+In the decades after World War II, the population of suburban areas more than doubled while the population of central cities shrank. Many of the new suburbanites were members of a growing white middle class who had grown up in cities but chose to buy their own home and raise their family in the suburbs. These affluent suburbanites may still have worked in cities, but their homes and much of their spending were in the suburbs (along with the associated property and sales tax revenue). Notably, formal and informal mechanisms–such as restrictive covenants that banned sale to people of color; zoning laws that effectively excluded poor people; and informal, discriminatory real estate broker practices–kept the suburbs nearly all white. Those who remained in the cities were disproportionately likely to be poorer people of color, often living in slums, and thus were the most in need of the social services that city governments were increasingly ill-equipped to provide.
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