American Suburbs Are Decaying
Working-class people of color have mostly been latecomers to suburbia. But by the time they get there, they often find the suburbs in a state of disrepair. A new book explores the boom-and-bust economic cycle that's obscured by the gauzy suburban dream.
Latino students walk to school in Compton, California, on February 10, 2023. (The Washington Post via Getty Images)
For the better part of a century, American internal migration patterns have been massively influenced by the suburban promise of great amenities, low taxes, privacy, safety, and a fresh start. But as long-time education reporter Benjamin Herold argues in his new book, Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs, that dream has always been elusive, not least because the suburbs themselves have a baked-in economic life cycle. Through a portrait of five families in pursuit of the suburban idyll, Herold reveals how suburbs are born to fail.
Disillusioned is just as much about schools and race as it is about housing as a Ponzi scheme, but when it comes to daily life, these can’t be neatly separated. All five families Herold profiles move to the suburbs to get their children into better schools. But schools’ performance and resources too often mirror their racial makeup, good intentions or not. Part of the suburban story is that opportunity is usually drained by the time latecomers, often people of color from working-class backgrounds, move in.
The suburban cycle, as Herold documents it, goes something like this: suburbs are built on massive subsidies like guaranteed mortgages, federal infrastructure like commuter highways, and defense contracts for employment. New tax revenues flow to high-quality services. Budgets are boosted by plentiful credit, taken against future taxes so long as the suburb continues to expand. This lasts for decades, but there’s a tension between exclusivity and expansion. When infrastructure ages and the bills come due, services are pinched and wealthy people move to start the cycle over somewhere new. Problems are staved off for a time through ignorance and more debt, but sooner or later taxes must go up as quality of life goes down.
Consequently, Johnny-come-lately suburban dream seekers often reach the promised land long after its promise has faded, unbeknownst to them. We’re seeing it all across the United States: after decades or even generations of aspiration and exclusion, people of color from working-class backgrounds are finally getting a bite of the suburban apple — only to discover that the juice has been sucked from the fruit.
Lucas, Texas
If the suburbs are depreciating in value, where are the rich people going? Disillusioned gives some insight into this question via the Beckers, a conservative, white family that leaves a diversifying outer-ring Dallas suburb for Lucas, Texas, and the Lovejoy public school system in 2019. The Beckers are wooed to Lucas by a school district–appointed real estate agent, and spend $850,000 on a home, vacating one suburb for another.
Planned for exclusivity, the Lovejoy district’s previously agricultural towns are zoned residential-only. Homes must be built on at least one acre and require septic systems (individually costly, but no cost to the municipalities). As a result, not a single Lovejoy student lives in an apartment.
This plan began after a 2003 Lovejoy district consolidation when the district hired a demographic firm to project future growth, income, and education levels. High standards have a high cost, and combined with super-low tax rates, the district was rapidly building up debt. Local leaders knew that zoning apartment buildings could balance their budget, but they opted instead to push costs into the future, seeking to keep up appearances of exclusivity to retain wealthy residents. They had reason to fear; as one parent said, “If Lovejoy tanked tomorrow, don’t think for a second I wouldn’t move somewhere else.” The arrangement has no doubt set Lovejoy up to fail in the future, but for now it’s a place where the wealthy can skim the cream of the suburban cycle.
It’s a wonder the Beckers, candid about their desire to be insulated from the apartment-dwelling masses, let Herold depict them at all. He tells their story through their own words without much judgment, but the book’s other four stories make the Beckers appear deeply unsympathetic.
Penn Hills, Pennsylvania
The book’s stand-out story centers on Bethany Smith and her family. Smith moved from Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood, rapidly gentrified by Google, to Penn Hills, a modest inner-ring suburb seven miles away. After a time renting, she bought a house on the very same block where the book’s author was raised. Herold met Smith by knocking on the doors of recently purchased homes.
If Lucas, Texas, is a snapshot of a suburb’s rise, Penn Hills is a snapshot of its fall. It even has the distinction of being, according to Herold, “the first municipality in the country convicted of a federal environmental crime.”
Built after World War II, Penn Hills’ population quadrupled in three decades. Municipal planners established a centralized school district but otherwise relied on existing patched-together infrastructure — which quickly became inadequate. Problems cropped up across the town, but the worst cases of neglect were in the historically black section, Lincoln Park. Penn Hills quickly abandoned the sewage treatment plant there, and in 1953, voted down a plan to rebuild the entire municipal sewer system.
When a ravine in Lincoln Park was rezoned as a dump, it smashed the pipes carrying the untreated sewage to the river. Waste pooled and stagnated there. The black community mobilized for (at the very least) a trench that would drain the sewage. After the 1972 Clean Water Act, Herold reports, Penn Hills racked up a stunning thirteen thousand violations. Forced into a consent decree, Penn Hills rebuilt the sewer system in the 1980s — costing six times more than if they’d done it in 1953 (accounting for inflation).
