" Daniel Moynihan describes in "Crisis in the City:".
The appearance, as of a sudden, of large numbers of lower class Negroes in Northern cities has led many persons to assert that we are in the grip of a unique problem. Only a limited number of Americans can see contemporary problems as a result of the malfunctioning of that system of economic and social relationships which are defined as urban. The problem of objective evaluation of urban programs must become even greater, now that the Federal government is moving beyond its original concern (to improve the physical equipment of cities) towards an effort to improve the human beings who live in them. No one need be told that people are harder to rehabilitate than buildings, although we begin to learn that the process is expensive and frustrating in buildings as well. [4] .
In the 50's and 60's subsidized assistance and VHA or VA financing catapulted millions of families into a largely white only new suburbia. Even the new interstate highway system acted as an indirect subsidy, connecting commuters to inexpensive land. During the early 1960s, conversation concerning urban issues centered on the problems of metropolitan growth, but as the decade progressed urban issues became associated with issues of racial conflict. Minorities felt that, "Black labor built wealth for a white America-while their communities have been later used as dumping grounds for the negative externalities produced by industrialization."[5] Low-income whites were granted access to the suburbs with assistance that minorities could not obtain instigated through redlining, racial steering and other discriminatory practices, building racial instead of economic barriers. As the suburbs multiplied and sprawled, funding was funneled to their new infrastructure instead of to the cities, leaving them to rot.
Cities emptied by white flight and the "American dream" idealization of the suburbs subsequently surrounded by an exploding metropolis, had lessons to learn if they wanted to survive.