Tag Archives: suburbs

What suburban communities do and do not put into time capsules

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A notable year in the United States means more time capsules have been opened and created. What do suburban communities put in the capsules?

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I spoke with nearly every community in Illinois that is opening or sealing a time capsule this year, and more often than not, what’s inside are, yes, business cards, a list of board members, speeches by mayors, lapel pins, corporate pamphlets, a city budget. For reasons unclear, a number of Bicentennial time capsules contain copies of JCPenney catalogs (probably so future generations can marvel at the price of jeans and socks). Please don’t misunderstand me, I love time capsules just like you love time capsules. There are so many time capsules, there are at least two businesses, Time Capsules Inc. of Pennsylvania, and Heritage Time Capsules of New York, dedicated to creating these small vessels, into which we are tasked with leaving meaningful objects for future generations. I just wish we were a little more … colorful, and meditative, and personal.

Early last month, DuPage County buried a capsule, inviting county leaders to contribute items. “The mayor of Wheaton and I closed the capsule and he reached across (the capsule) and shook my hand, and it meant a lot,” said Deborah Conroy, DuPage County Board Chair. “It was all of us working together, valuing our community.” Glendale Heights left an account of a daring rescue last year by two police officers on a frozen pond. West Chicago, founded in 1849 as a railway hub, left a toy train. Glenn Ellyn left a leaf from a 200-year-old tree. All thoughtful, culturally telling items. Less so: A garbage sticker from Lisle, a Trader Joe’s gift card (with no value) and annual fiscal reports…

We don’t tend to see our everyday lives as history.

I’ve written about the seven reasons Americans love suburbs. How easy is it to capture these reasons in a time capsule? Many of them require activities or people. A single-family home can be captured in a photograph or a book but it is harder to fit the actual space or what it was like to live there into a capsule. Perhaps provide more interactive elements, perhaps recorded ones (and hope the future openers have the media capability to use the recorded medium)? Or how to capture suburban driving and all it entails? Suburban local control is exemplified by lists of officials or official documents but doesn’t quite get at the experience of local control.

The focus on items is an interesting choice – something physical, can be touched and viewed – versus more experiential elements or accounts of regular life. What if a suburban time capsule included people describing their daily lives? Preserving oral histories brings its own complications but then people in the future could have some insight into how people used their time and how they thought about the world around them. Is the goal of the capsule to have some trinkets from the past or to understand people from the past?

Experiential elements could also provide room for different suburbs to highlight what is unique about their community. For those looking back from the future, what differentiates daily life in one suburb versus another? Objects can help tell this story but so could written or oral descriptions of community life. What were the important local spaces for the suburb? What did kids in the community grow up knowing about their suburb in comparison to others?

I may be thinking of this more as a researcher than someone who wants the excitement of burying or opening a capsule. To study and understand suburban life, certain records and objects can help more than others.

Are there more schools closing in cities or do closures get more attention in cities?

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Several factors are leading to school closures in American communities:

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School closures have spiked 35 percent across the country over the past four years, propelled by a shrinking youth population and the end of covid-19 relief funds that had propped up education funding in some places.

For the fourth year in a row, the number of school closures rose nationally last year, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics released last week. Districts closed more than 1,000 schools in 2025-26, compared with 755 in 2021-22. And more closures are planned, including districts in Houston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Broward County in Florida.

Several cities are mentioned as is a county with suburbs in Florida. Without having the full list of the schools closing, it is hard to know whether these are primarily in cities, suburbs, or rural areas. This might line up exactly with where populations are growing and shrinking but it might not. Which people and communities (1) are more likely to push for school closures and (2) are more likely to push back against school closures (and attract the attention of the public and media)? Who has higher success rates countering decisions to close schools?

Suburban schools are only mentioned once in this story with the suggestion that people are moving to suburbs. Many suburbs have reputations for having good schools. Are these places (1) not losing population and (2) if populations are stagnant or declining, not willing to close schools?

If current population patterns continue, there will be more to see here with districts and communities grappling with this issue. Perhaps patterns will become even more pronounced and school closures become a marker of community vitality.

Win a cheaper single-family home via lottery in a Chicago suburb

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Many Americans would benefit from affordable single-family homes. The Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village set up a lottery for ten local residents to get one such unit:

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Inside a room at the Belvedere banquet hall in Elk Grove Village, 10 families got the chance to pick their new single-family home — priced below market rates and for village residents only — in a perhaps first-of-its-kind municipal housing initiative aimed at helping ease the housing affordability crisis…

The village bought the 2.5-acre site — the former Elk Grove Presbyterian Church property — for $965,000 in 2023, and recently sold it to the Mount Prospect-based Nicholas Family of Companies for $1 million. That recoups the village’s costs to purchase the site and tear down the church, officials say.

