Tag Archives: suburbs

Sanctifying Suburbia is out! Explaining the forces behind the evangelical embrace of the American suburbs

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If observers in the United States in the late nineteenth century had to predict the geography of American evangelicals in the year 2000, what would they have said? Would they have foreseen an evangelical presence in the biggest cities? Important evangelical congregations, organizations, and institutions resided in New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago. From these population centers (and ones that emerged in the twentieth century like Los Angeles or Dallas), evangelicals could reach the masses. Or would they have selected small towns and more rural areas? Perhaps they would have thought of evangelicals living in particular regions, in the kinds of places that would be called “the heartland” or “flyover country” or “the Bible Belt.” These places with a slower pace of life and traditional values may have aligned with everyday evangelical life.

I argue in Sanctifying Suburbia (out in paperback today!) that by the turn of the twenty-first century American evangelicals were firmly suburban. Evangelicals did not simply follow many other Americans to the suburbs (the country was majority suburban in the 2000 Census); evangelicals actively chose to locate in the suburbs.

Why? Multiple factors led to this and different chapters in the book discuss the components that contributed to the evangelical embrace of the growing American suburbs. The story includes:

  1. Racial and ethnic change in cities and evangelicals moving to whiter suburbs.
  2. The National Association of Evangelicals operating from suburban settings for much of its existence after its founding in the 1940s
  3. Locating in some evangelical clusters – like Wheaton and Carol Stream, Illinois and Colorado Springs, Colorado – that offered particular amenities and synergy between evangelical congregations and organizations.
  4. Seeing cities as incompatible with evangelical lifestyles and goals.
  5. An individualized view of engaging with places and society while also holding up heaven as the ultimate city/place.

And this is not just a story of the twentieth century; some of the seeds were sown prior to mass suburbanization and developed over decades.

Where does this leave American evangelicals in the third decade of the twenty-first century? As a whole, they may feel most comfortable in suburban settings where day-to-day life focuses on families in single-family homes, middle-class and populist activities and values rule the day, and attracting attendees and gathering resources from growing suburban populations occupies their organizational efforts.

How a suburban school district could “attract the right families…while keeping the wrong families out”

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The suburban case studies in the 2024 book Disillusioned include one wealthier community trying to boost its status and avoid decline. Here is one way they tried to insure this in their local schools:

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For the plan to work, the district would have to attract the right families into Lovejoy while keeping the wrong families out. Hoping to gauge the possibility of threading that needle, the Lovejoy board hired a demographic firm to run some analyses. First, they took aerial photographs of the district’s 17-square-mile attendance zone, counting the number of roofs versus available lots to ascertain likely development trends. Then, the firm analyzed census data and conducted interviews with local real estate agents, landowners, and developers to predict the household incomes and education levels of future residents. In their final report, the demographers projected that Lovejoy’s enrollment would by 8 or 9 percent a year for the next decade, enough to support a midsize high school. And just as important, they expected that the local poverty rate would remain extremely low, allowing the towns to maintain what local leaders liked to call “quality growth.” Elated, Lovejoy leaders began assuring prospective homeowners that their new high school would never look anything like its gargantuan counterpart in Allen. (202-203)

Growth is good in suburbs as it brings status and additional revenue.

But suburban communities often are looking for particular kinds of growth and certain residents. Here, “quality growth” means higher-income residents in larger new houses. The community does not want residents who are below the poverty line. And they then can run particular programs in their local schools aimed at high levels of academic performance, which will also boost their status. Good schools are not just about student learning; for numerous suburbanites, they serve as proxies for the overall quality of life.

Through planning and zoning, the suburb will have effectively decided who will live in the community and attend the local schools. They may pay for this down the road – the argument of the book is that the suburbs are a Ponzi scheme that pass along the costs to future residents who have fewer resources to meet the costs – but the short-term benefits look good for local leaders and residents.

Are millennials going to the suburbs like boomers did?

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The American suburbs reach across generations:

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But the reality of many millennials is starting to more closely mirror their parents’. They’re catching up on earnings and wealth, and while they’re still behind on homeownership, they’re not screwed. It may have taken them awhile to settle down, but they’re getting around to it and heading to the suburbs. In short, millennials are looking increasingly boomer-esque, and in some areas, they’re doing better than their parents.

