February 1, 2024 • 26 mins
Benjamin Herold, author of Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs joins us to discuss the historic origins of post-war suburbia, and how suburbia racial exclusion is still prevalent today.
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(00:10):
Facepalm America. I'm Baowolf Rocklinfacepalmamerica dotcom is where you can find, as
usual, more information about the show, listen to past episodes, and connect
with us on social media. Igrew up in a suburb. You probably
grew up in a suburb too.That's actually where most Americans live these days.
(00:30):
Ah. It is a It's aninteresting place, and it has an
interesting past, and it has aninteresting and perhaps not so auspicious future.
And the reasons how we got intothe realm of suburbia in this great land
of ours are interesting and maybe speakto some of the things that we need
(00:53):
to change in this country, andso I wanted to have a discussion about
this. Our guests, therefore,is Benjamin Harold. He's a journalist covering
the public education system. He reportsfor Education Week, PBS, News Hour,
NPR, and many more, andhe's the author of Disillusion, Five
Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs. Benjamin Harold, Welcome to Facebook America.
(01:15):
Thanks so much for being here today, Thanks for having me. First,
let's talk about the definition of asuburb. Is it still just a
less densely populated area outside an urbanmetropolis, or has the definition expanded or
shifted in any way over the pastgeneration or two. They're starting with the
hard questions. It's actually really challengingto define a suburb, and that's part
(01:40):
of why we're so bad at talkingabout them. So how I would answer
that is that the first and mostimportant thing that we have to do is
kind of shed our popular mythology thatsuburbs are just these kind of all single
family houses with the nice lawn andthe picket fence and the good public school
down the street. Like that mythis very powerful in America, but the
(02:00):
reality of American suburban communities very widely. And so what I do in the
book is I follow five different suburbsthat are really at different stages of their
developmental arc from a new exurban communityoutside of Dallas, where you see these
five thousand, six thousand square footmac mansions still going up in ranchland,
you know, next to longhorn cattlestill grazing by the side of the road,
all the way to the other endof the spectrum in Compton, California,
(02:23):
which was, you know, it'skind of prototypical bedroom community back in
the thirties and forties all white upuntil the nineteen fifty. Bush family actually
lived there for a brief period oftime, but now, you know,
it's been decades since we've thought ofit as a suburb at all, and
so you know, this kind ofspectrum really kind of helps us understand what
suburbia really is in America right now. Yeah, ex surbs. I've always
(02:44):
wondered exactly where I live because Ilive in a community that is in southern
Oregon, in the Rogue Valley thatis like, you know, really,
if you look at the totality ofit, it's really kind of one hundred
miles from anything else. That's abig area. And yet I live like
in a single family home neighborhood outsidein between a couple of different towns.
(03:05):
So is that a far accurb?Is it? Is it a suburb?
You know, it's really hard totell. And yet like these are the
kinds of places where really most peoplelive. I grew up in Marine County,
California, which is just north ofSan Francisco, and that was a
really established before World War Two.I mean, people were commuting into San
(03:25):
Francisco from Marine County, you know, in the teens and twenties. You
know, one hundred years ago.You grew up in a suburb outside of
Pittsburgh. Tell us about that andwhat your experience there was. Yeah,
so my parents moved into Penhills,Pennsylvania, it's ten miles east of downtown
(03:46):
Pittsburgh, in nineteen seventy six,and I was born a couple months later,
and so, you know, inmany ways, I've had this experience
that was what we kind of stereotypicallythink of it as a suburban experience.
I'm white, my family was white. We were kind of upwardly mobile,
working middle class, and so Igot a lot of benefits and my family
got a lot of benefits from living. There were cheap mortgages, there were
(04:08):
good tax breaks, there was generallynew infrastructure, and there was a really
good public school system. And partof why that was good is because you
know, I learned, you know, I got to take advanced placement courses
and had a lot of opportunity availableto me. But there were also these
small moments that came up again andagain, and one that I think of
all the time, especially after writingthis book, was when I was in
third grade. I was the kindof kid who would get bored and distracted,
(04:29):
and I would start drawing on mydesk, and instead of punishing me,
what my teacher actually did was bringin her typewriter from home, and
she said, Ben, when youget bored, don't drawin your desk.
