AHC: Prevent government deregulation and urban decay

[Divergent54]

Is there anyway to prevent the late 20th century government deregulation, spending cuts, and urban decay?

Along with a seperate question, is there a way for the suburbs to develop slowly or not at all and instead develop into flats similar to the Soviet Union (except less shitty).

 

[CthulhuFhtagn]

Find a way to smother the Washington Consensus in its cradle. Somehow avoiding the Reagan presidency would also help. As for the suburbs, I think those grew as a consequence of government-funded housing for returning soldiers from WWII, so I'm not sure how to avoid that without butterflying away WWII altogether.

 

[Mike Stearns]

You could have an alternate model for the suburb wind up being adopted. Several were put forward in the 20s and 30s, which placed an emphasis on livability and human interaction as opposed being car friendly.

 

[Memphis]

Why are suburbs? I see lots of people ask for ways to prevent them, but my question why?

 

[steve_wilson]

After the Bolshevik uprising, Zinovy Rosenbaum is made manager for first his own pharmacy, and then others until he is Commissar for all of those in the Soviet Union. His loving daughter Alisa begins to write pro-Soviet novels, invariably with a short, brown haired non-observant Jewish heroine and a Stakhanovite hero.

Reflecting Soviet ideas, her novels divide the world outside the USSR into two types of people, Doers (the working class) and Moochers (people who do no work but live off of their capital investments). Inevitably, when a worker chances on a discovery that the Moochers want to exploit, he heroically resists.

Her novels are popular worldwide, and though later critics will call them simplistic Alisa Rosenbaum becomes a major influence on the growth of Socialism throughout the planet, and no-one has ever heard of Ayn Rand.

 

[CthulhuFhtagn]

After the Bolshevik uprising, Zinovy Rosenbaum is made manager for first his own pharmacy, and then others until he is Commissar for all of those in the Soviet Union. His loving daughter Alisa begins to write pro-Soviet novels, invariably with a short, brown haired non-observant Jewish heroine and a Stakhanovite hero.

Reflecting Soviet ideas, her novels divide the world outside the USSR into two types of people, Doers (the working class) and Moochers (people who do no work but live off of their capital investments). Inevitably, when a worker chances on a discovery that the Moochers want to exploit, he heroically resists.

Her novels are popular worldwide, and though later critics will call them simplistic Alisa Rosenbaum becomes a major influence on the growth of Socialism throughout the planet, and no-one has ever heard of Ayn Rand.

You're giving way too much credit to Ayn Rand. She wasn't even remotely influential enough to cause the rise of neoliberalism in OTL, and getting rid of her won't stop it.

 

[Divergent54]

Why are suburbs? I see lots of people ask for ways to prevent them, but my question why?

Because of its car-friendly culture it brings. It'll be better if the US was more urbanised to encourage public transportation and biking (or other means) rather than driving 10 minites just for the supermarket! Also, those large car parks are disastrous. It'll be better if it's a multi-storey car park in an urban environment because a) they save space and b) less degredation of the environment by the development of these vast surburbs and car parks.

The problem is, I can't find a good POD.

EDIT: Yes this is pretty much what I'm trying to achieve: an urbanised US with regulated buisnesses and less ghettos

 

[Barry Bull]

Because of its car-friendly culture it brings. It'll be better if the US was more urbanised to encourage public transportation and biking (or other means) rather than driving 10 minites just for the supermarket! Also, those large car parks are disastrous. It'll be better if it's a multi-storey car park in an urban environment because a) they save space and b) less degredation of the environment by the development of these vast surburbs and car parks.

The problem is, I can't find a good POD.

EDIT: Yes this is pretty much what I'm trying to achieve: an urbanised US with regulated buisnesses and less ghettos

Public transport-friendly cities and deregulation are not necessarily connected. Slums still exist in Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, etc.

 

[lord caedus]

Why are suburbs? I see lots of people ask for ways to prevent them, but my question why?

Because they were the destination of white urban-dwellers rich enough to leave the cities following World War II.

Those who left gutted the cities' middle-class tax base, which meant that the cities were increasingly forced to rely on poor whites and ethnic minorities who could not afford to leave for the suburbs or were formally or informally barred from relocating there until the 1970s.

