A New Suburban Politics
A New Suburban Politics
A more capacious suburban politics—beyond the myth of the white, affluent enclave—is fundamental to addressing the problems of racial segregation and economic inequality that shape American life.
Patchwork Apartheid: Private Restriction, Racial Segregation, and Urban Inequality
by Colin Gordon
Russell Sage Foundation, 2023, 284 pp.
In Levittown’s Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb
by Tim Keogh
University of Chicago Press, 2023, 328 pp.
The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs
by Matthew D. Lassiter
Princeton University Press, 2023, 680 pp.
The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles after 1945
by Becky M. Nicolaides
Oxford University Press, 2024, 576 pp.
Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs
by Benjamin Herold
Penguin Press, 2024, 496 pp.
Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity
by Laura Meckler
Henry Holt and Co., 2023, 400 pp.
Amid the pandemic lockdowns and mass protests of 2020, political figures on both the right and left invoked the American suburban ideal. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump made almost desperate appeals to “the suburban housewives of America.” Claiming that Joe Biden would “abolish the suburbs,” Trump tweeted that he would protect the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” from rising crime and the construction of affordable housing for low-income people of color. During protests following the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also painted a rosy image of suburban life. “People ask me, ‘What does a world where we defund the police look like?’” she said. “I tell them it looks like a suburb.”
Commenters were quick to criticize both Trump and Ocasio-Cortez’s conceptions of the suburbs, which have become far more racially and economically diverse than either politician implied. None but a few tradwife influencers actually embody the image of suburban womanhood that Trump invoked; meanwhile, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Ahmaud Arbery all lived in and were murdered in suburbs. In fact, police killings and arrest rates are higher in suburbs than in large cities.
Yet as Trump and Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks show, the myth of the suburbs as white, affluent enclaves of the American Dream has not changed much since the 1950s. Several new books confront this myth head on. They reveal the poverty and diversity that have long existed in the suburbs, and the interrelated forces of mass incarceration, globalization, and gentrification that have remade the metropolitan periphery, deepening inequality within and among suburban communities.
The popular image of the suburb has long flattened these class and other differences—making it an effective shorthand for populist appeals by politicians from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton to Trump. As suburbs grow ever more racially diverse and unequal, it is that much more important to parse the distinctions between them. Dispelling the suburban myth has immediate implications for election strategists who describe a migration of wealthier, educated suburbanites toward the Democrats, and of lower-income voters toward the Republicans; but it has deeper policy consequences as well. As these books make clear, there are few easy solutions to suburban inequality, and all come with difficult trade-offs. Still, any strategy for reducing inequality needs to include the suburbs—and to understand more accurately how they came to be.
The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 renewed interest in the historical forces that etched racial segregation into the urban and suburban landscape. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law soared to the New York Times bestseller list and became required reading among many a book group—not least in the suburbs. Yet the book produced its own mythology about the origins of suburban segregation and inequality. The Color of Law argued that residential segregation was the direct result of de jure government policies, not a de facto outcome of private actions. Along with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s landmark Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” Rothstein’s book made terms like “redlining” virtually household words.
While the subtitle of The Color of Law calls it a “Forgotten History,” most of its topics had been well studied by scholars of urban history, including Kenneth T. Jackson, Thomas J. Sugrue, David Freund, Lizabeth Cohen, Robert Self, and N.D.B. Connolly. Rothstein’s oversimplified version of this literature focused far too much on a set of federal policies implemented in the middle of the twentieth century. Historian Destin Jenkins wrote a searing critique soon after the book came out in 2017, which argued that Rothstein’s emphasis on law alone failed to address the market incentives for producing structural segregation.
Colin Gordon’s new book Patchwork Apartheid expands on Jenkins’s critique by examining the role of private actors and tools, especially restrictive covenants, in shaping residential segregation. Under such private agreements, African Americans were systematically excluded from the vast majority of urban neighborhoods and suburban subdivisions, and exploited by predatory rents and usurious lending in the few areas not under restrictions. In a triumph of dogged archival research, Gordon exhumes local property records (most handwritten and only recently digitized) in five counties across the Midwest, including St. Louis and Hennepin County (Minneapolis). Gordon shows that restrictive covenants were far more important than has been understood and directly shaped municipal zoning and federal housing policies. Policies like exclusionary zoning and redlining, he argues, “served primarily to sustain, subsidize, and legitimize practices already well established by private restriction.”
