The Suburbs Have Become a Ponzi Scheme!

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The Suburbs Have Become a Ponzi Scheme

A new book looks at how white families depleted the resources of the suburbs and left more recent Black and Latino residents “holding the bag.”

www.theatlantic.com

The Suburbs Have Become a Ponzi Scheme - The Atlantic
By Alex KotlowitzJanuary 24, 2024, 7 AM ET
The Suburbs Have Become a Ponzi Scheme


A new book looks at how white families depleted the resources of the suburbs and left more recent Black and Latino residents “holding the bag.”

The side of a suburban house
Venice Gordon
Produced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration.

Nearly 25 years ago, I reported on the changing demographics of Cicero, a working-class suburb just west of Chicago. For years, the town, which was made up mostly of Italian and Eastern European American families, worked hard at keeping Black people from settling there. In 1951, when a Black family moved in, a mob entered their apartment, tore it up, and pushed a piano out a window. Police watched and did nothing. The governor had to call out the National Guard. By 2000, the nearby factories, which were the economic foundation of the community, had begun to close. White families moved out and left behind a distressed, struggling town to its new residents—Latinos, who now made up three-quarters of the population. It felt wrong. It felt like the white families got to enjoy the prosperity of the place, and then left it to these newcomers to figure out how to repair aging infrastructure and make up for the lost tax revenues.
After reading Benjamin Herold’s Disillusioned, I now realize I was witnessing something much larger: the steady unraveling of America’s suburbs. Herold, an education journalist, set out to understand why “thousands of families of color had come to suburbia in search of their own American dreams, only to discover they’d been left holding the bag.” In this richly reported book, he follows five families that sought comfort and promise in America’s suburbs over these past couple of decades, outside Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh. In each of these communities, Herold zeroes in on the schools, in large part because education captures the essence of what attracted these families: the prospect of something better for their kids.
The racial and economic fissures in our cities have gotten much attention, but less has been written about how these same fault lines have manifested themselves in the suburbs. This is surprising because the suburbs serve as such a deeply powerful symbol for American aspiration. A house. Good schools. Safe streets. Plentiful services. Consider that from 1950 to 2020, the populations of the nation’s suburbs grew from roughly 37 million to 170 million, which Herold writes represents “one of the most sweeping reorganizations of people, space, and money in the country’s history.”


Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs
By Benjamin Herold

The suburbs have become such a strong emblem for the American dream that in the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump used their decline as a bludgeon against the Democrats to suggest that that dream was withering. “They fought all their lives to be there,” he declared about suburbanites. “And then all of sudden something happened that changed their life.” He posted on Twitter, “If I don’t win, America’s Suburbs will be OVERRUN with Low Income Projects, Anarchists, Agitators Looters, and, of course ‘Friendly Protestors.’” I can’t fully decipher Trump’s rant, but suffice it to say he knew that people feared the fall of America’s great experiment in community, and he played off white families’ fear that their communities would be “overrun” with residents who didn’t look like them. In the granular details of the lives of the five families Herold chronicles, it’s clear that Trump had it only partially right. The suburbs—especially the inner-ring suburbs, those closest to the urban centers—have been in collapse, but the people affected, mostly Black and brown families, are not necessarily the constituency Trump had in mind.

Herold opens his book by visiting his hometown, a Pittsburgh suburb called Penn Hills. In many ways, the story of this particular suburb captures it all. When Herold’s family moved here in 1976, the average home price in 2020 dollars was $148,000. Now it’s $95,000. Herold knocks on a door just down the street from where he grew up, and there meets Bethany Smith, who has recently purchased the house with her mom. She’s single and Black and undaunted, raising a son, Jackson, for whom she wants the absolute best, which means finding a well-resourced, nurturing school and buying a home, an investment that will serve as a foundation to building wealth. (She’s also gotten priced out of her gentrifying neighborhood in Pittsburgh.)