The primary argument here involves wealth and homeownership. Are millennials at similar levels? Can they find the same kind of American Dream consisting of making it to the suburbs and owning their own house?

But it strikes me that there is a larger argument to make: these are longstanding cultural patterns, not just questions about economic resources. A later passage in the article hints at this:

In other words, it may not be that all the millennials headed to the suburbs want to be there, but in some cases, they feel like they have no choice but to exit urban centers and swallow a longer commute in the process.

“The plurality are moving to the suburbs, but that’s where the housing stock is,” Lautz said. Some of it has to do with having school-age kids, for example, but a lot has to do with affordability and availability.

Do economic conditions alone drive these choices – people need housing they can afford – or is it about influential ideologies that provide Americans particular messages about the suburbs? Americans prioritize certain things in suburbia. They like cheap and big houses. They like living near certain neighbors. They like particular amenities in their communities, including those they think help their children succeed.

If millennials do indeed end up in the suburbs at similar rates to previous generations of Americans, they may do so because this is what Americans have been doing for decades. There are economic imperatives for doing this – owning a suburban home is a primary vehicle for acquiring wealth – but also established patterns where they like driving, they are used to the ins-and-outs of sprawl, and they enjoy their private dwellings.

If the exurbs are way beyond the basketball three-point line, where are downtown and the suburbs?

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With more NBA action taking place beyond the three point line, this description likened it to the exurbs:

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This is some wild stuff happening between the circles. Minnesota’s Jaden McDaniels is guarding Steph Curry nose-to-nose more than 40 feet from the basket, no space between them, two guys sharing a shirt. The other eight players on the court might as well be in another galaxy; this dance in the exurbs is its own game. The player who has the ball is somewhere behind McDaniels, far outside his sphere of interest. His mandate appears settled: He will go where Curry goes, and he will turn his attention to the ball if, and only if, he sees it in Curry’s hands.

The idea invoked is that the dribbling is taking place on the outskirts of a region. Forty feet out is a long way from the basketball and closer to the half-court line than the hoop.

But continue the spatial analogy. One issue is that some announcers say a three-point shot is from “downtown.” From Hunter S. Thompson:

My grudge against Brent Musburger has been smoking on a personal back burner for many years — since the early 1980s in fact, when Brent was covering the NBA Finals for CBS-TV, and it involves the word “downtown.”

That is when Musburger changed the language of sports forever when he kept repeating this ignorant notion that any basketball player firing off a long 3-point shot is shooting from “downtown.” (Celtics announcer Johnny Most might have coined the “downtown” trademark in the 1960s, but it was Musburger who beat it to death.)..

Downtown is where you score — not somewhere out in the wilderness, where people are far apart & not much happens. You don’t fire a long jump shot from Downtown, you fire it into Downtown. The Real definition of “Taking it downtown” is to suddenly drive to the basket & into a cluster of 7-footers who seem to have you sealed out — like Iverson launching himself at Robinson & Duncan & dunking it over them. To think Otherwise would be to think like a Baseball Writer, or like Brent Musburger.

Thompson did not like the term and he points out that it makes more sense to say downtown is right where the basket is. If downtown is at the center of the city and the region, why would taking a three-pointer be from downtown?

If the basketball court is likened to American geographic categories, how about downtown is under the basket, the city is the paint, the suburbs span between the paint to just outside the three-point line, the exurbs are between the normal three-point shots and the half-court line, and rural areas are in the backcourt. That is probably too many categories but it more accurately applies categories Americans use.

The suburbs and television helped decrease American social engagement

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By the 1970s, Americans engaged less with others compared to previous decades:

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But in the 1970s, the U.S. entered an era of withdrawal, as the political scientist Robert D. Putnam famously documented in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone. Some institutions of togetherness, such as marriage, eroded slowly. Others fell away swiftly. From 1985 to 1994, active involvement in community organizations fell by nearly half. The decline was astonishingly broad, affecting just about every social activity and every demographic group that Putnam tracked.

What happened in the 1970s? Klinenberg, the sociologist, notes a shift in political priorities: The government dramatically slowed its construction of public spaces. “Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether,” he told me. Putnam points, among other things, to new moral values, such as the embrace of unbridled individualism. But he found that two of the most important factors were by then ubiquitous technologies: the automobile and the television set.

