Sprawl, Informality, and Housing

In North America, the decades following the Second World War produced explosive outward growth known as suburbanization or urban sprawl. Cheap land, mass-produced housing developments such as Levittown, New York, federally subsidized mortgages, and a massive new interstate highway system combined to pull middle-class households, disproportionately white, out of central cities and into low-density, automobile-dependent suburbs, a process often described as "white flight" because it coincided with and reinforced racial segregation between city and suburb. This pattern of sprawl produced metropolitan regions that consume far more land per resident than older, denser cities, and it left many American urban cores with shrinking tax bases through the latter half of the twentieth century.