You just go back and you dowhatever you want to do on greater And
so I started my first I starteda class newspaper. It was my first
newspaper job up to date with roomthirty eight, and so that kind of
opportunity and grace and like cultivating gifts, that was really a big part of
(04:53):
what suburbia was all about. ButI graduated high school in nineteen ninety four
and I left. I didn't thinktwice about it. You know, it
was three quarters white. I thoughtit was the most boring place in America.
I couldn't wait to get out.I wanted to see the real world.
And I really didn't think much aboutthe suburbs for about twenty years.
And then in twenty fifteen, allof these headlines started coming out of Penhills,
this town that I had grown upin, and all of them revolved
(05:15):
around the school system, which isthe four thousand student district that had somehow
run up one hundred and seventy twomillion dollar debt, and the ripple effects
of that were just washing over thecommunity. So teachers getting furloughed, programs
getting slashed, budgets getting cut,property taxes going up, home value stagnating,
And so it made me realize twothings. So one that this kind
(05:36):
of opportunity benefit, this generous socialcontract that my white family had received from
suburbia, was no longer happened,no longer available to the families that moved
in, and many of those familieswere African American. The public schools there
were now two thirds black. Sonot only were they not getting the generous
social contract that my family had enjoyed, they were in effect on the hook
(05:58):
for paying for all all of theopportunities families like mine had already extract.
It's interesting I feel such a commonalitywith you because you and I were born
and graduated from high school in thesame year, and I feel like so
many of the same processes were goingon and morin. But because of the
ambient you know, wealth in theSan Francisco Bay Area, I think the
(06:20):
same impact has not been visited uponmy former home as has been visited upon
yours, But I think I thinkmine is the exception as far as I
can tell, because really there isfar less ambient wealth in these in these
suburbs like the one that you grewup in. And I'm just wondering because
(06:41):
the process for building them, asI understand, was driven so much by,
to be honest, racism and whiteflight and you know, white families
moving out of urban centers and intothe suburbs, and it was made you
know, pretty pretty cushy for themfor us, And is there a similar
(07:02):
white flight now out of the suburbsnow that there has been a demographic adjustment
there has been for the past youknow, twenty thirty years, really even
going back to around nineteen eighty.What we've seen is the dramatic diverstication of
suburbia that we've really missed. Weagain, we're so grounded in our own
mythologies that we kind of haven't reallyrecognized how sweeping these demographic changes have been,
(07:27):
to the point that inside suburban publicschools, now white children are a
minority, and so these demographic changeshave swept through everywhere. So what we
saw historically was that you know,all of those benefits and that kind of
generous social contract that you and Ireceived and our families received in suburbia.
Part of the reason that was possibleis because we were pushing the true costs
(07:49):
off onto a future generation. Weweren't really paying to repair and maintain the
infrastructure being a prime example of this. And so eventually the bills come due.
And when the bill come, dothey come do in a big way
Because all that stuff was built almostovernight. All of that sewers, sidewalks,
public schools, streetlights, all ofit was built almost overnight. And
(08:09):
so what all needs repairs at once. And so what we see, you
know, have seen over and overagain, is that families like mine leave
right when the bills are about tocome. Do we go to the next
ring out and we start a newsuburban community wondering further from downtown and kind
of restart the cycle over without lookingback at who's following us into that community.
And often families who follow us inour black, brown, poor immigrant
(08:33):
looking for that same generous social contract, and instead what they find is this,
you know, essentially that they're onthe receiving end of this kind of
Ponzi scheme that's now starting to fallapart in part because we've kind of like
run out of space, like literallyand figuratively to just keep running away.
We can't keep building further and furtherout into the country side. Partly,
the demographic numbers just don't support it, like the transformation of suburbia demographically is,
(08:56):
you know, such that the numbersjust don't work more. And also
land use patterns are changing, changingclimate change, housing market is better.
So there's all these reasons that arekind of forcing many families white, you
know, working in middle class familieswho historically will be fled suburbs to move
to a community wondering further out andavoid all of the stuff that comes with
this demographic change now being stuck inplace and having to reckon with it.