It cannot be denied, however, that the federal government’s investment in mass suburbanization after the Second World War extended and intensified these practices. Federal policy helped millions of white Americans buy homes, while African Americans were left behind. Levittown on Long Island, the first and largest mass-produced suburb, was underwritten by the Federal Housing Administration, mostly to house the families of returning white veterans with access to GI Bill mortgage assistance. The postwar mass migration to Levittown and its ilk broadened the American middle class; by allowing millions of white Americans to build home equity, it also became the primary engine of the racial wealth gap.
The FHA initially required restrictive covenants as part of its loan agreement with Levittown developer William Levitt. Even after the Supreme Court ruled the enforcement of restrictive covenants unconstitutional in 1948, Levitt actively fought the sale of homes to African-American buyers. Questioned about this practice, he famously declared:
As a Jew, I have no room in my mind or heart for racial prejudice, but I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 or 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. This is their attitude, not ours. As a company, our position is simply this: We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem, but we cannot combine the two.
This was the prevailing attitude of the real estate industry and federal housing agencies as well. Through most of the 1950s, not a single one of Levittown’s more than 60,000 residents was black.
But segregation is only part of the story. As Tim Keogh’s path-breaking book In Levittown’s Shadow documents, the prosperity of postwar communities like Levittown depended on growing suburban poverty and exploitation elsewhere. The postwar suburbs were places not just of housing but of industry, much of it subsidized by the federal government and by municipalities that gave generous tax breaks to firms willing to build offices and factories. Long Island became a a hub of the defense industry, and its companies received substantial government contracts in the early years of the Cold War. Many jobs at these factories were unionized and paid well enough to enable workers to purchase a Cape Cod or ranch home in one of the area’s booming subdivisions. Racial discrimination hindered access to such jobs for African Americans and Puerto Rican migrants, especially women. These groups instead found employment in more vulnerable sectors, outside the labor protections established under the New Deal: cleaning, child care, gardening, stocking or ringing up groceries, or non-union construction. This cheap supply of laborers willing to work overtime was one reason developers like Levitt were able to keep costs low and build so quickly.
Many of those unable to secure defense jobs on Long Island were likewise ineligible for FHA-backed mortgages, sharply limiting their housing options. Some black residents resorted to predatory lenders to purchase their own homes. Others rented from speculators, landlords, and even individual homeowners, who defied local building codes by dividing small Levittown-style homes into multifamily apartments. Unpermitted units also popped up in garages, attics, and sheds, often in neighborhoods undergoing racial transition. Local officials largely turned a blind eye to these pervasive practices. Meanwhile, enterprising lenders and landlords were able to take advantage of those excluded from the conventional suburban real estate market by charging exorbitant rents. Domestic and other workers spent large parts of their meager salaries on shoddily built, rat-infested units in the attics and garages of suburban single-family homes. For Keogh, the plight of these poor families is an example of the postwar welfare state’s failures and a “manifestation of America’s ersatz social democracy.”
Compounding the problem, policymakers and the media continued to equate the suburbs with prosperity, while treating poverty as a largely urban phenomenon—a false binary predicated on what Keogh terms “suburban exceptionalism.” This narrative in turn led to policies that focused on helping poor people of color move from the city to the suburbs by building affordable housing or improving transportation—an approach that aimed to redistribute people rather than wealth. One such program was the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing policy, which was central to Trump’s warnings that Democrats wanted to “abolish the suburbs.” But as Keogh shows, poor people have always lived in the suburbs. A lack of access wasn’t producing inequality; the main culprits were instead market exploitation and a paltry welfare state.
