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The suburb
A suburb is a residential area outside the city, and after the war they were built on an entirely new scale with government loans behind them. Suburbanisation is the single factor that most shaped North American land use, energy use and politics after the war. Nor was it open to everyone: Levittown's original deeds barred sale to Black buyers, and the federal loan programmes followed the redlining maps. The combination of subsidised suburbs and motorway building simultaneously drained city centres of their tax base, with effects that marked American cities for the rest of the century.
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