(09:20):
And that's what we're you know,that's what I argue, and disillusion is
really driving a lot of this tensionand conflict we see at a suburban school
board meetings. In particular, it'sinteresting to think how the whole like Moms
for Liberty dynamic plays out as aresult of this, because I really feel
that, you know, politics andculture are downstream of economics, and it's
(09:43):
a whole other conversation. But itmakes me think about why specifically that came
into place. You certainly can seethat the racism which drove the suburbs into
beings has not gone away entirely byany stretch of the imagination. It's also
interesting to a deserve that to anextent, you know, not only are
(10:03):
our whites moving out of the suburbsto exerbs, but to an extent some
of them are also moving back intourban centers and gentrifying those places. So
both both phenomena are occurring at thesame time in many places, right and
Pittsburgh is a great example of that, Chicago and Atlanta, which I also
featured in the book as well.And so part of what you see is
(10:26):
again that part of that dynamic iswhat's driving me the diversification of suburban as
well. So the woman that Ifollow in you know, I follow five
families in one in each of thesecommunities outside Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta,
Pittsburgh, and Allet. And sothe mom who I met in Pittsburgh is
an African American mom, and sheactually bought the house three doors down from
my childhood home in twenty eighteen aftermy family was entirely gone and when I
(10:50):
got to know her, she waslike, look, I didn't even really
want to move to the suburbs.I grew up in like this kind of
like intact historic black community in downtownPittsburgh. But over time our family was
pushed out because of the gentrification.So we saw this kind of like ten
year window when Pittsburgh lost almost tenpercent of its black population, and she
was part of that displacement. Soshe ends up in the suburbs kind of
on the hook for all of thisstuff that happened in the seventies and eighties,
(11:13):
which she didn't even necessarily want tobe there in the first place.
And that's part of this disillusionment thatI think we're seeing, you know,
in suburbs all across the country,where you know, families come to suburbia
for all of these reasons, manyof which revolve around their kids and their
dreams and their hopes for the future. And then when that gets pooled out
from under you, when the rugstarts to kind of disappear, like,
(11:33):
it's very upsetting for a lot offamilies and for a lot of different reasons.
And now because of the demographic changes, because it's not as easy to
just keep moving away further out,you see those dreams colliding more and more.
You mentioned earlier that the bills arecoming doe for these communities, especially
(11:58):
in terms of infrastructure. How arecommunities across the country responding to it?
Are they able to pay them?What strategies are they using to try and
stay afloat when things are starting tofall apart. Yeah, it's a really
really delicate dance for a lot ofcommunities to do. And so I'll give
you a couple examples. So,you know, I look at the kind
of Dallas Fort Worth area and oneof the you know, kind of the
(12:20):
successive rings of development northward into ColinAnd so there's a town there called Plano,
and it was kind of like theclassic prototypical suburb in the seventies and
eighties, it drew tons and tonsof people and families there for the schools,
and then it started to age andstarted to get a little more diverse.
And so Plano, much like MarineCounty, you know, it was
an area where you have all ofthis wealth toyotas you know, established headquarters
(12:43):
there. There's a lot of actthere's like a robust industrial tak space.
So in many ways, it hasmany advantages. So the town started saying,
Okay, we're going to develop anew comprehensive plan that's going to be
about sustainability, diversity, adding pocketsof density, starting to rely on mass
transit, and people freak out.There was this whole recall movement. There
was like this kind of backlash thatcame out on the council. The mayor,
(13:07):
who was black, was accused oftrying to turn Planeto into quote another
Harlem. You know, it wasjust all of this backlash against that kind
of effort to deal with the problems. And then what you saw actually in
the community further outside where the familywho's a white family who I ended up
following, they left Plano and endedup going into one of these far exurban
communities that's far wealthier and far wider, and thinking that they were in this
(13:28):
place that was going to kind ofat least be intact long enough for their
kids to get through the public schools, and what they find is like it
ends up in this kind of wickedbudget crunch for these from some of these
same issues. And when I startedtalking to the town leaders, they told
me just this incredible story of sayingthey kind of knew as early as like
two thousand that this was coming,like, we know, we're not really
paying full freight. And so theyhad these planning and zon and commissions,
(13:50):
and expert after expert would come andsaid, listen, this mix that you
have of all residential with large lotsand no real tax base and having low
time taxes and abundant services, like, you can't keep that up forever.
You either have to grow or youhave to raise taxes. And the community
was like not at all. Itwas so contentious that they had to move.