But Bethany has walked into a mess of a town. Signs of wear and tear are everywhere: most notably, a collapsing sewer system and a school district that is $9 million in debt. According to Herold, the town didn’t invest in infrastructure improvements, kicking any needed repairs down the road. Financial mismanagement is everywhere. Enrollment in the schools has steeply declined. White families like Herold’s have moved out; Black families have moved in. It’s a pattern, Herold writes, repeated in suburb after suburb. It’s what I witnessed in Cicero with Latino families. Herold poses the question that drives his reporting: “How are the abundant opportunities my family extracted from Penn Hills a generation earlier linked to the cratering fortunes of the families who live there now?”

We have, Herold suggests, been looking directly at this problem—and either haven’t acknowledged what’s occurring or, worse yet, don’t care. He points to Ferguson, Missouri, an inner-ring suburb just outside St. Louis, where in the summer of 2014 a white police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, a Black teen. In the news coverage that followed, people were shocked to learn that more than 20 percent of the town’s operating revenue came from fees, fines, and court summons collected from the town’s mostly Black residents, a result of aggressive policing. This was because Ferguson had gone the way of so many inner-ring suburbs.

 

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PART 2:


At the peak of its prosperity, in the 1960s and ’70s, the town was 99 percent white, and local leaders borrowed large sums of money and took state and federal subsidies to quickly build its infrastructure. (Herold points out that many of our suburbs were built with endowed money, either government-constructed infrastructure such as expressways or cheap mortgages through federal loan guarantees.) To keep taxes low, Ferguson postponed budgeting for long-term maintenance. By 2013, Herold writes, the town was in steep decline, and that year spent $800,000 to pay down the interest on its debt, leaving just $25,000 for rudimentary services such as sidewalk improvement. Hence the need for revenues from unlikely places, including fees, fines, and court summons. White people had left long ago, leaving the new residents—the town was now two-thirds Black—with the waste and debris of their prosperity. “The illusion that suburbia remains somehow separate from America’s problems,” Herold writes, “is no longer viable.”

Charles Marohn, whom Herold describes as “a moderate white conservative from Minnesota,” is the one to lay out Ferguson’s decline to him. According to Herold, Marohn had a hand in building suburbs, but he has since had an awakening. Marohn suggests that what’s happened in places such as Ferguson and Penn Hills is the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme. It’s “the development version of slash-and-burn agriculture,” he tells the author. “We build a place, we use up the resources, and when the returns start diminishing, we move on, leaving a geographic time bomb in our wake!”

This is a sprawling book, which is its virtue and the source of its occasional misfires. Five families are a lot to keep track of. I found myself at times having to flip back in the book to remember the contours of each family and their respective suburb. I wasn’t convinced that Herold needed all these people to make his point. So many of their stories echoed one another, and at times I simply wanted to hear more about the architects of America’s dream, especially those like Marohn who have apparently become disillusioned with their grand vision. I so wanted to know more about Marohn. Who is he exactly? How did he help build America’s suburbs? I wonder if this isn’t a missed opportunity, given that Marohn is helping Herold make sense of what he’s witnessing.

Despite its imperfections, though, Disillusioned is an astonishingly important work. We know what’s happened and happening in our cities. Finally, here’s someone to take us to the places that early on served as an escape valve, mostly for white families fleeing the changing demographics of urban America, the places where many Americans imagined a kind of social and economic utopia.

At one point Bethany tells the author that she worries he’s pigeonholed her, that she isn’t a victim, that she is more—far more—than just a struggling single Black mom. To his credit, he doesn’t walk away but instead reflects on how he may have failed her. After some consideration, he offers to let her write the epilogue to the book, and in those few sharply written pages we have a clear-eyed take on what has occurred in a place like Penn Hills coupled with a passionate plea for what could be.

“We want to build good lives for ourselves,” Bethany Smith writes. “We want to raise our children in safe environments. We want to have them in schools where they are being taught and governed by folks who have their best interest at heart. We want the same deal that the suburbs gave white families like Ben’s. This time, though, we want it to last.”