This story reveals the contradiction at the heart of the suburban dream: great amenities, low taxes, and freedom from responsibility. As cracks grew in Penn Hills’ facade, wealthy people moved to more upscale suburbs. Housing prices and tax revenue fell, making it affordable for the next wave of suburbanites, who were left to pay the debt via rising taxes and fees for inadequate services. (The same process unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri, where police killed Michael Brown in 2014 on the impoverished streets in a derelict suburb that was once 99 percent white, launching the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests. Ferguson made 20 percent of its annual budget through petty fines and fees targeting its black residents. This system, which imprisoned many who couldn’t pay, underlay the uprising that followed Brown’s killing.)
Herold diligently shadowed Smith and the other families profiled in Disillusioned for three years. He spent ample time in their homes, catching up by phone, even observing their children’s classrooms. He watched, listened, and documented as COVID lockdowns scrambled their lives (none more than the Texan Beckers, who latched onto conspiracy theories and pulled their children from Lovejoy in favor of a private strip-mall school that doesn’t teach evolution).
At some point in Herold’s research, Smith had enough. She was singing Whitney Houston in her kitchen, enjoying her life, when Herold’s “doom-and-gloom” phone call ruined her day. “You’re coming to me with statistics,” she told him, “this person said this, that, and the third about Penn Hills. But me personally? I’m thriving.” Raised in a tight-knit black community inside Pittsburgh, she views buying her home in Penn Hills as a major accomplishment (even if her three-month water bill is $500).
Smith’s sharper issue with the author, though, is that “there has been a long history of people telling black people’s stories and profiting off of it. That right there is what I’m having an issue with.” In response, Herold gave her the final word. Smith authored the book’s epilogue, elaborating in her own words what she wants from suburbia. She believes in the book, but also asserts that it’s dangerous to view herself as a victim rather than a victor, declining to “look at myself through the eyes of society instead of through my own eyes.”
Compton, California
Long before NWA scandalized the nation with gangster rap, Compton was a different place entirely. In 1950, it was briefly home to none other than George H. W. Bush and his son, George W. Bush. Following fierce anti-segregation battles and the 1965 Watts riot (which did not take place in Compton), whites fled the city-suburb and quality of life deteriorated. During the 1992 Rodney King Riots, President George H. W. Bush called the National Guard to Compton. He gave no indication that he had any ties to the place.
But Compton has since experienced something of a suburban rebirth. In Disillusioned, today’s Compton is seen through the eyes of the undocumented Hernandez family, who barely scrape by to send their bright children to the now-blossoming school district. Compton Unified ranked worst among California schools for decades, but things have turned around. The dominant narrative is all tech: tracking students with data analytics, partnerships with Apple, and teaching robotics and engineering in elementary school. In truth, the district’s improvement owes more to California’s switch to progressive school funding. Per-pupil spending in Compton has gone up 50 percent, and the district hired many more English as a Second Language teachers, causing a jump in test scores and graduation rates.
If Herold’s theory about the economic life cycle of suburbs holds water, this isn’t the end of the story. Compton could bounce back, only to be driven to its knees again. Disillusioned gets right into the action, profiling a district forced to make tough choices between services for advanced students or students who require learning support — to choose, that is, between inclusivity and exclusivity, the dialectic encoded in the suburbs’ DNA.
The two other profiles in the book are equally personal and complex. A black family moves from an outer-ring Atlanta suburb to a further-still, predominantly white district, where they struggle with disproportionate and messy discipline against their son. Outside Chicago, a mixed-race family enters a district intent on mending its racist history. Real concerns morph into a rigid embrace of Ibram X Kendi–style anti-racism, which also draws an intense backlash.
What Is to Be Done?
More than half of all Americans live in suburbs, and yet they invite little inquiry. Disillusioned admirably aims to fill in the gaps, exploring with journalistic diligence and depth the mechanisms that suburbs use to reproduce wealth, individualism, and American identity.
The book’s primary shortcoming is that it lacks a call to action or indeed any indication of a path forward. The problem with this, as labor organizers know, is that presenting blunt facts about society’s flaws without plans for change can be demoralizing. Agitation around social problems can be the spark that ignites action, but agitation without proposed action can easily depress and deactivate people. In other words, Herold gives us an illuminating portrait of suburban America in cyclical decline, but this bleak knowledge is not enough. We need ideas for how to get out of the mess we’re in.
There is, however, one hint of a solution in the book. Smith, the woman who took issue with Herold’s framing of herself as a victim, is not content to simply enjoy the spoils of suburban life while they last. Instead, Herold follows Smith as she joins an activist group focused on addressing the state of education in Penn Hills and the plethora of scandals playing out there. If there’s any hope for the suburbs, it’s in following Smith’s example. Ordinary people must join together and fight for an alternative to the economic forces otherwise determining our destinies.