Wealthy people have always had a natural tendency to try to avoid paying for public services (or taxes of any kind), a tendency that was dramatically strengthened by racist resentment of the now-disproportionately-black city residents who relied on those public services.
That tendency was strengthened by how the automobile and free trade cored out much of the industrial base of the inner city. Some businesses moved to locations nearer to freeways out of the city, while others left the country altogether — though not all, as the central city remained a logical place for many enterprises. As wealthy and middle-class whites fled to the suburbs, they mobilized furiously to prevent annexation of their cities, and thus keep their tax dollars — many of which were still being made in the central city — locked into their own small communities to the greatest possible extent. An attempt to enlarge Baltimore again in 1948 failed, as did nearly every other similar effort.
The result was places like New Jersey’s Newark, a tiny central city surrounded by a thicket of strangling wealthy suburbs. It was falling to pieces by the mid-1960s.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member