This helped kick off the vicious cycle where urban decay began to set in due to lack of funds, which made the city increasingly dangerous as crime soared and diminished the overall quality of life, which further exacerbated the flight to the suburbs of anyone who had the means to leave, which hurt the city's tax base even further.

 

[Divergent54]

Public transport-friendly cities and deregulation are not necessarily connected. Slums still exist in Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, etc.

I said less ghettos, not no ghettos. For example, Detriot vs Seattle.

 

[steve_wilson]

You're giving way too much credit to Ayn Rand. She wasn't even remotely influential enough to cause the rise of neoliberalism in OTL, and getting rid of her won't stop it.

I know, but it was fun writing it.

 

[Beedok]

Because they were the destination of white urban-dwellers rich enough to leave the cities following World War II.

Those who left gutted the cities' middle-class tax base, which meant that the cities were increasingly forced to rely on poor whites and ethnic minorities who could not afford to leave for the suburbs or were formally or informally barred from relocating there until the 1970s.

This helped kick off the vicious cycle where urban decay began to set in due to lack of funds, which made the city increasingly dangerous as crime soared and diminished the overall quality of life, which further exacerbated the flight to the suburbs of anyone who had the means to leave, which hurt the city's tax base even further.

Well a simple way to help fight that is Canadian style amalgamation so the suburbs still contribute to the city's tax base.

 

[Agent of SHIELD]

Because of its car-friendly culture it brings. It'll be better if the US was more urbanised to encourage public transportation and biking (or other means) rather than driving 10 minites just for the supermarket! Also, those large car parks are disastrous. It'll be better if it's a multi-storey car park in an urban environment because a) they save space and b) less degredation of the environment by the development of these vast surburbs and car parks.

The problem is, I can't find a good POD.

EDIT: Yes this is pretty much what I'm trying to achieve: an urbanised US with regulated buisnesses and less ghettos

Others have covered some of your other concerns, but from my understanding, if you want to prevent the growth of the suburbs you need to keep the US out of WWII. The GI Bill and VA loan programs were huge in kickstarting the growth of suburbs. Why live in an expensive, tiny apartment in the city when there is all that land around the city, not being farmed and just sitting there and you can get a loan for it with only $1 down? It was an easy decision to most after the war. Throw in that a lot of the GI's had money sitting in the bank (or mattress, pockets, etc, because its hard to spend your salary in the middle of the Pacific or fighting up Italy or through France) and the post-war economic boom that made cars available en mass and its a hell of a recipe for suburbs.

Simply put the US will never be as urbanized as say, the UK or Japan, because there's just too much land. Add in the conditions that existed after WWII and suburbs are hard to prevent.

 

[TxCoatl1970]

Gotta pimp phx's TL Stop the Plague of Sprawl and TheMann's Transport America and The Land of Milk and Honey for discussions of common-sense alternatives to OTL sprawl.

Milk and Honey butterflies dergeulation really getting going by Reagan getting thoroughly discredited by Iran-Contra and trying to crush PATCO and not getting re-elected in 1984.

I'll retread my response to Stop....

@Orville-- you're right, the post-war VHA loans and grubstakes sitting in everyone's mattress after the war did a lot to fuel the post-war suburban exodus.

However, the US housing stocks had effectively been frozen from 1929-1945 due to loans being nonexistent and corrupt zoning commissions really not allowing either enough new projects or renovation projects to go forward.

Those commissions gave a lot of Americans a sour taste of planned developments and trusting City Hall or state governments to be fair, honest, and efficient.

Millions of Americans were displaced during the Dust Bowl, the Depression and WWII, and saw how easy it was to build new with all the modern conveniences faster and cheaper during WWII...why stay in the same old town or neighborhood?

So, find a way to butterfly the Depression, and also find a way for planned communities to be politically, economically, aesthetically desirable things.

I saw a doc about the Pruitt-Igo project in St. Louis where at first, it was racially-mixed and you had a broad spectrum of middle-class, working-class, and poor residents.

However, in clearing the slums, poor residents had nowhere else to go, the jobs moved out to the burbs or disappeared, nobody planned for maintenance or upkeep (rents were nowhere near enough to account for depreciation and all federal subsidies stopped once they cut the ribbon-oops), so by the 1960's it'd become a hellhole where anyone who could move did.