The discourse of suburban exceptionalism also shaped the War on Drugs, the subject of Matthew D. Lassiter’s important new book The Suburban Crisis. Lassiter—in full disclosure, my former PhD advisor and occasional coauthor—exposes the largely overlooked role of white suburban privilege in the construction of drug policy at all scales of government. From extensive archival research, The Suburban Crisis reconstructs how politicians, the media, and grassroots suburban activists conspired to protect white middle-class youth from the perceived dangers of drugs, especially marijuana. “Otherwise-law abiding” white teenagers who recreationally smoke marijuana, Lassiter argues, have been as symbolically central to drug war politics and policy as the tropes of the young black male dealer or the Latin American trafficker. And officials in the postwar era routinely suggested that living in racially segregated middle-class neighborhoods was one of the best ways to protect white middle-class youth from drug use and other misbehavior.
“By 1973 white Americans accounted for 81 percent of all drug arrests and 89 percent of juvenile apprehensions,” Lassiter writes, but very few in these groups served prison sentences. A bipartisan political project dating to the early 1950s helped divert youth from “good families” into rehabilitation and other coercive public health programs. Judges consistently reduced white teens’ charges to misdemeanors, dismissed charges in exchange for therapy or other treatment, and expunged records that might jeopardize college admissions. Lassiter argues that these many exemptions and diversions were “constitutive of the expansion of the carceral state.” The police were hardly absent from affluent suburbs, but they have enforced the law there selectively. This is something that Ocasio-Cortez herself acknowledged in 2020, giving a more nuanced account of policing in the suburbs. “When a teenager or preteen does something harmful in a suburb,” she observed, “white communities bend over backwards to find alternatives to incarceration for their loved ones to ‘protect their future,’ like community service or rehab or restorative measures. Why don’t we treat black and brown people the same way?”
Building on his first book, The Silent Majority, Lassiter also underscores how suburban residents shaped policy at the local, state, and federal levels. For instance, thousands of suburban residents wrote to the governor of California in the 1950s calling for stiff consequences, even the death penalty, for marijuana and heroin dealers—one factor in the state’s passage of one of the nation’s first mandatory minimum sentences for drug distribution in 1951. Suburban activists in the “parent power” movement of the 1970s and 1980s, who favored a zero-tolerance approach, directly guided the drug enforcement policies of the Carter and Reagan administrations. Lassiter cautions against seeing these suburbanites and the policies they supported as merely products of the rise of conservatism. There were many committed liberals in the ranks of these movements, and the racialized approach to the War on Drugs was a consistently bipartisan political project.
The first waves of historical scholarship on suburban politics generally ended their accounts in the 1970s or 1980s, with white residents fighting to defend their communities against desegregation, affordable housing, and increased taxes; this white backlash was portrayed as critical to the rise of Reagan and the New Right. In addition to giving a distorted view of suburban political realignment—ignoring, for example, the many liberal Democrats who also lived in the suburbs—this earlier work failed to fully address the significant ways that the suburbs have changed since Reagan’s presidency.
The proportion of people of color living in suburbs increased from under 10 percent in 1970 to 45 percent in 2020.In fact, a majority of black, Latine, and Asian Americans now technically live in areas designated by the census as suburbs, as many immigrants bypass central cities, creating what geographer Wei Li has dubbed “ethnoburbs.” At the same time, the pockets of suburban poverty that have persisted in places like Long Island have multiplied nationally. Between 2000 and 2015, the number of people in poverty in the United States increased by 11.5 million, and suburbs comprised close to half of that growth, or 5.7 million people. By 2018, there were around 3 million more poor people in suburbs than in cities.
In the 2020 election, Biden tried to spin these statistics as a way to counter Trump’s nostalgic depictions of suburban homogeneity. In one of their debates, Biden groused that “this is not 1950. All these dog whistles and racism don’t work anymore. Suburbs are by and large integrated. . . . There are as many people today driving their kids to soccer practice [with] black and white and Hispanic in the same car as there have been at any time in the past.”Yet Biden’s remark reflected yet another myth: while suburbs have become diverse in the aggregate over the last half-century, they are more segregated by race and class than ever, and wealthy white communities remain the most racially segregated of all.
Even places that pride themselves on their racial diversity have faced challenges. Perhaps the best example is Shaker Heights, an affluent suburb of Cleveland that long served as a national model of integration, particularly in its renowned public schools. The town took deliberate steps to encourage integration in both its housing and schools in the 1950s, setting the community on a unique path. As journalist Laura Meckler explains in Dream Town, the national media and academics presented Shaker Heights as a “special” place whose “approach to race and integration was innovative, progressive, [and] newsworthy.”