The deal also allows the homes to be “moderately priced,” officials said, at between $466,000 and $508,000…

Fourteen showed up to the lottery, and 10 of them picked homes on Saturday.

Names were drawn one by one. Each potential buyer had five minutes to pick from the available lots.

Then they signed purchase agreements and related forms and gave the developer a $2,500 cashier’s check. A year from now, they will be the first residents in the Tonne Grove development, where 20 single-family homes will be built on the northwest corner of Tonne Road and Elk Grove Boulevard.

Several quick thoughts in response:

  1. The property became available because of the closing of a church. According to the still-existing Facebook page, the church held its last service in June 2023 and the building was demolished in April 2024. This is one potential fate for closed churches: the land is redeveloped for other purposes.
  2. The lottery method reminds me of a framing of the documentary Waiting For Superman where families are in a lottery to get into desirable schools. In both, the use of a lottery could invite questions: is this a public good that should only be available by lottery?
  3. It is interesting that only 14 people showed up to the lottery. Granted, there were numerous conditions potential homebuyers had to meet. I imagine similar lotteries throughout suburbia could invite many more participants.
  4. Was this a success? Will other suburbs copy this?

The Washington, D.C. exurb that attracts politicians

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American suburbs are supposed to provide a respite from the big city. One small town outside Washington, D.C. provides that for politicians:

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Set in Virginia’s rolling countryside an hour west of Washington, Middleburg has one traffic light and roughly 750 residents, a majority of whom voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. The town is known for horseback riding and hunting, fences made of stacked stone and long winding driveways leading to multimillion-dollar homes…

At any given time, an array of dignitaries — senators, congressional leaders, diplomats — can be spotted window shopping on Washington Street, Middleburg’s main commercial corridor, where decorative lawn jockeys stand sentry outside a few businesses. The well-heeled can also be found at the Salamander Resort, next door to Wolver Hill, where suites go for as much as $1,100 a night.

Over the years, at least four presidents have owned homes or visited the town, including Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan and Obama. The Kennedys built a home in Middleburg in the early 1960s, a 167-acre estate they called Wexford that Jackie Kennedy sold after the president’s death, though shestill visited after leaving the White House to ride horses with her children. Elizabeth Taylor and her husband Sen. John Warner lived in Middleburg until their divorce. Robert Duvall resided on a 360-acre farm in the area for several decades until his death earlier this year. In April, Queen Camilla visited a horse farm in town during King Charles III’s trip to the United States.h

Middleburg is a small town at the edge of Loudon County, once a sparsely populated county. In 1960, Loudon County had 24,549 residents, in 1990 it had 86,129 residents, and in 2020 it had 420,959 residents. In other words, Middleburg might have been “the country” at some point but now is part of a large and growing metropolitan region.

This puts pressure on communities like Middleburg. Can they keep a way of life or local character that has been present for a long time? When developers come with proposals, what is the response of local officials and residents? The suggestion here is that the small town might be threatened by Vice President, of a locally disliked party, rents in the community. As long as he does not bring more development and residents, the small town can probably wait him out.

How much elected suburban leaders make, 2026 North Shore edition

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What is the salary for elected suburban leaders in Chicago’s North Shore suburbs?

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Voters may be surprised to learn that in Evanston, the position to oversee a $400 million-plus municipal government and a city of about 76,000 people comes with an annual salary of a little over $25,000…

“I don’t think anybody expects somebody in Evanston to support a family on this salary, so whether they have other employment or other wealth or, as in my case, right now they have a spouse who works full-time, I think certainly the expectation is there’s some other reason that they’re able to stay afloat.”…

Evanston is not unique in this regard. Municipalities across the North Shore tend to offer modest compensation for mayoral and other top elected offices, begging similar questions about who can afford to serve…

And Hansen said research suggests that low-pay and unpaid municipal positions tend to have less competition and therefore are more conducive to a higher rate of diversity among elected leaders who come from a wider range of backgrounds.

Historically, however, even “poorly paid positions still tend to be primarily held by white-collar professionals for reasons that aren’t directly related to the salary offered by the office,” like professionals being able to more easily raise campaign money or because they have “greater autonomy over their time, both to campaign for office and to serve if they win,” Hansen said.

Local elected officials have important roles in their suburban communities. They help make decisions in communities, they are at events in the community, and they serve as figureheads for the community.

Hinted at but not stated explicitly in the article is that there are local government staff that do a lot of day to day work. They are not typically elected.

You can see some of this dynamic at local meetings. Say there is a new development proposed for the community. Elected officials have roles and government staff have roles.

It would be interesting to put the question to local voters: should local government staff and/or local officials have higher salaries? Present the argument to the voters, including the effects on who might run or how this might affect local services and decision-making.

