This is a long list and it is hard to quickly think of something that should be on the list that is not.
But is this how people select a house or a community? Do they look at all of these factors? Do some of these play a more outsized role than others? Imagine a realtor having a list like this with potential buyers and going through each factor. If you put people in a more controlled setting and asked them to decide between potential suburban places to live, is this how they would decide?
I suspect making a decision is less rational than this full list suggests and is more about having a feeling about a particular house, neighborhood, and/or community. They hear from people or they enjoy driving through the community or what they see in a particular residence appeals to them. Of course, different buyers or potential residents might emphasize different factors and still arrive at the same outcome.
There are plenty of colleges and universities in the United States named after communities. And many schools are in suburbs outside of cities. But, I had a hard time coming up with colleges with “suburb” or a form of that word in them. Here is the only one listed on a site containing over 6,500 colleges and universities:
-South Suburban College in South Holland, Illinois.
A good number of schools were founded before the mass suburbia of the twentieth century but many have started since then. Is “suburb” or “suburban” too generic? Does it not provide the level of prestige or status a school seeks? It is hard to drum up for support for a school linked to a sector of a metropolitan region or identified with suburban life?
The titanic Biden-Trump election likely will be decided by roughly 6% of voters in just six states, top strategists in both parties tell us.
Each side will spend billions to reach those voters over the next six months…
In which states?
Zoom in: Both campaigns are obsessed with six states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
And which voters within these six states?
We perked up our ears when we heard a Biden insider use the “6% of six states” formulation as a proxy for how narrow a group of voters are considered truly in play — swing voters in swing states.
Republicans are making a similar calculation. A Trump insider told us that persuadable voters are below 10% in every battleground: “I think it’s probably 6% in Wisconsin but 8% in Michigan, and lower in Arizona.”
Given the way recent elections have gone regarding the importance of suburban voters, would a big proportion of those 6% live in suburbs? If so, these suburban voters can expect many appeals to come their direction from a variety of methods. Targeted ads online, TV and radio ads, mailers, campaign events, local gatherings, and door to door appeals. Lots of conversation about these voters and what they are thinking. Many media stories about them.
Does the average suburban voter in this 6% like that their vote matters or tire of lots of political attention?
Schaumburg officials hope a tax increment financing (TIF) district can provide the public resources needed to attract new investment in the village’s nearly 60-year-old, 573-acre Centex industrial park…
Neighboring Elk Grove Village’s 6-square-mile industrial park — the largest in the nation — wouldn’t be as successful without the kind of public-private partnership Schaumburg officials have in mind for Centex, Elk Grove Mayor Craig Johnson said.
Through a combination of location, modern infrastructure and a supportive local government, demand for some areas of the park has driven land prices there to $2 million an acre, Johnson added…
While Elk Grove’s industrial park includes the additional electricity capacity for such uses as data centers, Schaumburg is aiming to simply create a better environment for the type of manufacturing businesses that use the Centex industrial park today. But even those businesses have different needs than they did decades ago, Johnson said, such as higher ceilings and larger loading docks…
Johnson also noted that TIF funding allowed his village to acquire properties within its industrial park, package them into larger parcels and then sell them to businesses in need of more space.
Two thoughts come to mind:
Many parts of the suburbs are no longer new. A sixty year old industrial park was created in the postwar era. The properties and the land use overall may not fit with what is in demand in 2024. At what point is it cheaper or easier to build new somewhere else? (I am thinking of what can happen with big box stores.)
This exemplifies the kind of public-private partnership that is fairly common with development in the United States even as a lot of rhetoric suggests the U.S. takes a free market approach. There may be business competition but in the examples above, local governments are helping to create conditions or acting as middle men to get to the development they would prefer to see.
Another angle to this: what might suburbs do in the next few decades to set up industrial, commercial, and residential development for the next 50 years? At that point, even postwar suburbia will be roughly a century old.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking Good Times sitcom on CBS, which ran until 1979. Mike Evans, who played Lionel Jeffferson in The Jeffersons, and Chicago native Eric Monte created the television show, which the legendary Norman Lear developed.
The opening credits showed an aerial view of the red towers with Chicago’s skyline in the background as its iconic gospel-tinged theme song played. Good Times was an honest depiction of a loving Black family trapped in poverty. The show never shied away from racism — whether taking on crooked Chicago politicians, critiquing the lack of jobs in African American communities or being unapologetic about racial pride. And the youngest son, endearingly dubbed the “militant midget,” aspired to be on the U.S. Supreme Court.
White American sitcoms often depicted a sanitized version of real life, a la Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. By contrast, Good Times did not…
While the show has been lauded, it also has taken in criticism over the way the family was depicted in a never-ending cycle of keeping their heads above water. Walker’s character, J.J., became the breakout character, but some saw his portrayal as playing to a negative stereotype with his signature “dynomite” line. Amos has said he was fired from the show because he spoke out against some of the stereotypical elements of the show.