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

 

[BigMoneyGrip]

Suburbs is the new hood and the city is the new suburbs

 

[cheek100]

Caucasians deplete everything on earth

 

[OfTheCross]

PART 2:


At the peak of its prosperity, in the 1960s and ’70s, the town was 99 percent white, and local leaders borrowed large sums of money and took state and federal subsidies to quickly build its infrastructure. (Herold points out that many of our suburbs were built with endowed money, either government-constructed infrastructure such as expressways or cheap mortgages through federal loan guarantees.) To keep taxes low, Ferguson postponed budgeting for long-term maintenance. By 2013, Herold writes, the town was in steep decline, and that year spent $800,000 to pay down the interest on its debt, leaving just $25,000 for rudimentary services such as sidewalk improvement. Hence the need for revenues from unlikely places, including fees, fines, and court summons. White people had left long ago, leaving the new residents—the town was now two-thirds Black—with the waste and debris of their prosperity. “The illusion that suburbia remains somehow separate from America’s problems,” Herold writes, “is no longer viable.”

Charles Marohn, whom Herold describes as “a moderate white conservative from Minnesota,” is the one to lay out Ferguson’s decline to him. According to Herold, Marohn had a hand in building suburbs, but he has since had an awakening. Marohn suggests that what’s happened in places such as Ferguson and Penn Hills is the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme. It’s “the development version of slash-and-burn agriculture,” he tells the author. “We build a place, we use up the resources, and when the returns start diminishing, we move on, leaving a geographic time bomb in our wake!”

This is a sprawling book, which is its virtue and the source of its occasional misfires. Five families are a lot to keep track of. I found myself at times having to flip back in the book to remember the contours of each family and their respective suburb. I wasn’t convinced that Herold needed all these people to make his point. So many of their stories echoed one another, and at times I simply wanted to hear more about the architects of America’s dream, especially those like Marohn who have apparently become disillusioned with their grand vision. I so wanted to know more about Marohn. Who is he exactly? How did he help build America’s suburbs? I wonder if this isn’t a missed opportunity, given that Marohn is helping Herold make sense of what he’s witnessing.

Despite its imperfections, though, Disillusioned is an astonishingly important work. We know what’s happened and happening in our cities. Finally, here’s someone to take us to the places that early on served as an escape valve, mostly for white families fleeing the changing demographics of urban America, the places where many Americans imagined a kind of social and economic utopia.

At one point Bethany tells the author that she worries he’s pigeonholed her, that she isn’t a victim, that she is more—far more—than just a struggling single Black mom. To his credit, he doesn’t walk away but instead reflects on how he may have failed her. After some consideration, he offers to let her write the epilogue to the book, and in those few sharply written pages we have a clear-eyed take on what has occurred in a place like Penn Hills coupled with a passionate plea for what could be.

“We want to build good lives for ourselves,” Bethany Smith writes. “We want to raise our children in safe environments. We want to have them in schools where they are being taught and governed by folks who have their best interest at heart. We want the same deal that the suburbs gave white families like Ben’s. This time, though, we want it to last.”

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Good info

 

[Wild self]

Suburbs is the new hood and the city is the new suburbs

Nah, plenty of wealthy CACs still in the burbs. Its the RURAL areas that are deathtraps.

 

[voiture]

Buying an old house is a serious risk.
Lots of things need to be replaced that the sellers are quiet about. Even a good home inspection sometimes doesn't catch it.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

I think a harm of online activism is the "THIS IS ACTUALLY EASY" argument.

I've seen lots of folks indicate that a single billionaire could solve homelessness, or that there are 30x more houses than homeless people so we could just give them all houses.

These words are fantastic for activating people, but they are also lies.

The US government currently spends around 50B per year keeping people housed. States, of course, have their own budgets. If Bill Gates spent the same amount of money the US does just to keep people housed, he would be out of money in 3 years. I think that would be a great use of his money, but it would not be a permanent solution.

The statistics about there being more houses than homeless are just...fake. They rely on looking at extremely low estimates of homelessness (which are never used in any other context) and include normal vacancy rates (an apartment is counted as vacant even if it's only vacant for a month while the landlord is finding a new tenant.) In a country with 150,000,000 housing units, a 2% vacancy rate is three million units, which, yes, is greater than the homeless population. But a 2% vacancy rate is extremely low (and bad, because it means there's fewer available units than there are people looking to move, which drives the price of rent higher.)