Suburban reasons for the prevalence and expenses of youth sports

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Here are some thoughts about how the suburbanization of the United States might be related to two concerns I have read/seen/heard multiple times in recent years: (1) most kids sports activity takes place in structured leagues and programs with a big rise in travel sports and (2) participation in these structured sports is expensive. There are lots of explanations for this but few take into account the setting where a majority of Americans live and how this has shaped these patterns. Are the sports opportunities kids get connected to suburban lifestyles?

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  1. Sprawling suburban landscapes can make it hard for kids to get together and just play. On one hand, suburban yards would seem to provide ample opportunities. And there are parks and school grounds scattered across suburbs. But much of suburban life requires driving and until kids have licenses, they need other people to drive them. Put this together with fears for safety in suburbia (see Neighborhood of Fear by historian Kyle Riismandel for how this happened) and kids don’t get together to play sports with each other outside. In how many suburbs today could the baseball team depicted in The Sandlot play regularly and where would those games take place?
  2. Suburbs suggest a certain social class standing and suburban households desire that their kids are successful or get ahead. Instead of playing sports for fun and to develop as a person, sports are a possible pathway to success and fame. Partaking of these sports options provides room to share about kids’ successes. And plenty of suburban households have disposable income to make this happen. Why play around when you can pay for travel sports and lessons and camps and equipment? This reminded me of Richard Reeves’ book Dream Hoarders where the top 20% of American earners look to secure advantages for themselves and their kids.
  3. Local governments and private companies are willing to provide these sports opportunities. They can claim this is what residents and customers want. And there is money to generate or be made from people willing to pay. As the trust Americans have in more traditional institutions have decreased, suburbanites are willing to invest time and money in sports leagues and programs where they might feel they have more control over outcomes. And why not rep a local team or club rather than wade into national polarization?

Another way to put this: could the United States have such a system of youth sports if it was not a suburban country?

Suburban farmers markets as “multi-purpose civic events”

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The farmers markets of the Chicago suburbs could be described this way:

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More and more suburbs are embracing farmers markets in ways that go beyond the sale of produce. They have evolved into multi-purpose civic events — a proving ground for small businesses, a way for communities to advertise their services, a showcase for local musical talent, a source of food for area pantries and a draw for local eateries and shops.

Three thoughts in response:

  1. How much of this is due to the relative lack of civic and public spaces in American suburbs? If people wanted to gather in suburbs, how attractive or available are non-private or non-commercial spaces? These farmers markets provide settings for people to shop, eat, and gather. Such spaces are lacking in the suburbs.
  2. The weather has something to do with this. People want to be out in warmer weather. Fresh produce is available at this time of year. What would be the equivalent of this from November through March? Could there be a cold weather version of this in Chicago suburbs?
  3. Economic development is a consideration here. People spend money at farmers markets. They also may spend more in the surrounding area, turning a farmers market visit into an additional trip to a store or restaurant. For suburbs with downtowns, a centrally located farmers market can add to what local officials often hope is a vibrant and walkable downtown.

There are numerous suburban farmers markets in the Chicago region so it will be interesting to see which thrive and what kinds of civic relationships and initiatives they might lead to.

The different aspects of American suburban living through the eyes of European World Cup fans

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An article about reactions of Europeans to the American suburbs circles around a definition of suburbs or suburban life. Perhaps it is about space or being wealthy:

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“It’s spacious,” he said. “You go here for your shopping, and there for your dentist. People are so rich here. I think that’s why they can be so nice.”

Maybe it is about space and fast food:

In recent days, social media has been filled with videos of Europeans gawking at the staples of suburban American life—a two-car garage, a walk-in closet, a second refrigerator. One Brit went viral for trying Chick-fil-A for the first time: “That was absolutely banging,” he said. In another, he toured the inside of an American fire station, marveling at the size of the trucks and the station itself. “This is nuts, honestly,” he said. 

Or is it about portions at American restaurants?

Variations in portion size have become an established part of any discussion of cultural difference. One 2024 study showed that American portion sizes are 42% larger than those in France. A large McDonald’s drink in the U.S. holds almost twice as much—30 ounces—as a large in France or the U.K.

No, it is about consumerism and big box stores:

Some Dutch fans in Kansas City were impressed—but confused—by the scale of U.S. consumerism. Dutch fan Max Hall and his friend didn’t know why there needed to be two Home Depots within a 10-mile radius. When they entered a Walmart in search of new clothes (they lost their luggage in transit), they wound up spending a whole hour in the store, lost in the aisles. Fellow Dutch fans Mike Tol and Demi Tol struggled to navigate Costco.

I have written about the seven reasons Americans love suburbs and a few show up in this story. American single-family home are big. Driving and a middle-class life are linked to homes, shopping, and eating out.

