Comment by cucumber3732842
4 days ago
I think it's important to remember that the 1950s and 1960s were the time when western society really started to swing the government around for each and every thing in a way what we think is normal now but was fairly unprecedented at the time. When the government is seemingly capriciously regulating your life, pulling strings to get neighborhoods redeveloped in accordance with some new vision, bulldozing other neighborhoods for highways, that's not someplace you want to put down roots, raise your family or be in it for the long haul.
Hate to break it to you but that wasn't new in the 50s and 60s. The mechanisms by which it was done were changing away frome the machine politics of earlier eras - but ways to regulate what can and can't be done by neighborhood have been around since the birth of the country. Use of eminent domain for public works private ventures is at least as old as the railroads. Planned suburbs, company towns, bedroom communities and the like are all 19th century "new" things in the US.
The "new" part was who it was happening to. Instead of just stealing some poor hicks town for a dam and reservoir (after circling the plan for years to depress land values of course) they were interfering with substantially more established communities in far more volume than the railroads ever had. And it was more than just the highways, zoning codes and all manner of municipal regulation proliferated hugely over this time bringing government into people's lives (remember, the economy was way different too, people didn't all work in cube farms with a compliance department between them and the rules).
All those centrally planned things you mentioned were green(ish) field developments