This is a tiny town of likefive thousand people. They had to
(14:13):
move the planning and zoning commission meetingfrom the town from city Hall into the
fire station so they could set upmore chairs in the baby because everyone was
so mad, and they ended upvoting out. They ended up like rolling
back this plan, so they endedup issuing more debt instead of raising taxes
or you know, allow and growth. And the town ended up voting out
every single council member who had evenvoiced any support at any point in time
(14:37):
for that time. So, youknow, there's a lot of pressure against
constructive ways of kind of proactively tryingto address this dynamic. It is so
frustrating to hear that and to knowthat the political pathways that are currently open
to any sort of I mean onejust maintaining what there is and two looking
(15:01):
to the future, which obviously alot of individual residents are not wanting or
willing to do. How do wechange these structures in a way that actually
facilitates people being able to live andbe near where they work, and also
(15:24):
in a way that is not detrimentalto the environment, because there's so many
environmental impacts. I mean, there'sso many issues beyond just the immediate maintenance
of these places, and yet they'renot even willing to do those basic things.
It is so frustrating. And Iwill mention also that I see what
they're called that. One of thethings that you talk about in your book
(15:46):
is that one of the cities theyrefuse to let the public transportation system go
to the suburbs. And I willnote also that when they were you know,
planning, you know, bart theBay Area rapid transit in the nineteen
fifties and sixties. Sure, whatdoes San Francisco, and it went to
(16:07):
the East Bay and the far EastBay, you know, Walnut Creek,
where I also lived for a time, but they absolutely refused to let it
come to morin. It's you know, it's it's it's actually really important that
you're bringing this up, because Ithink part of the problem that we have
and even just talking about suburbia,is that it's really this kind of fractured,
(16:27):
crazy, you know, quilt ofcommunities that are scattered all over the
place, and often they're competing witheach other, they're very small. It's
just really hard to find patterns acrosssuburbs because there's so many, and there
are often you know, there's somuch going on there. But once you
start kind of widening the lens andlook kind of common issues around schools,
(16:48):
around transit, around development, aroundzoning, it's like, oh wait,
this is actually a very clear patternthat we see again again. And in
many ways it does go back to, you know, the root of it
goes back to what she talked aboutearlier, kind of historic origins of post
war suburbia, which in many caseswere built explicitly with federal government support as
a means of really creating safe havensfor upwardly mobile, middle class white families
(17:11):
to kind of reap all these advantagesand keep everyone else out. That legacy
of racial exclusion really really lives ontoday. And so part of what you
know, in terms of thinking abouthow do we find our way out of
this, like the ended up beinglike the model of hope. For me.
It was actually the most surprising ofall. It was Compton, California,
And I think part of what Comptonhad going for it, you know,
it's a place where you know,the bottom really fell out starting in
(17:33):
the nineteen sepents against starting in thepublic schools, massive debt, quick demographic
changes. You started to see thiskind of violence and capital disinvestment, and
then you had this like really reallyrough couple decade stretch. But they're coming
out of it now, starting inthe public schools. And part of why
they're able to do that is becausethere aren't any white people there left.
And so the conflict it's still reallytense between black Compton and Latino content and
(17:56):
there's a lot of kind of interracialconflict. It's been going on for decades
now there. But when you havethis kind of thing of saying, Okay,
we're going to try and invest inall of the kids who are historically
excluded from suburban that means comptence,unified population ninety six percent black and brown,
largely poor, often immigrants, someundocumented, some still learning English.
(18:18):
Those kids are getting very much thesame deal that I got when I was
at leastying, so not just resources, but this sense of that he is
the one who is going to makeour future. That's something we haven't historically
been willing to do for all familiesin suburbia. And I think that's really
the key is saying, how dowe make this social contract more inclusive.