Today, a low percentage of people in the United States live in public housing. According to the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development, there are roughly 970,000 public housing households. What would a Good Times type show in 2024 look like in terms of depicting their experiences? In a more fractured media landscape, could such a show find a decent-sized audience?
As of now, only Oak Park and Ford Heights applied for the fund Cook County created last fall. The lack of effort is frustrating some non-profit leaders who see the need in their communities…
The Cook County Board created a $100 million disaster response and recovery fund last fall, and of that $20 million was earmarked for suburbs if they wanted to play a bigger role in helping migrants. The money can be used for a variety of services, from shelter and short-term rental assistance to helping migrants enroll their children in school or apply for public benefits, according to the application.
Suburbs can pass the money through to other organizations, such as non-profits or community health centers…
She has her theories about why suburbs aren’t applying for the county’s big pot of money. She points to Joliet Township, which was awarded money from the state, then didn’t take it after blowback from residents…
But some suburbs are frank about why there’s been little interest — they say they’re already overwhelmed by their existing needs. In west suburban Forest Park, Mayor Rory Hoskins said he already has a lot on his plate. His community is the last stop on the CTA’s Blue Line. He said his small fire department is stretched thin responding to mental health calls, overdoses and assaults.
Another way to think about this is what incentives would prompt a suburb to provide help to migrants. Is there a dollar amount? Some sort of special project or program could be brought to the community?
It would be interesting if similar funds were made available throughout the Chicago region. How many suburbs would accept money? More than five?
Visits to suburban food pantries have surged over the past two years, exceeding previous record highs set during the pandemic.
Schaumburg Township’s pantry experienced 33.3% increase in client visits between the fiscal year that ended in February 2023 and the one that ended in February 2024, from 9,809 visits to 13,079…
The Greater Chicago Food Depository, which supplies more than 800 food pantries in Cook County, has seen similar growth in most suburban areas, Communications Director Man-Yee Lee said.
Such numbers hint at the growth of complex suburbia where more suburban residents experience poverty or have lower incomes. Schaumburg Township overall might have a relatively high household median income – $83,909 in the 2020 Census – but that obscures that there are many households with less. With higher housing costs and food prices, the need for food goes up.
I would be interested in hearing more about coordinated efforts to address food insecurity in suburbs. I am sure there are a good number of food pantries, whether provided by local government bodies, local congregations, or other groups. But, this can provide a hodge podge of opportunities that are available at different times and places. Are there regional efforts to address food issues? Is this an issue that might be reduced significantly with higher-paying jobs? Would more affordable housing make it easier to obtain food?
I haven’t lived in Ypsilanti since I was 17, decamping first to a college campus north of Chicago, then to Chicago proper, then to Washington, D.C., where I’ve lived for more than 10 years. Yet at the risk of being one of the “apologists for the ubiquitous highway crud” whom Kunstler derides in his book, I must say that even after all this time, I feel at home in a strip mall. It is familiar; it is my heritage. At least once a year, the winds blow in from the Midwest, and I cannot rest until I make a pilgrimage to an Olive Garden. If home is “nowhere,” and nowhere has spread almost everywhere, then many places can remind you of home…
Of course, people do crave specificity in the places they’re from, even in suburbia. I think the particular passion people have for those slightly more regional chains—Californians and In-N-Out Burger, southerners and Waffle House—is evidence of that. No one wants to feel like they’re from nowhere. But life happens where you are, and if where you are is a strip mall by a highway on-ramp, well, you work with what you’ve got…
Is Taco Bell a gaudy restaurant that serves cheap sodium bombs that all taste basically the same and bear only a passing resemblance to actual Mexican cuisine? Definitely. But I’ll always love it, not just because I think it’s delicious but because that’s where my high-school friends and I would go to pick up sacks of 99-cent bean burritos to bring back for dinner when drama rehearsal was scheduled to run late. So Taco Bell bean burritos, to me, taste like staying at school until 9 p.m. and trying to do homework on the side of the stage between scenes, like the intense friendships of a ragtag group of teens figuring out who they are by pretending to be other people…
The feeling that your past is coherently tied to your present and your future is called “self-continuity,” and Routledge’s research shows that nostalgia facilitates it. So feeling nostalgic for the landscapes of suburbia doesn’t necessarily mean I think that’s the best way to design a community—it’s just part of my story. My soft spot for Olive Garden’s huge portions of mediocre fettuccine alfredo is just the vessel for the things I actually value: the feeling of belonging to a place and its people, the comforts of accumulated memories that adhere to spaces.
The memories referenced here primarily deal with common experiences and corporate chains. The suburbs do have plenty of these.
