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 distinct...