Starting in the second half of the century, Americans used their cars to move farther and farther away from one another, enabling the growth of the suburbs and, with it, a retreat into private backyard patios, private pools, a more private life. Once Americans got out of the car, they planted themselves in front of the television. From 1965 to 1995, the typical adult gained six hours a week in leisure time. They could have devoted that time—300 hours a year!—to community service, or pickup basketball, or reading, or knitting, or all four. Instead, they funneled almost all of this extra time into watching more TV.

Television transformed Americans’ interior decorating, our relationships, and our communities. In 1970, just 6 percent of sixth graders had a TV set in their bedroom; in 1999, that proportion had grown to 77 percent. Time diaries in the 1990s showed that husbands and wives spent almost four times as many hours watching TV together as they spent talking to each other in a given week. People who said TV was their “primary form of entertainment” were less likely to engage in practically every social activity that Putnam counted: volunteering, churchgoing, attending dinner parties, picnicking, giving blood, even sending greeting cards. Like a murder in Clue, the death of social connections in America had any number of suspects. But in the end, I believe the likeliest culprit is obvious. It was Mr. Farnsworth, in the living room, with the tube.

There are more details on this in Bowling Alone. This also reminds me of the famous sociology Middletown studies that found the widespread adoption of the automobile allowed people to drive off and do their own thing. For example, they could take a drive into the country on a Sunday morning rather than go to church.

This is also something Jonathan Haidt tried to get at in The Anxious Generation: take away smartphones and you have preexisting social issues in the United States where social interaction had already changed. Yes, the smartphones may affect people and interactions but they are not the only or initial culprits to changing social conditions.

So would the answer then be to limit or eliminate cars or television? I have heard this argued before. Would these changes limit individualism in significant ways or would the trends in that direction just find other outlets?

Suburban pattern #3 to watch in 2025: where suburbs will find revenue

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What will 2025 bring in the American suburbs? A third thing I will be watching for is the search for municipal revenue.

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Every government body has a budget and sources of revenue. This includes suburban communities. They may receive money from taxes, fees, state government, the federal government, and other sources.

What will happen to suburban revenues in 2025? There are multiple threats:

  1. Slowing population growth or no population growth.
  2. Vacant office and retail buildings.
  3. Reduced funding from the federal and/or state governments.

And it is difficult to reduce municipal costs. As suburbs develop and mature, there are certain costs to maintain infrastructure and provide the services residents expect.

One way to boost revenues is to boost local taxes and fees. This may be unpopular among locals, particularly if they already perceive their local tax burden to be high. But more of this money can go directly to local operations and small increases can be sold as small burdens for individual taxpayers.

To some degree, municipal budgets are always tight. How many suburban communities have surpluses that enable them to keep spending and expanding services and amenities?

In 2025, some suburbs may face tough financial situations. What will they do in these situations? Where might they find extra money? How much goodwill will there be among leaders, residents, and other actors to find solutions?

Suburban pattern #2 to watch in 2025: shopping malls and retail locations

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What will 2025 bring in the American suburbs? A second thing I will be watching for involves the fate of shopping malls and retail locations.

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While the suburbs are known first for their emphasis on single-family homes, they are also full of commercial activity. Specifically, shopping malls, retailers, and strip malls dot the suburban landscape. Drive down major roadways through the American suburbs and you are likely to see retail activity all over the place.

With the ongoing shift toward online shopping and shopping by delivery, what happens to all of these locations? The shopping mall has been suffering for years. A quintessential suburban feature with acres of free parking, numerous retailers in one location, and a place for teenagers and others to hang out, many malls will not survive. Similarly, big box stores and smaller retailers are also closing.

Suburban communities have been working on this for years. Can the shopping mall become more of an entertainment and restaurant center? Can it survive with apartments and housing added on site? Can they be demolished, rezoned, and be home to thriving new developments? For the big box store, what can fill that space?

In all of these plans and activity, there are some common patterns at work:

  1. Suburbs want to replace the revenue malls and retailers produced. This can mean they hold on to ideas of retail or revenue producing uses for a long time.
  2. What replaces the retail locations should not significantly drain local services.
  3. Redevelopment, even if local actors generally agree on what should be done, can take a while. Some of these malls and retail locations have been there for decades. Their particular location and context may vary but changes can affect local character and experiences.

