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Originally Posted by Crawford
Definitely. We had transit, downtowns, public spaces. The average American had access to all this.
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We have all of this now. Since the 1950s the U.S. has urbanized. In 1950 40% of the U.S. population was rural. The South reached majority urban in 1950, the NE is was in the 1880s. Since you mentioned Phoenix - AZ was 55% urban in 1950, today Arizona is 90%. Today the West is the most urbanized region in the U.S. coming in at 90%. In 1950 it was 69% urban.
Average Americans have never had better access to those things you mentioned.
-Off topic, but transit is interesting. It better served the average American in our old urban centers when it was privately operated. Think L.A.'s street car system of the 1930s. Once those companies began to fail [due to technological advances and consumers embracing automobiles], government took them over and turned them into expensively operated inefficient subsidized metropolitan transit agencies that ended services.
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The U.S. in 1950 probably had the same quality of public sphere as Western Europe. We've since gotten much wealthier, but the public sphere has largely disappeared.
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Is there any information about this? A link or source? Or is this subjective?
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Originally Posted by the urban politician
Yes!
Passenger rail, intercity rail, construction of the interstate highway. Federal dollars went toward creating huge public housing systems, other infrastructure..
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We have all of this today. Federal dollars are being spent at record amounts on public projects all over the place. Is it enough? Probably not, but was it ever enough?
Quote:
Originally Posted by the urban politician
We had a better public sphere in 1950, when we had a fraction of our present population. Not an excuse
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Is there any verifiable evidence to this statement? And does it matter when the overall quality of life in the U.S. is light years ahead of where it was in 1950? Just about every important metric has greatly improved since then. Education attainment [college educated used to be around 6% in 1950!], life expectancy, literacy rates, racial tension, segregation, income levels, technological advance, air travel and overall connectedness and so on.
The 'public sphere' of Washington has changed. I can no longer ride my horse and tie it up to a hitch outside of the Capitol. Technology changes cities.