It's really fascinating to me the factthat you mentioned like once the white people
(18:44):
go away, things start to geta little better because there are so many
people like just digging in their heelsand complaining about things anymore. It really
is amazing. I wonder how oftenyou see you see that happening, especially
given the fact that now the majorityof school kids in suburbia are people of
(19:11):
color. Like what, Because thereseems to be so little hope to me
on a federal and even a statelevel in terms of how the politics is
just obstructed again and again, itseems unlikely to me that the solution comes
from that area. And what yousay about individual communities gives me hope,
Like, what strategies can these communitiesuse in order to, you know,
(19:37):
help reverse the damage that has beencaused by these these years of neglect or
just kicking the can down the road. Yeah, I mean, I think
part just the moot wment to makesure I'm being clear on my mind that
when white families start to leave asuburban community in mass there's a lot of
negative consequences that often come with thatin the short term. Sure, so
they're particularly the tax base. Youknow, white families like to take our
(20:00):
tax dollars with us. We don'tlike to share that money, and so
when we when we take that out, and kind of the disinvestment that follows,
Like that's a big part of whyCompton struggled for so long. No,
no, no, totally and Iget that. But but also in
a in a very cynical way,you know, I mean they you know,
you know, mow money more problemsin terms of suburban communities. So
(20:25):
I don't know it's it's but,but but how had these communities like found
ways to make things better because theydon't seem to be getting a lot of
outside help. Yeah, And Ithink part of it is you know,
part of what I talked about inthe book is like we had this moment
with COVID where it actually it shinedthis really bright light on a lot of
(20:45):
these tensions and problems and in manyways made them worse. But the federal
government, and this is both theTrump administration and the Biden administration, you
know, passed one hundred and ninetybillion dollars in relief for K twelve schools,
right and is called ESER dollars.And so that's you know, a
not insignificant chunk of change. Andso what I saw in a place like
Compton is, you know, youhave a twenty thousand student school district that's
(21:07):
getting tens of millions of dollars thatit otherwise wouldn't have had. And so
part of that is going to youknow, pay for remote school and disinfectants
and like those kinds of things.But part of what it allows them to
do is start repairing some of thisinfrastructure, start addressing some of these underlying
challenges. So on one hand,it's like kind of like almost like this
little pilot or like a glimpse oflike what kind of investment we would need
(21:30):
in order to start rebuilding and repairingsome of these communities. Now, the
challenge is when I talked to thesuperintendent and Compton, a man named Darren
Brawley, and I said, look, you know, you're getting tens of
millions of dollars and they just passedthis big bond package and like you can
do this now, right, Andhe's like, listen, don't get me
wrong, I am not going tosay no to tens of millions of dollars.
It's important, it's valuable. Wewant it. But just for Compton
(21:51):
Unified, just for our schools andjust for the facilities, we need three
billion dollars. And so you know, in terms of the scale of the
need across suburbia, I think we'redramatically underestimating how profound that is. And
again, part of the thing toremember is because so many of these communities
were built in such a short periodof time between nineteen forty and nineteen seventy,
(22:14):
and so when they all age atonce, of course they're going to
need repairs. We just haven't gotit in our mind or in our policy
to make that kind of investment.Yeah, and until it hits the people
who are in a position of powerto be able to do something about it,
and who have an influence on thingsthat is, you know, outside
(22:36):
to their actual population, it's goingto be a very slow road. I
mean, you know, frankly,you know, richer, wider people are
not going to feel these impacts asmuch. They're moving out of these areas,
and so it's going to be difficultto get policy solutions across. And
while it's wonderful that in a situationlike COVID you get us and influx and
(23:00):
you can see what's possible, youknow, clearly they have been you know,
pulling back on you know, thoseprograms, you know, pretty quickly
in a lot of ways. Anduh, it's it's not likely that there
are going to be circumstances in whichwe're going to see that again. And
it's you know, it's it isvery depressing to my mind, you know,
(23:22):
And I think part of part ofwhat is both a little fearful and
alarming but also potentially a room forhope is that because that that option of
just moving out and running away fromthe problem is available to fewer and fewer
of us. Yeah, Like,I think what we're seeing is a lot
of conflict as a result, anda lot of that conflict is coming up
around things like critical race theory andbook bands and LGBTQ issues and school curriculum
(23:47):
and those kinds of things diversity equityand inclusion initiatives, and so all of
those things matter and are really important, and they make a big difference for
families who are trying to make suburbswork for them. But I also believe
that a lot of times those areor we can't understand those as kind of
symptomatic of this larger issue. Andif we're willing as a community to say,
hey, what's actually happening in ourcommunity, is these bills coming doe
(24:10):
for something that already was taken outof here, and so we need to
be able and we can't escape this. We're all subject to this in one
way or another. There's that atleast hypothetically opens the door to say,
hey, we have some common interestshere. We may not like each other,
we may not even want to liveon the same street to send our
kids to school together, but we'restuck in this together and we need to
figure this out in a way thatmy fate is bound up in your faith.