Housing should not be an option in this country. It should be something we spend tons of money on. It should be a priority for every leader and every citizen. it should also be interfaced with in real, complex ways. And it should be remembered that the main way we solve the problem is BUILDING MORE HOUSING, which I find a whole lot of my peers in seemingly progressive spaces ARE ACTUALLY OPPOSED TO.

Sometimes they are opposed to it because they've heard stats that the problem is simple and could be solved very easily if only we would just decide to solve it, which is DOING REAL DAMAGE.

By telling the simplest version of the story, you can get people riled up, but what do you do with that once they're riled up if they were riled up by lies?

There are only two paths:

1. Tell them the truth...that everything they've been told is actually a lie and that the problem is actually hard. And, because the problem is both big and hard, tons of people are working very hard on it, and they should be grateful for (or even become) one of those people.

2. Keep lying until they are convinced that the problem does not exist because it is hard, it exists because people are evil.

Or, I guess, #3, people could just be angry and sad all the time, which is also not great for affecting real change.

I dunno...I'm aware that people aren't doing this because they want to create a problem, and often they believe the fake stats they are quoting, but I do not think it is doing more good than harm, and I would like to see folks doing less of it.

One thing that definitely does more good than harm is actually connecting to the complexity of an issue that is important to you. Do that...and see that there are many people working hard.

We do not have any big, easy problems. If we did, they'd be solved. I'm sorry, it's a bummer, but here we are.

 

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Why are America’s suburbs failing?

In ‘Disillusioned’, Benjamin Herold follows five families coping with the wreckage created by outer city development

www.ft.com

Why are America’s suburbs failing?
In ‘Disillusioned’, Benjamin Herold follows five families coping with the wreckage created by outer city development

Houses on a street
A residential housing development in north-west Atlanta, Georgia, 2018 © Chris Rank/Bloomberg News
The US is fundamentally a country of suburbs. More than 55 per cent of Americans live in the communities that surround the nation’s major cities in ever-widening concentric rings.

Starting in the 1940s with Long Island’s Levittown, new developments offered GIs returning from the second world war and their families the promise of a fresh start with thousands of cookie-cutter homes and state-of-the-art parks, recreation centres and above all schools — all at affordable prices. While some larger cities built rail networks, most relied on the burgeoning highway system to open up new land for development and get people to and from work.

The rituals of American suburban life, from country club tennis tournaments to carpools and high school proms, went on to permeate global culture for decades through movies and television shows from Sixteen Candles to Desperate Housewives. And US presidential elections have often been won or lost in the suburbs, as independent voters once stereotyped as “soccer moms” shifted between the Republican and Democratic parties depending on the issues of the day. This year’s likely rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is no different: the winner’s path to the White House lies through swing state suburbs outside Pittsburgh and Atlanta, rather than the already deeply blue cities of New York or the bright-red rural counties in Iowa.

But all is not well with this slice of Americana, as Benjamin Herold reports in a deeply researched new book, Disillusioned. He argues that decades of short-sighted planning decisions, which produced “slash and burn” development, have left many communities struggling to fulfil their promise, even as a wider range of Americans moved in.

“In every corner of the country, the ensuing disillusionment was forcing families to reckon with an unsettling new question: what if the American dreams suburbia was built on weren’t enough to lead us out of the enormous problems that nearly a century of mass suburbanisation had created,” writes Herold.

Outside dozens of US cities, a pattern set in the late 1940s has repeated itself, with devastating results: newly built infrastructure and government levies on new construction helped many suburban communities offer residents both a panoply of services and low taxes. But by the time the bills for maintaining and updating this infrastructure came due, the original beneficiaries had raised their children and moved on. Most communities had also largely run out of open land for new development, providing a double hit to tax returns.

The politically popular decisions to rely on developer levies rather then setting higher education taxes, and to invest more in highways to far-flung new suburbs than in mass transit in older ones, “encouraged us to cycle through a series of disposable communities with shelf lives just long enough to extract a little more opportunity before we moved out [and] stuck someone else with the bill,” Herold writes.

Disillusioned follows five very different families as they cope with the wreckage created by this outward spiral of development. Each one chases the American dream to new communities, but the parents then find themselves having to fight to get their children the opportunities and support they were seeking.

