Abstract

Housing policy has been instrumental in the evolution of suburbs in the United States and France. During the postwar period, the French state actively produced collective social housing estates for families impacted by the devastation of the war. In the 1970s, the French middle class abandoned collective housing estates that became increasingly occupied by the working poor and immigrant groups. In the postwar United States, state production of social housing occurred in cities rather than suburbs. During this time, White working and middle classes, encouraged by federal housing policy, left the city and focused on ensuring their purchase of suburban single-family housing to the neglect of minority populations and neighborhoods.