At the same time, some suburban communities will continue to have thriving malls and retail locations. Will this only be in wealthier communities or in ones with advantageous locations within a region or among ones that provide certain desirable amenities? Even if the number of shopping malls, strip malls, and big box stores declines this year, they are not going away completely anytime soon. But the patterns of where there are may continue to fuel differences between suburbs in regions.

Suburban pattern #1 to watch in 2025: affordable housing

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What will 2025 bring in the American suburbs? One thing I will be watching for are discussions of and actions regarding affordable housing.

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Why this particular concern? We could start with a broad statement: there is a need for cheaper housing in many American metropolitan areas. The rise in housing prices in recent years has priced out many residents from quality housing or living near where they work or residing in places they want to. This is not just true in the most expensive urban areas like Manhattan or San Francisco; there is a need for housing in numerous suburban areas.

At the same time, affordable housing can mean different things in different communities and among different actors. Is affordable housing about providing broad housing opportunities to most people who could live in a region? Or is it for lower-income residents? Or is it for seniors? When suburbs discuss affordable housing, I think they have different populations in mind depending on the local history and context.

The last few decades demonstrated that affordable housing is not a concept many suburban communities welcome. It has particular connotations. It may be perceived as a threat to existing property values. It is for particular residents. Few American suburbanites seem to want to live adjacent to affordable housing, even if they are for the concept in general.

So what might happen in 2025? There surely will be discussions at the federal, state, and local levels about affordable housing. Different levels of government and different actors may want to use different levers to encourage affordable housing. What kind of carrots or sticks might be offered? The 2024 presidential campaigns had different thoughts. Could there be significant shifts either way in the next year? If Americans continue to be concerned about their own economic standing, the issue of housing prices will not go away. But who will act and what might they do?

Sanctifying Suburbia out early in 2025

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I am looking forward to the release of my book Sanctifying Suburbia: How the Suburbs Became the Promised Land for American Evangelicals on January 14, 2025. Preorder at Oxford University Press and Amazon. Throughout the early part of this year I will be publishing posts about the argument of the book and its implications, surprising things I found while researching, and ongoing possibilities for analyzing religion and the suburbs.

Here is the description of the book:

The suburbs are home to the majority of Americans, including millions of evangelical Christians and thousands of evangelical congregations and organizations. And while American evangelicals are a potent force in society and politics, their connection to and embrace of the suburbs are rarely examined. How did white evangelicals come to see the suburbs as a promised land, home to the evangelical good life and to dense concentrations and networks of evangelical residents, churches big and small, and nonprofit organizations? This book systematically assesses how evangelicals became intertwined with the suburbs and what this means for evangelical life.

Brian Miller shows how evangelical views of race and ethnicity, social class, and gender led to anti-urban sentiment, white flight, and the pursuit of racial exclusivity-all of which has led evangelicals to make the suburbs their physical and spiritual home. At the same time, clusters of evangelical organizations were planting themselves in the suburbs, drawing evangelicals out of the cities. Through sociological analysis, case studies of multiple communities with clusters of evangelical residents, and examinations of evangelical culture, Miller shows that in order to fully understand American evangelicals we must take a deeper look at how evangelicals embraced suburbs and how the suburbs shaped them.

More to come.

What makes a suburban store “hyperlocal”?

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Numerous independent stores operate within American suburbs. What might it mean if they pitch themselves as a “hyperlocal” store (heard on a recent advertisement)? A few possibilities come to mind:

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  1. The business is trying to emphasize that they are super local. If some brands or stores are global or national (think multinational corporations or national or regional chains), then other brands or stores are local or hyperlocal. This is not just local; it is really local or super local to emphasize that it is not national or global.
  2. The store offers goods or experiences only available in this one particular community. Perhaps the business connects with local themes, history, or spirit in ways that someone could not do if the store was in a different community. The store is hyperlocal because the stuff that can only be found there is connected closely to the suburb.
  3. Could this be a nod to hyperlinks? What if hyperlocal means that the store makes connections between local goods and themes? Or, going a different direction,
  4. The dictionary definition of hyperlocal is “limited to a very small geographical area.” This goes further than #1 above: the store serves not the suburb; it serves a smaller area within the suburb. The goods or experiences found therein serve a very particular place.

I am not sure what the store meant by describing themselves as “hyperlocal” but I find #1, #2, and #4 plausible. (The hyperlink/hyperlocal connection seems like a stretch.) If the goal was to stand out from other businesses that might say they are part of the community or serving the local community, hyperlocal might help.