This article discuses cultural differences between the United States and Europe and uses the suburbs as a a stand-in for American culture more broadly. A majority of Americans live in suburbs and millions of Americans are familiar with the lifestyle described in the article. The stadium in Kansas City is within the big city’s boundaries but is in a more sprawling area.

The descriptions above reference a particular American lifestyle. It may be found in the suburbs. It may also be found in cities and rural areas. It hints at things Americans experience everyday and may not think much about about. (Just as one example, see this post about the wonders of Walmart.)

And as the article notes, it may be one thing to briefly see what daily American life could be and another to think about choices societies have made and consider the tradeoffs. How easy is it for people to around the world to visit another place and then give up their life to move to that new place because they see something they want to experience? Or how many of the fans in the article go home and see their daily life in a new way? Seeing the American suburbs while on a trip for the World Cup may be one thing; how one responds could be a very different thing.

1 day until Every Somewhere Sacred: writing and waiting, learning and doing

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Writing a book does not just involve putting words on a page, or, more accurately, typing letters into computer software. It involves thinking, discussing, doing. I find it hard to write something without first turning it through in my mind over and over as well as living out the ideas and the questions. Here are two examples from the process of creating Every Somewhere Sacred.

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First, I live in the suburbs of the United States. These are unique settings with particular histories. A majority of Americans live there, including many American Christians. (Read Sanctifying Suburbia for more on this.) What does difference, if any, should it make to be Christian and live in the suburbs?

Thinking about this is important. It is easy to live a suburban life, including doing Christian things as part of this life. Doing is also important: Christians are to use their minds and their bodies as they live out their faith.

Second, lots of American communities are home to Christian congregations and organizations. How do these Christian groups shape places and land? Are they primarily focused on their own internal activities or do they contribute to the flourishing of communities and places?

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I ask this as I live and work in a suburb partly known for its religious character. In addition to being home to a known evangelical college, it is home to 40+ churches and many evangelical organizations are in the suburb or nearby. Does this mean the character of the community is different in terms of how people interact (interpersonally and collectively) and how land and creation are treated?

I hope the years spent working with Ben on writing this book also influenced how I act. My question about living in the suburbs or Christians meeting together in certain locations could apply to any place and setting. We address both thinking and doing in Every Somewhere Sacred. We argue we need new tools, metaphors, and lenses to help us recognize what is going on in lands and places and to see what God is doing. We want to act with these lenses, listening to others, open to what we might have missed, and acting in ways that are consistent with God’s mission. If we can see land and place as a gift, sacrament, kin, or home, it can prompt us to better participate in what God is already doing in these settings.

5 days until Every Somewhere Sacred: caring for and learning from a suburban yard

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The yard for my suburban house is 0.26 acres. On all four sides, the house is surrounded by grass, bushes and trees, and wildlife. This is part of the American Dream: a suburban single-family home for a family framed by green grass and attractive landscaping. All that nature in the yard allows space for kids to play in a private setting free from threats. Or perhaps it is about keeping the lawn extra green and finely trimmed and completely free of weeds and leaves so that the nature around the home leads to a higher return on investment.

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What could it look like for Christians to expand their imagination about the nature around them rather than defaulting to American land stories and half-truths? In Every Somewhere Sacred, Ben Norquist and I consider better ways to engage with God’s plans for land and places.

What might that mean for my yard? It is certainly not “wild” land. Humans have been in this area for a long time, including Indigenous people and white settlers starting in the 1830s. This particular plot of land was farmed for decades before a developer started putting up houses in the early 1970s. As they put up houses, they shaped other features of the land, putting in a pond that some of the homes back up to, leaving numerous older trees along the main road through the neighborhood, and situating other homes to back up to a public park.

The land is not there just to serve my financial interests or the specific needs of my household. My yard is connected to other yards and it part of a broader ecosystem. Some animals and plants thrive in suburban settings. Others do not. I regularly see rabbits and have occasionally spotted foxes. Chickadees, robins, cardinals, red-tailed hawks, cormorants, and Canadian geese can be seen and heard. Insects are around. We have a small, simple garden that requires weeding and watering. I do not fertilize my yard or use weed killer. We occasionally trim the bushes and trees.

I want the nature around me to flourish. I am created, nature is created. My yard presents a small opportunity for me to learn from and with Creation about God and the world. We can tend, cultivate, plant, tear up when needed. We can work with nature rather than just extracting value from it.

In our book, we describe four different lenses different Christians have developed to help us better understand the physical world around us: land as gift, sacrament, kin, and home. If I took time with each of these and applied them to my own yard, what could I see differently? As I retrieve a basketball from the rose bushes next to the driveway planted by previous occupants of our home or when I drag the hose to the backyard to water our garden or when I put down mulch in the flower beds or when I hear a woodpecker in a nearby tall tree, how might I better see God and the world?