But, I also assume plenty of suburbanites would remember other things that are a little more place specific. Their home and possibly a yard. A specific school. A park. Perhaps also a McDonald’s or an Olive Garden or a TJ Maxx but a specific one or two they went to regularly. The same relationships that overlapped with chains also operated in specific places.
On one hand, the suburbs share common features. Structured around single-family homes and driving, the suburban lifestyle is a particular one. On the other hand, cities and rural areas also share common characteristics. Whether the suburbs are more conformist, patterned, dull, wasteful, and/or nowhere places compared to other places is up for interpretation and debate. James Howard Kunstler has argued this for years as have many other critics of the suburbs. Yet, plenty of Americans claim to like suburbs and the lifestyle there. (And policies and ideologies have supported suburban life for decades.)
What is more clear that at least a few generations of Americans have now been shaped by growing up in the suburbs. As adults, they have choices about whether to stay in suburbs or what kind of suburbs they might want to live in. Some have chosen other settings and many have continued to live in suburbs. How they remember these choices and experiences can differ.
But a POLITICO analysis shows there’s also a significant bloc of voters who did not want Trump in more exurban, red-leaning counties — the kinds of places that were skeptical of Trump in the 2016 GOP primary and, while largely voting for him in the 2016 and 2020 general elections, have remained somewhat resistant to his takeover of the Republican Party…
They’re farther away from urban areas. They’re less densely populated, and they have fewer voters with college degrees. These places — which include North Carolina’s Republican-leaning exurbs, and conservative but less Trump-inclined counties several hours north of Michigan’s major cities — still vote predominantly for Republicans, both at the presidential and local levels. In 2016, when both parties held contested primaries, the Republican voters in these counties backed candidates like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) over Trump, and in the general election they voted for Trump at lower rates than the deep-red rural areas.
Republicans are banking on the fact that partisanship usually wins out. This is far from the first contentious primary to leave bruised egos and hurt feelings, and usually the vast majority of voters come home to their party’s presidential nominee eventually. By Election Day, voters tend to return to their partisan camps.
The middle to outer suburbs have been a primary battleground in recent election cycles. Voters in big cities and suburbs close to big cities tend to vote Democratic and voters in rural areas and exurbs tend to vote Republican.
The analysis above seems to hinge on whether exurban voters are enthusiastic for Trump or not. Perhaps the more interesting question is whether some exburban areas are becoming more suburban. As suburban populations grow and more educated and wealthier voters move in, does this shift voting away from Republicans? Particularly in the South and West, metropolitan regions continue to expand and this could change voting patterns.
To explore religion and the American suburbs further, I briefly discuss available data sources and recommended readings. These are not meant to be exhaustive but rather to be starting points. There is much to consider and the particular variations of suburban faith in specific settings means there is much to discover.
First, two sources of data I have found valuable. The 2020 U.S. Religion Census sought religious congregations by county throughout the United States. Available at theARDA.com, anyone can look up congregations in a county. So, if you know a suburban county (and these are critical to defining metropolitan areas), you can get a sense of the number of religious congregations and adherents across places.
The second source is more local. Within a neighborhood or community, a resident should be able to research local congregations and religious activity. Such work could include: visiting local religious congregations; talking to members of religious communities, clergy, and community members about religious activity; seeking out records of congregations at a local historical or genealogical society; examining old printed Yellow Pages and searching social media and websites for congregations; and reading local histories. Doing one of these or some of these can reveal a lot about religious groups.
In terms of existing research, here are twelve books that I have found very valuable and have cited multiple times in work I have done. These works highlight different religious traditions and suburban settings:
Cavillo, Jonathan. 2020. The Saints of Santa Ana: Faith and Ethnicity in a Mexican Majority City. New York: Oxford University Press.
Diamond, Etan. 2000. And I Will Dwell in Their Midst: Orthodox Jews in Suburbia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Diamond, Etan. 2003. Souls of the City: Religion and the Search for Community in Postwar America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Dochuk, Darren. 2011. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. New York: W. W. Norton.
Eiesland, Nancy L. 2000. A Particular Place: Urban Restructuring and Religious Ecology in a Southern Exurb. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Howe, Justine. 2018. Suburban Islam. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hudnut-Beumler, James David. 1994. Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream in its Critics, 1945-1965. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
McGirr, Lisa. 2001. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mulder, Mark T. 2015. Shades of White Flight: Evangelical Congregations and Urban Departure. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Mulder, Mark T. and Gerardo Martí. 2020. The Glass Church: Robert H. Schuller, the Crystal Cathedral, and the Strain of Megachurch Ministry. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Numrich, Paul D. and Elfriede Wedam. 2015. Religion and Community in the New Urban America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wilford, Justin G. 2012. Sacred Subdivisions: The Postsuburban Transformation of American Evangelicalism. New York: New York University Press.
My own published work explores some of these areas – find these works listed here. I look forward to more reading and research in this area and continuing to learn from the work of others.
Legally Sociable 