How cheap mortgages and motorways helped hollow out city centres
After the Second World War, American policy nudged families out of cities. Government-backed home loans let returning veterans buy detached houses in the suburbs, and the private car made commuting easy. Cities lost residents, jobs and tax income. The result, repeated across North America and parts of Europe since the 1970s, has a bleak name: urban decay.
No single cause explains it. Planning decisions, poverty, suburban sprawl, freeways and rail lines slicing through neighbourhoods, and discriminatory lending practices such as redlining can all feed the spiral. The symptoms are familiar: empty lots and condemned houses, crime, pollution, feral animals and swathes of abandoned land sometimes called urban prairie. Rising city taxes push more residents out, and cutbacks to police and fire services can follow. Some libertarian economists add rent control to the list, arguing it discourages building and maintenance.
Industry sits at the heart of many cases. The Industrial Revolution drew workers into cities, but when factories later moved away, towns built around them lost their economic base. British studies around 2000 found areas combining industrial decline, unemployment, poverty and contaminated land proved especially resistant to improvement.
Europe offers its own versions. France built vast tower-block estates between the 1950s and 1970s, welcomed at first for replacing shanty towns, but hit hard by the economic slump of the 1980s. In eastern Germany, towns such as Hoyerswerda have shrunk dramatically since reunification in 1990, losing about 40 percent of their peak population, with births collapsing during those uncertain years.
Perhaps the starkest example is the Vele di Scampia in Naples, huge sail-shaped housing blocks built between 1962 and 1975. Planners imagined a lively community with a rail station and a park between buildings. After the 1980 Irpinia earthquake, families left homeless squatted inside, policing was thin, and the estate became a hub for the Camorra's drug trade.
Source: Urban decay
