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I most certainly did & that money could be used in a city as well as anywhere else. My father used his when he bought our first house in a city. Our later move to Cherry Hill was all on his dime. The case was the same for my friends families. I'm a babyboomer & my father was a WWII vet. My friends fathers were WII vets. The statement that I challenged was a real reach.
And your point? They were given low-interest, zero down payment loans, which enabled anybody to be able to move to the suburbs or to a nicer part of the city. New construction was made much cheaper and was encouraged.
And the GI Bill wasn't the only thing subsidizing suburban growth.
I think you're getting defensive of the people who used things like the GI Bill to "move up" to suburban communities or nicer city neighborhoods. There's no need. Anybody who would ever look down on those who served our country during that time is a disgrace to our country. We're merely just stating facts, and nobody is directing their ire at that group of people.
Location: The place where the road & the sky collide
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Quote:
Originally Posted by UDResident
And your point? They were given low-interest, zero down payment loans, which enabled anybody to be able to move to the suburbs or to a nicer part of the city. New construction was made much cheaper and was encouraged.
And the GI Bill wasn't the only thing subsidizing suburban growth.
I think you're getting defensive of the people who used things like the GI Bill to "move up" to suburban communities or nicer city neighborhoods. There's no need. Anybody who would ever look down on those who served our country during that time is a disgrace to our country. We're merely just stating facts, and nobody is directing their ire at that group of people.
I'm not being defensive. I'm speaking from experience, not reading it in a history book.
Cherry Hill & the places like it took off in the 60s after starting in the 50s. Our fathers had already used the GI bill. They bought a house there after getting jobs in the area. This is not the same as the Levittowns. Those were usually 1st time homes for returning GIs. To lump them all together is inaccurate & wrong.
If you want to be accurate the thing that most enabled people to leave Philly & move across the river was when the Ben Franklin Bridge was built prior to WWII. Prior to building the Ben people had to use ferries. There was also a train on the bridge prior to the PATCO train. Camden was actually a nice place then. RCA provided a huge number of jobs as did the Campbells soup factory.
When my family moved to Cherry Hill in 1964 it was a mixture of transplants (like my family) & people from Philadelphia & Camden. The loss of the mills & the mill workers following their jobs to North Carolina played a far bigger part in what hurt the City of Philadelphia in that time period. I remember hearing the announcements of mills closures on the news & on KYW, when it became all news.
Cherry Hill & the places like it took off in the 60s after starting in the 50s. Our fathers had already used the GI bill. They bought a house there after getting jobs in the area. This is not the same as the Levittowns. Those were usually 1st time homes for returning GIs. To lump them all together is inaccurate & wrong.
Up until the early 70s VA & FHA loans enforced economic (read: racial) discrimination. If your neighborhood was "mixed" you weren't getting a home loan to buy a house in that neighborhood. Even after it was illegal it remained standard practice until the Clinton administration.
The parts of the city where people were using the VA loan in large numbers in the 50s and 60s were the parts of the city just being built . . . and keep in mind, even though WWII was over in late '45 and a lot of GIs started coming home they weren't discharged in large numbers until '47 and it took until the early 50s to retool the economy from the war machine it had been to the consumer engine that it would become.
Housing construction - which had been basically non-existant since 1929 - didn't begin in earnest until 1951/52.
Also, as a veteran I can assure you that you can use your VA Loan as many times as you want. It's not a one shot deal. The only stipulation is that it has to be for your primary residence and you can only have one loan at a time. I sold my house in NJ that I bought through the VA program and bought my current house through the same program.
Location: The place where the road & the sky collide
23,813 posts, read 34,657,307 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by drive carephilly
Up until the early 70s VA & FHA loans enforced economic (read: racial) discrimination. If your neighborhood was "mixed" you weren't getting a home loan to buy a house in that neighborhood. Even after it was illegal it remained standard practice until the Clinton administration.