(24:34):
No, that's a good point,because at a certain point if you
have five hundred Flint Michigans across thecountry where everybody's you know, water is
failing, and you can't just isolateit to one particular you know, part
of the country or one particular typeof person. If everybody's you know,
water systems or sewer systems or roadsystems are failing, then ultimately that holds
(24:59):
a lot more weight when those immediateproblems come to bear on people than just
theoretical things about you know, youknow, critical race theory that have been
you know, ginned up by rightwing media. So maybe you're right,
you know, if things get youknow, bad enough in a way that
you know hits people, and eventuallyit will hit people because as you say,
the escape valves are are not asavailable as they used to be,
(25:22):
then we can finally, hopefully cometogether and solve this. I would say
that's definitely the hope. I hopeyou know, people who read dissolusion to
walk away with two things. Youknow, one, this sense of like
understanding this pattern that's playing out inyour communities all around you. We've historically
been very bad kind of recognizing what'sactually happening in suburbiaan and I hope this
(25:42):
gives us a framework for looking toand then also giving us examples of how
communities actually start to listen to eachother hear each other. So I appreciate
you having me on to talk aboutit, and you're excited for this conversation
too. Absolutely, and Benjamin Harold, again, the author of Disillusion,
Five Families and the Unraveling of America'sSuburbs, thank you so much for being
(26:03):
with us today on Facebook America.Thanks for having me, Thanks for listening
to the podcast today. I wantto thank Ace Elson and Rosabel Hine,
who are the producers. You canalways reach us at two zero two six
five six six two seven one,either by message or by calling us.
We can get your voice on theprogram if you would like, or just
send us some words and we willread them on the show. And until
(26:26):
next time, enjoy the day.
Facepalm America. I'm Baowolf Rocklinfacepalmamerica dotcom is where you can find, as
usual, more information about the show, listen to past episodes, and connect
with us on social media. Igrew up in a suburb. You probably
grew up in a suburb too.That's actually where most Americans live these days.
(00:30):
Ah. It is a It's aninteresting place, and it has an
interesting past, and it has aninteresting and perhaps not so auspicious future.
And the reasons how we got intothe realm of suburbia in this great land
of ours are interesting and maybe speakto some of the things that we need
(00:53):
to change in this country, andso I wanted to have a discussion about
this. Our guests, therefore,is Benjamin Harold. He's a journalist covering
the public education system. He reportsfor Education Week, PBS, News Hour,
NPR, and many more, andhe's the author of Disillusion, Five
Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs. Benjamin Harold, Welcome to Facebook America.
(01:15):
Thanks so much for being here today, Thanks for having me. First,
let's talk about the definition of asuburb. Is it still just a
less densely populated area outside an urbanmetropolis, or has the definition expanded or
shifted in any way over the pastgeneration or two. They're starting with the
hard questions. It's actually really challengingto define a suburb, and that's part
(01:40):
of why we're so bad at talkingabout them. So how I would answer
that is that the first and mostimportant thing that we have to do is
kind of shed our popular mythology thatsuburbs are just these kind of all single
family houses with the nice lawn andthe picket fence and the good public school
down the street. Like that mythis very powerful in America, but the
(02:00):
reality of American suburban communities very widely. And so what I do in the
book is I follow five different suburbsthat are really at different stages of their
developmental arc from a new exurban communityoutside of Dallas, where you see these
five thousand, six thousand square footmac mansions still going up in ranchland,
you know, next to longhorn cattlestill grazing by the side of the road,
all the way to the other endof the spectrum in Compton, California,
(02:23):
which was, you know, it'skind of prototypical bedroom community back in
the thirties and forties all white upuntil the nineteen fifty. Bush family actually
lived there for a brief period oftime, but now, you know,
it's been decades since we've thought ofit as a suburb at all, and
so you know, this kind ofspectrum really kind of helps us understand what
suburbia really is in America right now. Yeah, ex surbs. I've always
(02:44):
wondered exactly where I live because Ilive in a community that is in southern
Oregon, in the Rogue Valley thatis like, you know, really,
if you look at the totality ofit, it's really kind of one hundred
miles from anything else. That's abig area. And yet I live like
in a single family home neighborhood outsidein between a couple of different towns.
