> I think "It's a Wonderful Life" deserves a good deal of blame for this,
This is a surprising hypothesis. Do you have other evidence/analysis, or is this purely speculative?
For my part, I would have said that racism/classism deserves much of the blame. Especially after forced public school integration, middle-class whites wanted to live in neighborhoods where poor people would be priced out by inability to afford cars or detached houses (and kept out by racial criteria for home ownership), and thereby could also keep their local tax money from paying for services or infrastructure for “those people”.
That and multiple types of massive subsidies for cars and driving – zoning, free parking, government support for cheap oil, publicly developed roads, etc.
This is a surprising hypothesis. Do you have other evidence/analysis, or is this purely speculative?
For my part, I would have said that racism/classism deserves much of the blame. Especially after forced public school integration, middle-class whites wanted to live in neighborhoods where poor people would be priced out by inability to afford cars or detached houses (and kept out by racial criteria for home ownership), and thereby could also keep their local tax money from paying for services or infrastructure for “those people”.
That and multiple types of massive subsidies for cars and driving – zoning, free parking, government support for cheap oil, publicly developed roads, etc.