It's entirely true and if you go back and read old meeting minutes they will constantly just say they're doing something just to get rid of the black neighborhood.

I'm sorry to inform you that Americans before 1960 were sometimes racist.

https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segreg...

Generally speaking other countries don't drive highways through the middle of cities nearly as much. It's still happening here - in Seattle and Bakersfield - maybe not for that reason, but still not for a good one, only because we've set a metric that cars need to go as fast as possible and when they don't the solution is more lanes.

This is a symptom of issues that still very much exist in the 21st century. In the US access to a good education is closely tied wealth, which is closely tied to homeownership and property values, which are in turn still benefiting from discriminatory housing policies [1].

As an example, the Bay Area has some of the best schools and most expensive real estate in the country. This is due to a lack of supply, yet to this day it is illegal to build high density and inexpensive housing in the vast majority of lots so that the less wealthy can start building equity, which again is a huge portion of wealth. Ordinances like high minimum lot sizes and low coverage were deliberately designed to make it more expensive for POC to buy into a neighborhood. This is covered extensively in The Color of Law, and is a great read [2].

Perhaps the better approach is to fix these systemic issues so that schools didn't have to compensate for them.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segreg...

Redlining was a conspiracy, but it's pretty well documented. Here's a good book on it.

https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segreg...

Tangent: For anyone who wants to learn more about the history of instutional racism in the US, in particular the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, The Color of Law (https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segreg...) goes into detail about the history of red lining and how it was GOVERNMENT-supported. For those bothered by the curfews imposed across the US, I'd also recommend Sundown Towns (https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ...), which discusses how many metropolitan areas had unofficial but very much enforced curfews for minorities.

> I don't really care about the skin color of my neighbors.

That's a nice sentiment, but if you dig a bit, there are probably reasons why his neighborhood is full of "older white people", and there's a good chance that it wasn't a natural process of sorting.

Recommended reading: https://amzn.to/2St6rOM

> it's hard to separate race from white migration to the suburbs.

Here's an entire book dedicated to discussing the government policies that drove separation: https://amzn.to/2Zz4Zeh (or get it from your local library!)

It's tough reading because a lot of things that happened were pretty ugly.

No one has mentioned "The Color of Law" yet, so here it is:

https://amzn.to/2IjeIhi

It's an entire book dedicated to this hypothesis, with a bunch of evidence. It's difficult reading because it pisses you off to hear about how horrible people were (and are), but it's a very good book.

Stripe cofounder here.

This is an issue that I know a lot of HN readers care about and I'd encourage anyone interested to get involved. (Feel free to reach out to CA YIMBY, your local representatives, or any of the other organizations doing good work in the field.)

Bad housing policy is one of the biggest impediments to overall economic growth[1] and to individual economic opportunity[2][3] in the US. Our current restrictive policies disproportionately hurt poorer, younger, and (frequently) non-white[4] people. I really hope we can change them.

[1] https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/chang-tai.hsieh/research/gr...

[2] https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/83656/...

[3] From the Obama administration: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segreg...

> In my opinion there is a clear line from redlining, blockbusting, white flight & loan discrimination to the massive wealth gap among races we see today.

Yes. See: "The Color of Law" - https://amzn.to/2JlHvRT extensively well documented. It's depressing reading though.

I just finished reading "Color of Law", which, while not the best formatted book, gives a really really good overview of the systematic, government led, programs designed and enforced explicitly against african americans from the late 1870s until the 1980s. It's a pretty quick read and well worth it for anyone who thinks that "systematic racism" isn't real.

https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segreg...

You can go back further, start around the 1930s, and see housing policies/practices that didn't just drive inequality, but also segregation[1]. I was shocked (pardon my ignorance).

1 - https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segreg...