'Mass exodus'

[Mortblanc]

What happened many times here in the U.S. was that middle class and upper working class people sold their single family houses at a loss to escape the urban problems, mostly taxes and poor services/schools. The "white flight" was about escaping totalitarian municipal government control as anything else. (severe restrictions combined with tax increases with no voter consent or control as happened in Detroit)

The single family houses were purchased by absentee landlords, broken up into apartments and 3-4 families each charged rent equaling what the previous single family paid.

The NEW urban ghetto is not a tenement house or a run down apartment building, it is a neighborhood filled with decrepit single family houses, that were once the homes of middle class people and are now controlled by a "management company".

The present "recession" in the U.S. was triggered by lending to people that could not afford the homes out in the burbs that they were buying. The politicians took the attitude that everyone had the right to own a home even if they could not pay for it. Easy lending accelerated the flight from the city centers through the 1990s and with the first small downturn in the economy all those houses of cards came crashing down as thousands of bankruptcies and foreclosures.

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I know people that drive 50-70 miles one way to work daily.

20-50 miles one way is normal.

Most people plan for 1-3 hours commute time added to their work day and make job decisions based on the fuel costs to get there.