These approaches are found across American suburbs. Start with zoning for larger residential lots which has several effects. It keeps houses further apart. It maintains a more rural image. It avoids having dense housing. It raises the price of homes as each lot is bigger and costs more and the houses can be bigger since there is more space to build.
Next, take apartments and why a good number of suburbanites do not like them. They are denser housing. Suburbanites prefer homeowners, who they think have more commitment to the community and to the property in which they live. They are cheaper and this may drive property values down.
Put these two together and suburbs can keep housing values up and limit who can live in a community. This is not an accident; suburbs often have particular residents in mind when they think about development and the future of their community.
In the postwar era, Will Herberg described American religion as primarily involving Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. The same was assumed to be true in the suburbs. With suburban populations growing, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews moved in and added to existing congregations and founded many new ones.
These groups also had to adjust to suburban life. Practicing faith in the suburban context looked different than in urban neighborhoods or rural areas. Critics within these traditions suggested the suburban version of their faith had serious deficiencies. Supporters of the suburban faith highlighted new possibilities and energy.
With changes to the population in the United States, including changes prompted by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the suburban religious landscape changed. Today, there are still plenty of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish congregations in the suburbs but they are located near the congregations of Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Orthodox, Sikh, and other religious traditions. Increasing racial, ethnic, and class diversity in the suburbs goes alongside religious change. The complex suburbia of today includes a complex religious landscape.
Add to that the growing number of residents of the United States who do not identify with a religious tradition or faith. The suburban landscape may include religious activity throughout the week but it also is full of residents with no religious affiliation or other understandings of religion and spirituality.
This is easy to see in many suburban areas. Pick a populous county outside a major city – whether Washington, D.C. or New York City or Chicago or Los Angeles – and you can find religious and non-religious activity all over the place. The suburban landscape may be dominated by single-family homes and roads but there are plenty of congregations in a variety of traditions. It is visible when driving down major roads. You can see it in county-level counts of religious congregations.
This means any quick description of suburban religion is hard to do given the number of practices, beliefs, and belonging present in American communities. One way to see this diverse religious landscape is in the religious buildings of the suburbs – this is the subject of the next post.
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…
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!”
I have not read the book. As someone who studies suburbs, here are the first four thoughts that come to mind:
Inner-ring suburbs are a unique type of suburb. Right next to a big city, they often look similar to urban neighborhoods (denser buildings), have similar demographics to cities (more residents of color), and can face similar issues as cities. They are suburban but day to day life may not look like that of sprawling subdivisions of recently-constructed single-family homes. That white residents have left these suburbs and these communities may struggle for resources is true. I recommend Bernadette Hanlon’s book Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States.
Suburbs as a whole and as individual communities experience different waves of development. Inner-ring suburbs were some of the first suburbs in the United States (and some were annexed into the big city). The issues described in this review also face other suburbs who may have had a particular character for decades. Communities change as both external forces and internal forces are applied to the suburb.
An investment firm know for buying up newspaper publishers then gutting them is behind the recent shuttering of dozens of Greyhound bus stations across the country, a new report has revealed.
Twenty Lake Holdings LLC, a subsidiary of Alden Global Capital, purchased 33 Greyhound stations across the U.S. from transport company FirstGroup in 2021, reported Axios…
Since the change of ownership two years ago, Greyhound has closed scores of its central bus stations around the country, either by cutting services completely, or moving to far out sites as a cost-saving measure to sell off the depots to real estate developers…
But as demand fell – with passengers numbers dropping by a third from 1960 to 1990 and then halving again between 1980 and 2006 – and running costs increased, they became less economically viable to run.
Given the American emphasis on driving, buses offer opportunities to move a lot of people along existing road networks. This limits the needs for fixed railroad tracks and buses can make more stops.
Like most transit hubs, buses and bus stations are shared spaces where members of different neighborhoods or social classes mix—which has made them important symbolic battlegrounds in civil rights history.
Black Americans, escaping the Jim Crow South for better opportunities in the north and west, used Greyhound buses during the Great Migration. The Freedom Riders used Greyhound buses to protest segregation and to test new protections on interstate passenger travel. In 1961, a mob beat and firebombed the Riders’ bus in Anniston, Alabama, attempting to trap the passengers, who escaped through the windows and door; the Riders had to be evacuated from Anniston through a convoy…
The accessibility of bus services and the mutability of their routes have historically made it an effective method for cities to move systemic problems elsewhere. Prior to the 1996 Olympics, for example, Atlanta leaders aimed to make the city more hospitable to the world by reducing its hospitality to people experiencing homelessness. The city bought thousands of one-way bus tickets to other locales to remove homeless populations from sight.
With more emphasis in the United States on driving individual vehicles – and this is a marker of self-sufficiency and freedom – buses can get short shrift. For those who cannot afford cars and other travel options, buses can offer opportunities – if they are available.
Also known as covenants, they’d existed for decades, typically as an agreement between a developer and buyer on a single lot, proving unpopular to Americans who didn’t want to be controlled on their own property. But Nichols sensed he could foster long-term stability, which would be profitable for him and for homeowners. He initiated restrictions on entire neighborhoods, placing them on the land before any lots were sold—a private zoning system before municipal zoning was widespread. He’s credited as the first developer to emphasize the covenants for middle-class areas and to make them self-renew after periods of 25 to 40 years unless a majority of residents objected, ensuring they’d essentially last forever. For enforcement, he set up homeowners associations.
Nichols’ restrictions started with a few sentences on neighborhood plat documents and eventually ran for a few pages. They set minimum prices for home construction, mandated single-family housing and banned apartments, required a specified amount of space on the fronts and sides of homes, and regulated routine housing elements like chimneys, trellises, windows, vestibules, and porches.