Meckler, who grew up in Shaker Heights (as did my father, who is featured in the book), explores the consistent challenges the area faced, particularly after the 1970s, as local wealth disparities grew and the vaunted public schools struggled with chronic achievement gaps. Despite many experiments, no one has yet succeeded in reducing these inequalities or resolving resulting racial tensions. Shaker Heights is not unique in this regard: as seen in the documentary series America to Me, which looks at Oak Park, Illinois, conflicts over the achievement gap are endemic in most communities committed to integration.
The possibilities and challenges of true racial integration are also the focus of historian Becky M. Nicolaides’s The New Suburbia. Nicolaides focuses on Los Angeles, which she presents as a bellwether of suburban diversification, especially with the arrival of Asian and Latin American immigrants since the 1965 Immigration Act. A social historian, Nicolaides is most interested in how these changes affected residents’ everyday lives and sense of community. Asian, Latine, and African American people have infused the formerly white suburbs with their own cultural traditions and aesthetics, remaking suburbs across Los Angeles.
Nicolaides also finds that many suburbanites of color have followed their white counterparts by embracing exclusionary practices targeting low-income people. Even as the L.A. suburbs grew more racially diverse, economic inequality deepened, reflecting larger changes in the global economy. Like Long Island, the Los Angeles economy depended heavily on military contracts and factory labor, until the end of the Cold War and the rise of globalization led to factory closures and economic slowdown. As the middle class shrunk, the L.A. suburbs increasingly resembled the “hourglass economy,” with both super-rich communities and poor suburbs proliferating. Moreover, suburban diversification coincided with increased government retrenchment, both in California and nationally. Austerity in the 1980s and beyond drove many of these neighborhoods to turn to privatized solutions—including PTA fundraising, outside tutoring, and neighborhood watches—which only compounded inequality in and between suburbs. Nicolaides shows that there is no white suburban monolith, in L.A. or elsewhere. Yet she does not fully abandon the enduring power of the American Dream, or the hope that the suburbs could be places where people of diverse backgrounds could “figure out how to live together in difference.”
In Disillusioned, journalist Benjamin Herold takes a far more pessimistic view, seeking to understand why so many Americans have become disheartened with suburbia. The book is also a personal reckoning: Herold came of age in Penn Hills, a Pittsburgh suburb that, when he lived there in the 1980s and early 1990s, was a largely white middle-class neighborhood with strong public schools and modest single-family ranch homes. Herold asks why places like Penn Hills are no longer delivering on their promises. Across the country and the socioeconomic spectrum, he argues, people have long tried to avoid the costs of suburban growth and racial exclusion, but the suburbs are now in the midst of a major crisis.
Herold, like Meckler, is an education reporter by trade, and he focuses on schools as key sites where tensions over race and growth play out. His account reinforces the centrality of education to the suburban experience and underscores the message that schools alone cannot address inequality—even if they all too often reproduce it. Most revelatory and original are Herold’s parallel explorations of the long-term costs and unsustainability of suburban development. Much attention has been given to how suburban communities hoard resources, but noticeably less to how they accumulate debt. In the postwar period, thousands of suburbs like Penn Hills underwent rapid development, following in the path of Levittown. The federal government provided subsidies to build roads, sidewalks, sewers, and schools, but not the funds needed to repair and replace such infrastructure in the long-term. Residents got used to low taxes and good services, and consistently voted down bonds that would have helped mitigate costs. As debt accumulated and services declined, many white families fled to the exurbs, starting the process over again at the further reaches of the metropolitan periphery. Families of color began to move into the homes they left behind, only to be “left holding the bag” of debt and degraded services.
Herold likens this multigenerational boom-and-bust cycle to “slash-and-burn” and a “ticking time bomb,” but his most useful comparison is to a Ponzi scheme. Ferguson, Missouri, is a prime example. In the 1960s and 1970s, when the town was almost all white, local officials sought out state and federal subsidies and took out large loans to build new infrastructure. Beginning in the 1970s, Ferguson underwent steady racial and economic transition, and it began to take on all the characteristics of suburban poverty. With its tax base depleted and its municipal debt skyrocketing, the town turned to fees and fines accrued from court summons and routine traffic stops to cover its operating revenue. Michael Brown was one victim of this highly extractive system.