(03:05):
So is that a far accurb?Is it? Is it a suburb?
You know, it's really hard totell. And yet like these are the
kinds of places where really most peoplelive. I grew up in Marine County,
California, which is just north ofSan Francisco, and that was a
really established before World War Two.I mean, people were commuting into San
(03:25):
Francisco from Marine County, you know, in the teens and twenties. You
know, one hundred years ago.You grew up in a suburb outside of
Pittsburgh. Tell us about that andwhat your experience there was. Yeah,
so my parents moved into Penhills,Pennsylvania, it's ten miles east of downtown
(03:46):
Pittsburgh, in nineteen seventy six,and I was born a couple months later,
and so, you know, inmany ways, I've had this experience
that was what we kind of stereotypicallythink of it as a suburban experience.
I'm white, my family was white. We were kind of upwardly mobile,
working middle class, and so Igot a lot of benefits and my family
got a lot of benefits from living. There were cheap mortgages, there were
(04:08):
good tax breaks, there was generallynew infrastructure, and there was a really
good public school system. And partof why that was good is because you
know, I learned, you know, I got to take advanced placement courses
and had a lot of opportunity availableto me. But there were also these
small moments that came up again andagain, and one that I think of
all the time, especially after writingthis book, was when I was in
third grade. I was the kindof kid who would get bored and distracted,
(04:29):
and I would start drawing on mydesk, and instead of punishing me,
what my teacher actually did was bringin her typewriter from home, and
she said, Ben, when youget bored, don't drawin your desk.
You just go back and you dowhatever you want to do on greater And
so I started my first I starteda class newspaper. It was my first
newspaper job up to date with roomthirty eight, and so that kind of
opportunity and grace and like cultivating gifts, that was really a big part of
(04:53):
what suburbia was all about. ButI graduated high school in nineteen ninety four
and I left. I didn't thinktwice about it. You know, it
was three quarters white. I thoughtit was the most boring place in America.
I couldn't wait to get out.I wanted to see the real world.
And I really didn't think much aboutthe suburbs for about twenty years.
And then in twenty fifteen, allof these headlines started coming out of Penhills,
this town that I had grown upin, and all of them revolved
(05:15):
around the school system, which isthe four thousand student district that had somehow
run up one hundred and seventy twomillion dollar debt, and the ripple effects
of that were just washing over thecommunity. So teachers getting furloughed, programs
getting slashed, budgets getting cut,property taxes going up, home value stagnating,
And so it made me realize twothings. So one that this kind
(05:36):
of opportunity benefit, this generous socialcontract that my white family had received from
suburbia, was no longer happened,no longer available to the families that moved
in, and many of those familieswere African American. The public schools there
were now two thirds black. Sonot only were they not getting the generous
social contract that my family had enjoyed, they were in effect on the hook
(05:58):
for paying for all all of theopportunities families like mine had already extract.
It's interesting I feel such a commonalitywith you because you and I were born
and graduated from high school in thesame year, and I feel like so
many of the same processes were goingon and morin. But because of the
ambient you know, wealth in theSan Francisco Bay Area, I think the
(06:20):
same impact has not been visited uponmy former home as has been visited upon
yours, But I think I thinkmine is the exception as far as I
can tell, because really there isfar less ambient wealth in these in these
suburbs like the one that you grewup in. And I'm just wondering because
(06:41):
the process for building them, asI understand, was driven so much by,
to be honest, racism and whiteflight and you know, white families
moving out of urban centers and intothe suburbs, and it was made you
know, pretty pretty cushy for themfor us, And is there a similar
(07:02):
white flight now out of the suburbsnow that there has been a demographic adjustment
there has been for the past youknow, twenty thirty years, really even
going back to around nineteen eighty.What we've seen is the dramatic diverstication of
suburbia that we've really missed. Weagain, we're so grounded in our own
mythologies that we kind of haven't reallyrecognized how sweeping these demographic changes have been,
(07:27):
to the point that inside suburban publicschools, now white children are a
minority, and so these demographic changeshave swept through everywhere. So what we
saw historically was that you know,all of those benefits and that kind of
generous social contract that you and Ireceived and our families received in suburbia.
