Shopping Malls
The Mauling of America
Without highways and suburbia, malls would not exist. Malls are indirect
beneficiaries of two hugh Federal subsidy programs. The Federal
Housing Authority helped create suburbia by financing the move there by
the "white" middle class. Why just "white"? Because, until the
policy was overturned in 1966, the FHA only financed home loans in
racially segregated neighborhoods. If you were a "white" realtor or
homeowner in a new suburb you certainly would not sell to a "black" family
because the FHA would not guarantee the loan. To make
matters worse, banks would "red line" any block with even one "black"
family on it, and that would cause property values to drop.
Consequently, black Americans were effectively trapped in the inner city.
(But don't believe me, read the book that won the American
historical association's Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize in
1986. See chapter 11 of Kenneth T. Jackson's Crabgrass
Frontier: The Suburbanization Of The United States, New York, 1985.)
Of course, suburbia would not be possible without highways,
so fortuitously there was in 1956 the Federal Highway Act. It authorized
the spending of 105.3 billion dollars to build 42,500 miles of
freeways. Then into this new landscape of bungalow or colonial-style homes
and automobiles, came the mall as a proverbial city of lights.