The folks left were marooned w/o hope and to comply with the capricous and silly welfare eligibility requirements, family structures and culture of work completely fell apart.

So say, you're the master-planner for s/t like Pruitt-Igo. You have to make sure it's good for everyone, jobs and shops and amenities are handy, there's a sense of community and individual pride.

You can only do so much to predict how things will change over time.

 

[Hashoosh]

Well a simple way to help fight that is Canadian style amalgamation so the suburbs still contribute to the city's tax base.

Yeah, but that ends in Rob Ford situations...

 

[Francisco Cojuanco]

Is there anyway to prevent the late 20th century government deregulation, spending cuts, and urban decay?

Along with a seperate question, is there a way for the suburbs to develop slowly or not at all and instead develop into flats similar to the Soviet Union (except less shitty).

Avoid the election of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or Jerry Brown.

 

[Files]

it seems like - and stop me if i'm wrong - but it seems like the question being posed here is "how to avoid neoliberal capitalism". the problem is, there's a very specific logic driving towards those sorts of policies, a logic that's hard to thwart in a capitalist society.

the economist/geographer david harvey has a good explanation of all this, especially the question of how urban development (or lack of!) links into the larger economic situation at the time. here's an interview with him that touches on a lot of these issues: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2006/lilley190606.html

a relevant section:

SL: The welfare state was characterized by a compact of sorts between labor and capital, the idea of a social safety net, a commitment to full employment -- you call this "embedded liberalism." Up until the 1970s it was supported by most elites. Why was there a backlash against the welfare state and the push for a new political economic order in the 1970s that gave rise to the political implementation of neoliberal thought?

DH: I think there were two main reasons for the backlash. The first was that the high growth rates that had characterized the embedded liberalism of the1950s and 1960s -- we had growth rates of around 4 percent during those years -- those growth rates disappeared towards the end of the 1960s. That had a lot to do with the stresses within the US economy, where the US was trying to fight a war in Vietnam and resolve social problems at home. It was what we call a guns and butter strategy. But that led to fiscal difficulties in the United States. The United States started printing dollars, we had inflation, and then we had stagnation, and then global stagnation set in in the 1970s. It was clear that the system that had worked very well in the 1950s and much of the 1960s was coming untacked and had to be constructed along some other lines. The other issue which is not so obvious, but the data I think show it very clearly, is that the incomes and assets of the elite classes were severely stressed in the 1970s. And therefore there was a sort of class revolt on the part of the elites, who suddenly found themselves in some considerable difficulty, for economic as well as for political reasons. The 1970s was, if you like, a moment of revolutionary transformation of economies away from the embedded liberalism of the postwar period to neoliberalism, which was really set in motion in the 1970s and consolidated in the 1980s and 1990s.

 

[satilisu]

Urban decay is a product of regulation as much as it is the lack thereof. Rent control destroys affordable housing by making it completely unprofitable to perform improvements or even maintenance on rented housing.

 

[Barry Bull]

I said less ghettos, not no ghettos. For example, Detriot vs Seattle.

The car industry's decline is not entirely connected to deregulation though. Detriot has a lot more against it then just urban decay.

 

[British Republic]

Along with a seperate question, is there a way for the suburbs to develop slowly or not at all and instead develop into flats similar to the Soviet Union (except less shitty).

Why is this such a bad thing, NYC and Chicago show how city centers work despite their large suburban populations. As I keep saying flats are for young single people and everyone else can do better with a nice house in the suburbs.

However to have thriving urban centers you need better transport networks to and from the suburbs and in general. For that you need a federal and state governments willing to invest in infrastructure.

You can also make it requirement that city governments must cover the entire metropolitan area to prevent the loss of any tax base. (like it was the case in Canada).

As for a POD achieve your goals what about a Quebec Act which is basically a extension of the Irish Penal Laws which encourages Canada and NS to join the ARW and USA and No Alien and Sedation Acts. This keeps the Federalists as a political forces and the addition of Canada/NS would make sure they can remain in power whatever the South thinks. That will be enough IMO.