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During the 1950s and 1960s, realtors and developers appealed to racism in getting citydwellers to sell their houses ("The 'Negros' are already over on Twentieth Street. Pretty soon, they'll be moving in here on Twenty-Eighth Street") and buy into new developments on the edge of town. To top it off, until the Civil Rights Act passed, many suburbs had "restrictive covenants," which banned the sale of property to non-whites or Jews.
Many of the suburbs built at that time were not particularly well built, so by the 1990s, they were looking pretty seedy and were no longer considered desirable by the most affluent whites. They then became affordable for the less affluent. (That certainly seems to be the case in the Minneapolis area.) I think that this is the point at which they start to lean Democratic.
In Portland, the urban growth boundary has prevented the growth of far-flung suburbs, but in an interesting development, the suburbs have acquired noticeable concentrations of Asians and Latinos.
I think that the people who move to far-flung suburbs and buy trophy houses are the ones who are the most conformist ones, the ones who buy the fantasies of rural life and don't stop to think about how their very presence in their clumps of trophy houses is destroying the rural landscape.
It's not surprising that they vote Republican.
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