The parts of the city where people were using the VA loan in large numbers in the 50s and 60s were the parts of the city just being built . . . and keep in mind, even though WWII was over in late '45 and a lot of GIs started coming home they weren't discharged in large numbers until '47 and it took until the early 50s to retool the economy from the war machine it had been to the consumer engine that it would become.
Housing construction - which had been basically non-existant since 1929 - didn't begin in earnest until 1951/52.
Also, as a veteran I can assure you that you can use your VA Loan as many times as you want. It's not a one shot deal. The only stipulation is that it has to be for your primary residence and you can only have one loan at a time. I sold my house in NJ that I bought through the VA program and bought my current house through the same program.
The WWII GI bill died many years ago. The current program is not the same. I heard my father & many of my friends' fathers comment many, many times that they wished that they could use the VA loan again, but they could not.
Again, the harm done to Philly was not done by WWII vets dribbling out to PA & NJ suburbs. The harm was the mill closures & the Bryers plant, etc., etc. . . I remember of hearing that, after some mill closures, & the subsequent evacuation of mill workers to North Carolina, to follow their jobs, that entire blocks were empty or nearly empty. That did not happen when families picked up & moved to South Jersey.
I heard announcements of mills closures & I heard discussions of the mill workers leaving, as well, in editorials on KYW AM.
Whatever. lol. If you like it there, fine,. We didn't and moved out. And are happy we did. Leave it at that
Quote:
Originally Posted by Summersm343
1. There are good schools in the city. Some of the best public schools in the metro are in Philadelphia. Also, cities all around the country tend to be for the childless young professionals, that is nothing unique to Philadelphia.
2. Just because there are unclean areas, doesn't mean there are no clean areas within city limits. There are plenty of clean areas in Center City, South Philadelphia, West Philadelphia, Lower North, Northwest and Northeast Philadelphia.
3. There are plenty of nice homes and they tend to be a better quality build, better architecture and more interestingly designed in the city. Sure rowhomes are smaller, but there are plenty of large victorian twins in UCity, there are plenty of larger houses being built down in South Philadelphia by the sports complex. Chestnut Hill has some of the largest houses in the metro. And the Northeast and Northwest offer some large houses. There is also some massive rowhomes in the Rittenhouse area... so if you desire size, it's not undoable.
4. Sure there are unsafe parts of the city, but there are perfectly safe parts of the city too in every section of the city. There are unsafe suburbs too.
5. Good public service. What do you mean? In all of my life living in the suburbs I did not see one "public service" by the township. Never saw a street cleaner. Nothing. Totally irrelevant.
What the city offers that the suburbs DON'T is certainly plenty. You proved my point, you have to DRIVE to do anything of interest. All the action is in the city. I can walk to anything you have to drive to. I can walk to the bar or a restaurant or for shopping. I have access to world class public transit, my job, world class shopping, museums, restaurants, bars, parks, sporting events, and grocery stores all within walking distance. Anywhere too far to walk I can take public transit to. I am in the middle of a large metropolitan city surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people within a couple mile radius. I can even just walk with nothing to do and have interesting architecture and an interesting street scape all around me, with thousands of other people out and about, not a monotonous walk through the suburbs with the same house over and over again where your lucky to see even one person. Also, in the city, people converse and are friendly. In the suburbs, someone will call the cops on you if you get to close to their house. In the city, there is a sense of community like no suburb you can find. People converse, when you walk down the street people will say hi, or good morning. In the suburbs you will get a rude glance and no response if you say hi to anyone you don't know. There is no sense of community. Everyone lives in the same house with the same yard with the same two cars and two kids, everyone drives to work from 9-5 to drive back home again and do the same thing over again the next day. Any action besides the shopping mall or the nearest Friday's (or other chain restaurant) is within the city where you HAVE TO DRIVE TO... then have to drive back home at night, so you can't have any fun. There are some few good exceptions of suburbs IMO like New Hope, Collingswood, Media, etc... but they are still inferior to the vibe of the city.