Herold follows a number of households in communities at different stages of this boom-and-bust cycle, from a family of undocumented immigrants from Mexico living in Compton, California (a community at the leading edge of this pattern), to a white, Trump-supporting family that moved from Plano, Texas, to a newly constructed 5,500 square-foot home in an exurb known for its racial homogeneity and excellent public schools. Herold’s own hometown sits squarely in the middle: Penn Hills currently faces a daunting combination of racial and economic turnover, infrastructure costs, rising taxes, and spiraling property values. A house in the area no longer serves as an appreciating asset that builds intergenerational wealth, but has instead become a major liability for new residents of color. Herold’s father sold his childhood home in 2014 for $27,000 to someone he met on Craigslist.
Herold depicts this process from the vantage point of a black single mother named Bethany Smith, who purchased a home a few doors down from where Herold grew up after being priced out of the gentrifying neighborhood in Pittsburgh where she was raised. What makes Smith so compelling is that she repeatedly resists the analytic frame of “disillusionment” that Herold tries to place her in, which proves to be its own kind of mythology. “Me personally? I’m thriving,” Smith tells him.
During another of their conversations, Herold tells Smith, “It’s important to see the big-picture patterns.” More than other places, the suburbs clearly and concretely reveal the ways that economic structures and government policies shape the lives of individuals. As Smith tells Herold, however, it is important not to see individual suburbanites, both present and past, as passive victims of these structures and policies, denying them a sense of subjectivity and agency. Smith’s comments also warn against the urge to tell the history of the suburbs as a simple narrative of ascension or decline.
Smith gives a forceful rejoinder to critics who have long treated suburban residents as though they suffer from false consciousness. She is not ignorant of the problems of her community: she is concerned about the rising taxes, the substantial sewage and water bills, and the subpar education her son is receiving. But this doesn’t lead Smith to reject the promise of suburbia and the American Dream, as Herold expects. She and other black residents of places like Penn Hills “want to build good lives for ourselves,” she declares. “We want the same deal that the suburbs gave white families . . . this time, though, we want it to last.” Still, Smith’s call raises the difficult question of whether the suburbs should remain an aspirational ideal, given their damaging economic, social, and environmental consequences. Is the best course forward to follow Smith’s directive and try to create a more sustainable and equitable version of the suburban American Dream, or to encourage a more urban model, focused on residential density and public transportation? Perhaps it is not one or the other.
The suburbs have not yet figured as prominently in the drama of the 2024 election as they did four years ago, despite a few half-hearted attempts by Trump to bring back the “abolish the suburbs” line. But they remain contested political terrain and symbols of the major class realignments changing the parties and nation as a whole. Rather than either celebrating or decrying their homogeneity, we must first recognize their heterogeneity—a step toward developing policies around housing, education, poverty, and criminal justice that can better address the varied lived realities of the people who inhabit these spaces.
The history of the suburbs exposes the role of the federal government, along with market forces, in creating structural inequality. This means the government also has the power to rectify it. Harnessing that power is essential to achieving a more universalist and social democratic agenda, where housing, jobs, child care, public transportation, and quality education are public goods available to all, and use of banned substances is no longer criminalized. Here the disproportionate influence that suburban residents have long wielded must also be directed to more equitable ends.
Such solutions also require creating new forms of suburban politics. This means going beyond the messaging of party strategists and recognizing that the suburbs are neither affluent, white sanctuaries nor multiracial utopias. It means looking to new forms of grassroots organizing already taking shape around issues like police violence, economic justice, and immigrant rights, and cultivating more organizing around things like participatory municipal budgeting, tenants’ rights, and climate change. This more capacious suburban politics is fundamental to addressing the problems of racial segregation and economic inequality that continue to shape all aspects of American life. Perhaps it can also help us finally retire the many myths of suburbia and the American Dream.
Lily Geismer is a professor of history at Claremont McKenna College. She is the author of Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, 2015) and Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality (PublicAffairs, 2022).
