“Pruitt-Igoe in the Suburbs”: Connecting White Flight, Sprawl, and Climate Change in Metropolitan America

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This article explores the connections between racial inequality and fossil fuel-intensive sprawl in the post-civil rights metropolitan landscape, through a case study of the Black Jack housing controversy. In 1970, a local religious group tried to build a low-income housing project in Black Jack, Missouri, a bedroom community four miles northwest of the city of St. Louis. Local residents opposed to the project argued that public housing would bring the crime, poverty, and social disorder of the city to the suburbs. Although they were forced to strip their opposition of overtly racist language, these White suburbanites were part of a nationwide project to racialize, and thus delegitimize, the extension of urban form into American suburbs, including public housing and public transportation. When these efforts failed, as they did in Black Jack, inner-ring suburbs began to desegregate, and in response, Whites again fled, further out, to second-ring suburbs and exurbs. This process, which has played out across American cities from the 1960s until the present day, has had devastating consequences for racial and economic inequality, but also on the global climate. Millions of White Americans, driven by their desire to maintain metropolitan racial segregation, have become hostile to the forms of urban infrastructure that would create less carbon-intensive cities, recreating racist, auto-intensive sprawl farther out into the countryside.