Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
I'm not sure if that was the "biggest enabler". Plenty of people lost money selling homes at a big loss in city propers, before moving to the suburbs, especially in the latter phases of white flight. If you sold in Detroit post-1967, you probably lost money.
And post-redlining, subsidized federal mortgages were readily available in cities too.
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Selling homes at a loss in the city were symptoms of the larger issue. With no regulations at the time, there was a market for house flippers to drive down the values of homes in the inner-city through scare tactics, and then sell those homes to black families at a profit, since those black families were mostly not allowed to buy into suburban communities.
But, the overall point is that there would have been no market for a significant amount of suburban expansion without easy access to financing enabled by the federal government. No loans, no mass building outside of city limits. On top of that, the federal government also financed the highways to allow people to get in and out of the cities.