There were also racial restrictions that barred Black residents from owning or renting homes. An early billboard for Nichols’ Country Club District development described the area as “1,000 Acres Restricted.” Newspaper ads claimed that Nichols’ neighborhoods blocked “all undesirable encroachments” and promised that “complete uniformity is here assured.”…
Nobody had seen a swath of suburbia as vast his neighborhoods, which comprised the Country Club District: By the 1940s there were more than a dozen contiguous upper-class and middle-class subdivisions filled with bubbling fountains, tree-lined vistas, and cul-de-sacs, providing homes for as many as 50,000 people across two states. Many subdivisions were buffered by parks and golf courses, and they were all tied together with restrictive covenants. It was the “American’s domestic ideal,” opined a visitor from the New Republic.
Nichols wasn’t the only builder applying covenants. Their use accelerated after 1910, imposing segregation and strict land-development rules across the country. But he was their most prominent proselytizer, promoting their spread through speeches and articles and in leadership roles with national real estate organizations. Nichols’ covenants in Sunset Hill and Mission Hills, two of his poshest neighborhoods, were said by his company to have been copied in more than 50 cities.
Developers, officials, residents, and others developed and put into practice a number of measures to keep people out of white suburban subdivisions. Today, these measures tend to be more economic and zoning-based with fewer explicit references to race and ethnicity. But, as noted above, the outcomes are clear: the suburbs were segregated by race and ethnicity.
Illinois is on its way to becoming the first state to recognize Arab Americans when collecting public data.
This month, H.B. 3768 passed both houses of the General Assembly and is on its way to Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s desk. When signed into law, Arab Americans and minority groups from the Middle East will be recognized separately in state data.
Pritzker tweeted his support upon the bill’s passage in the House on May 18: “History made! With HB 3768 passage, our MENA or Middle Eastern and North African communities will now have their own category on state forms and surveys.”…
Illinois has one of the largest populations of Arab Americans in the nation. But on most registration forms, Arab American is not an option when selecting ethnicity, something groups such as Arab American Family Services, advocates and community leaders have sought to change for years.
It will be interesting to see if this helps move along the conversation at the national level where the MENA category was not added to the recent Census. I assume if enough states did this, it would then be easier to add it at the federal level to make sure there is data from all parts of the country.
On Monday, March 27, I contributed to a conversation on “The 21st Show” titled “Illinois’ history with slavery and its links to the present.” You can listen here and I first talk at the 39:55 mark.
Some of the conversation is based on a co-authored research article in progress with Caroline Kisiel of DePaul University. We discuss the working out and legacy of race and property over 300 years of Illinois history. My previous work in looking at the development of several suburbs in western DuPage County – earlier work published here, here, and here – adds to the latter portion of this history as race and ethnicity influenced decisions about development, zoning, and who was welcome in different communities.
Racial discrimination is abhorrent and should be prosecuted. But as a Brookings Institution analysis of the 2020 census shows, race isn’t a barrier to suburban living. Blacks are moving to the suburbs at a faster pace than whites. Anybody can be suburban. It just takes money — especially in Connecticut. In 2017, developer Arnold Karp purchased a colonial house on tree-lined Weed St. in small, ultra-wealthy New Canaan. There are no commercial or multifamily buildings on the street. He now wants to build a five-story, 102-unit apartment complex with 30% set aside for affordable housing.
This analysis of suburban and primary city portions of the nation’s major metropolitan areas shows that these big suburbs are more racially diverse than the country as a whole. Moreover, in contrast to how white flight fueled growth there in the past, most big suburbs have shown declines in their white populations over the 2010-20 decade. Their greatest growth came from Latino or Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, persons identifying as two or more races, as well as Black Americans—continuing the “Black flight” to the suburbs that was already evident the 2000-10 decade.
Today, a majority of major metro area residents in each race and ethnic group now lives in the suburbs. And for the first time, a majority of youth (under age 18) in these combined suburban areas is comprised of people of color.
But, as a sociologist of suburbs, here is what is missing from the critics’ analysis: people of different racial and ethnic groups are not evenly distributed across suburbs and not all racial and ethnic groups have the same wealth, income, and resources to obtain suburban homeownership.
In other words, because social race and race and ethnicity in the United States are connected, it is not just about money in reaching the suburbs.
What is really at stake? From the critic:
Local control will be obliterated. Albany will call the shots on what your town looks like, how much traffic there is and ultimately what your home is worth…
Ensuring a supply of affordable housing within a region is more reasonable than demanding every town alter its character.
Suburbanites like local control and local government. These arrangements allow leaders and residents means by which to decide who can live in their community. This is often done through housing values and prices; ensure the land and homes or rental units expensive enough and the community can be exclusive.
Additionally, one of the problems of affordable housing – and other land uses less desired by suburban homeowners (including drug treatment centers and waste transfer facilities) – is that few suburban communities want it. Communities with means and political voices will keep affordable housing out. This means affordable housing is not plentiful often and is often clustered in particular locations. One reason states are pursuing this at a metropolitan level is that there is not enough affordable housing in the current system that prioritizes local decision making over what is good for the region.
Suburban residents may not like the idea of affordable housing arriving in their community. However, the legacy of housing in the United States is often one of exclusion and restriction, not about communities and residents coming together to provide housing for all.
Scholars who study ethnoburbs note the importance of Monterey Park, California. Here is one reason why:
Monterey Park, about seven miles east of downtown Los Angeles, has a population of about 60,000 people, about 65 percent of whom are Asian American and 27 percent are Hispanic or Latino, according to government data. In the 1990s, it claimed to have become the first city in the continental United States to have a majority of residents with Asian ancestry.
Legally Sociable 