Migration In The United States

Two great internal migrations lie at the center of postwar history in the United States: the movement of rural southern blacks to cities in the North, South, and West, and the movement of whites to the suburbs. Though the roots of these migrations long preceded the postwar period, both population shifts were greatly accelerated by World War II. This relocation of people and resources remapped the racial, economic, and political geography of American cities. Postwar metropolitan growth followed a pattern of

The most significant political, economic, and spatial transformation in the postwar United States was the overdevelopment of the suburbs and the underdevelopment of the cities. Simply put, where you lived determined your access to goods and services and the amount of taxes you would pay for them.

Urban deconcentration or horizontal development (beginning primarily with residential decentralization, but eventually progressing to include commercial and industrial development outside the urban center) progressed as a result of shifting government and private capital away from urban centers to the suburbs, the hardening of racial segregation in residential patterns, the concentration of African Americans and other ethnic minorities in central cities,

American capital, as the commerce and manufacturing that drove

Suburban ascendancy radically altered the geography of America’s political economy, decentralizing wealth and power away from their traditional location in urban hubs and concentrating the poor in the central city. At the same time, the suburbanization redrew racial and ethnic