Because this is America, there is also a toxic racial angle to this tale. Discriminatory covenants and biased lending practices initially kept many suburbs exclusively white, so the benefits of new construction went to them. Herold describes how black and brown families — he interviews the Adesinas outside Chicago and the Smiths outside Pittsburgh — were then empowered to move in by the civil rights movement and rising incomes. But many whites, like the Becker family outside Dallas, are moving out to the next ring of suburbs in search of newer homes.

These days all American racial groups are more likely to live in the suburbs than in city centres, and 45 per cent of suburbanites are nonwhite, a larger proportion than the 41 per cent share in the country as a whole.

Herold’s stories zigzag across the country. He visits older “inner ring” communities near Pittsburgh and Los Angeles now saddled with a shrinking tax base. In Evanston, a Chicago suburb, he explores a liberal, largely middle-class community as it seeks to defy the odds and create a truly integrated schools system.

The author delves into challenges facing farther flung suburbs outside Atlanta and Dallas, which have been siphoning off those who can afford to dream of new homes — yet whose inhabitants fear the growing numbers of less affluent black and brown families replacing white retirees in older communities. More than 15mn American suburbanites now live below the poverty line, a larger number than in all its big cities combined.

The book’s structure is in some ways reminiscent of Common Ground, J Anthony Lukas’ groundbreaking tale of the Boston busing crisis of the 1970s. Individual stories are woven together with demographic and historical research to build a compelling portrait of just what is going wrong. The rapid switches from place to place can be disorienting, but the individual struggles Herold describes help bring to life what could otherwise be bloodless discussions of planning and education policy.

Each family is taken on its own terms without judgment, although Herold clearly recognises that the burdens are not being spread evenly. He describes the aspirations and fears that prompt the white, Trump-supporting Becker family to flee their diversifying Dallas neighbourhood for a snazzy new school district that is deliberately zoned to prevent the construction of apartments. Meanwhile, outside Atlanta, the black Robinson family also moves further out in search of better schools, only to find themselves battling the education system over racial stereotyping and harsh discipline of non-white children.

Herold’s personal anguish about the troubles he spotlights gives the book extra power. He grew up and thrived in an inner-ring Pittsburgh neighbourhood, but his peers have moved on, leaving black newcomers like the Smith family to shoulder the gigantic bills coming due for decades of delayed maintenance to schools and the water system.

He does find some room for hope in Compton, a Los Angeles suburb that was home to a young George HW Bush in the 1940s but became an impoverished ghetto. A feature in rap songs as a signifier of both black pride and rage at persistent racism and the site of notorious riots in the 1990s, by the time Herold visits, Compton’s black families are starting to move out and it is increasingly home to first-generation immigrants seeking new lives, like the Hernandez family. As the community tries to rebuild, Herold finds much to admire in its dedicated educators and innovative efforts to boost test scores. “It’s kind of like when you have a burnt forest and you start to see the flowers poke through,” he quotes one teacher saying.

The book’s final section traces the ravages of Covid, which end up crystallising many of suburbia’s issues for the families who suffered through it. In Compton, the Hernandez family become so disheartened that we leave them considering a return to Mexico. The Dallas-based Becker family pull their children out of public schools in favour of Christian home-schooling, and the families outside Chicago and Atlanta also share their disappointment with Herold. “The illusion that suburbia remains somehow separate from America’s problems is no longer viable,” he writes.

Disillusioned also benefits from an unusual epilogue that helps it rise above a standard journalistic tale. One of the parents Herold followed, Bethany Smith, a black mother from his old Pittsburgh neighbourhood, grew uncomfortable with letting a white man tell her story and bend it to his narrative arc of how the suburbs failed.

After she confronted him about this, he agreed to give her the last word by writing a chapter of her own. In it, she refuses to give up on the dreams that continue to drive millions of Americans to the suburbs, while remaining clear-eyed about the challenges ahead: “We want to build good lives for ourselves . . . to raise our children in safe environments . . . the same deal that the suburbs gave white families like Ben’s,” she writes. “This time, though, we want it to last.”

Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs by Benjamin Herold, Penguin Press $32.00, 496 pages

Brooke Masters is the FT’s US Financial Editor. She spent the first part of her career reporting on the suburbs outside Washington

 

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