buy decent housing- as a result black tenants paid high rents for poor accommodation in overcrowded ghettos
• Whites contributed to the growth of large, urban ghettos

  • Whites staged 'housing riots'- 1951- Cicero, Chicago- where several thousand working-class whites used looting & burning to drive out the sole black family
• Whites contributed to the growth of large, urban ghettos


  • North, Midwest & West whites who could afford it fled the nearby overcrowded black ghettos:
  • Whites fled Oakland, California for suburbs such as Hayward- once in the suburbs- unwilling to pay increased taxes to assist inner-city areas
  • When black pressure for desegregation grew- 1955-63- Southern whites fled to the suburbs- Atlanta, Georgia was experiencing large scale white-flight by the mid-1960's
• Whites contributed to the growth of large, urban ghettos

  • The polices of the Federal Government promoted residential segregation
• Federal Government & Ghettos

  • GOV policies led to a change in racial composition of cities
  • FHA distributed billions of dollar of low-cost mortgages from the late 1940's- openly excluded applicants considered 'risks' because if their income or because they were likely to elicit a hostile reaction from the white majority
  • These 'risks' were what the FHA described as 'un-harmonious racial or nationality groups'- mostly black Americans & Jews
  • Here,residential segregation was effectively the policy of the US GOV
• Federal Government & Ghettos

  • Federally constructed highways enabled suburbanites to commute to city jobs
  • Federal Policies- responsibility for urban decline by allowing the more affluent to move out of the cities to the suburbs
• Federal Government & Ghettos


  • Although Congress authorised the construction of 810,000 subsidised public housing units & the purchase if slum are redevelopment- 1949- black Americans saw this as urban renewal as a way of removing black Americans from this area:
  • Chicago politicians, businessmen and developer manipulated local laws & used federal funds for urban renewal to tear down black neighbourhoods & replace them with commercial buildings or more expensive housing for whites
• Federal Government & Ghettos


  • Federal GOV's attempt to alleviate the black housing shortage was ineffective:
  • only 325,203 federal housing units were built 1945-65 & many of them failed such as the Pruitt-Igoe project in St Louis