Is New Jersey even considered a significant part of the Philadelphia metro? Philadelphia, unlike manhattan, is not actually in the center but instead in the corner. Isn't it a perpetual detriment for center city to not actually be in the center?
I believe that we may have actually forgotten what the OP is. Here's ^^ a reminder. If someone wants to start another thread regarding Why people move out of Philadelphia, please feel free to do so.
South Jersey is part of the Philly metro area, but its the crappy(er) part of NJ. All the money and influence is in the NYC metro region of North Jersey.
You see this played out in the state government too. The state always screws over South Jersey in favor of North Jersey. Just look at their handling of the Delaware dredging project which they fought in favor of deepening the port of Newark. Or, look at a NJTransit rail map. Newark/Hoboken/Jersey City have all benefited and gotten redevelopment monies for being across the river from New York City. Camden is across the river from Philadelphia and it gets... to merge its police force into a county-wide force since it can no longer even provide basic services like police protection. Its sad really.
I most certainly did & that money could be used in a city as well as anywhere else. My father used his when he bought our first house in a city. Our later move to Cherry Hill was all on his dime. The case was the same for my friends families. I'm a babyboomer & my father was a WWII vet. My friends fathers were WII vets. The statement that I challenged was a real reach.
A real reach? No... it's not a reach at all, the suburbs were essentially the first projects. They were built with all kind of tax breaks and incentives for not only the developers (the Levitt's), but the home buyers as well. Also, the creation and selling of homes in the suburbs involve the largest account of redlinning, steering, segregation, racism and discrimination in the housing market... EVER.
This is the last post on this subject... then let's get this thread back on topic.
First, you COULD use the GI Bill to purchase anywhere... the only problem was, after the end of the war in 1945 there was no new construction and no room for new immigrants and growing families. Instead of expanding inner ring suburbs in the dense urban fashion they were originally built, the U.S. government commissioned the Levitt's to build suburbs. These new towns were built with all kind of tax incentives. Then, when people were buying the homes, you didn't really need a down payment on the house, and the FHA was offering extremely low interest mortgages.
Quote:
By the mid-1930s the government began to lure white families out of public housing with federally insured mortgages that subsidized relocation to new single-family homes in the suburbs. With Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and then, after World War II, Veterans Administration (VA) guarantees, white middle-class families could buy suburban homes with little or no down payments and extended 30-year amortization schedules. Monthly charges were often less than rents the families had previously paid to housing authorities or private landlords.
This offered new homes to people, when there was no new construction in cities, and made it a no brainier to live in the suburbs due to how cheap living in the suburbs was due to all of the tax subsidies. Where it got even worse was:
Quote:
At the FHA's insistence, developer William Levitt did not sell homes to blacks, and each deed included a prohibition of such resales in the future.
Quote:
If a black family could afford to buy into a white neighborhood without government help, the FHA would refuse to insure future mortgages even to whites in that neighborhood, because it was now threatened with integration.
Why are modern black projects so looked down upon when Levittown where essentially projects for whites?
Even to this day, suburban ideology promotes racism, xenophobia, homophobia, segregation, class-ism, among other things while living in the inner city is viewed as "bad" and "dangerous" and "filled with undesirables."
IDK why talking about this is taboo. When people bash the city it's just overlooked, but when someone speaks negatively on the suburbs, every freaks out!
AGAIN, I have NO problem with all suburbs. All my views and issues with the suburbs are with Levittown-esk burbs and all sprawling burbs. I have no issues with inner-ring suburbs, street car suburbs, or any first suburbs. I don't even view these places as suburbs really. Even smalls towns and boroughs in the suburbs like Newtown, Collingswood, New Hope, Media, etc. are just fine. The problem is sprawl.
There is all kind of information on the issues the sprawlburbs cause with not building to human scale and building for the car, and how suburbs are unsustainable and how tax bases are spread too thin, etc. etc.
More information can be viewed in such documentaries:
If you are interested, they are great documentaries.
Now back on topic.
Last edited by RightonWalnut; 01-21-2013 at 06:12 PM..
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