Part of the reason that was possibleis because we were pushing the true costs
(07:49):
off onto a future generation. Weweren't really paying to repair and maintain the
infrastructure being a prime example of this. And so eventually the bills come due.
And when the bill come, dothey come do in a big way
Because all that stuff was built almostovernight. All of that sewers, sidewalks,
public schools, streetlights, all ofit was built almost overnight. And
(08:09):
so what all needs repairs at once. And so what we see, you
know, have seen over and overagain, is that families like mine leave
right when the bills are about tocome. Do we go to the next
ring out and we start a newsuburban community wondering further from downtown and kind
of restart the cycle over without lookingback at who's following us into that community.
And often families who follow us inour black, brown, poor immigrant
(08:33):
looking for that same generous social contract, and instead what they find is this,
you know, essentially that they're onthe receiving end of this kind of
Ponzi scheme that's now starting to fallapart in part because we've kind of like
run out of space, like literallyand figuratively to just keep running away.
We can't keep building further and furtherout into the country side. Partly,
the demographic numbers just don't support it, like the transformation of suburbia demographically is,
(08:56):
you know, such that the numbersjust don't work more. And also
land use patterns are changing, changingclimate change, housing market is better.
So there's all these reasons that arekind of forcing many families white, you
know, working in middle class familieswho historically will be fled suburbs to move
to a community wondering further out andavoid all of the stuff that comes with
this demographic change now being stuck inplace and having to reckon with it.
(09:20):
And that's what we're you know,that's what I argue, and disillusion is
really driving a lot of this tensionand conflict we see at a suburban school
board meetings. In particular, it'sinteresting to think how the whole like Moms
for Liberty dynamic plays out as aresult of this, because I really feel
that, you know, politics andculture are downstream of economics, and it's
(09:43):
a whole other conversation. But itmakes me think about why specifically that came
into place. You certainly can seethat the racism which drove the suburbs into
beings has not gone away entirely byany stretch of the imagination. It's also
interesting to a deserve that to anextent, you know, not only are
(10:03):
our whites moving out of the suburbsto exerbs, but to an extent some
of them are also moving back intourban centers and gentrifying those places. So
both both phenomena are occurring at thesame time in many places, right and
Pittsburgh is a great example of that, Chicago and Atlanta, which I also
featured in the book as well.And so part of what you see is
(10:26):
again that part of that dynamic iswhat's driving me the diversification of suburban as
well. So the woman that Ifollow in you know, I follow five
families in one in each of thesecommunities outside Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta,
Pittsburgh, and Allet. And sothe mom who I met in Pittsburgh is
an African American mom, and sheactually bought the house three doors down from
my childhood home in twenty eighteen aftermy family was entirely gone and when I
(10:50):
got to know her, she waslike, look, I didn't even really
want to move to the suburbs.I grew up in like this kind of
like intact historic black community in downtownPittsburgh. But over time our family was
pushed out because of the gentrification.So we saw this kind of like ten
year window when Pittsburgh lost almost tenpercent of its black population, and she
was part of that displacement. Soshe ends up in the suburbs kind of
on the hook for all of thisstuff that happened in the seventies and eighties,
(11:13):
which she didn't even necessarily want tobe there in the first place.
And that's part of this disillusionment thatI think we're seeing, you know,
in suburbs all across the country,where you know, families come to suburbia
for all of these reasons, manyof which revolve around their kids and their
dreams and their hopes for the future. And then when that gets pooled out
from under you, when the rugstarts to kind of disappear, like,
(11:33):
it's very upsetting for a lot offamilies and for a lot of different reasons.
And now because of the demographic changes, because it's not as easy to
just keep moving away further out,you see those dreams colliding more and more.
You mentioned earlier that the bills arecoming doe for these communities, especially
(11:58):
in terms of infrastructure. How arecommunities across the country responding to it?
Are they able to pay them?What strategies are they using to try and
stay afloat when things are starting tofall apart. Yeah, it's a really
really delicate dance for a lot ofcommunities to do. And so I'll give
you a couple examples. So,you know, I look at the kind
of Dallas Fort Worth area and oneof the you know, kind of the
(12:20):
successive rings of development northward into ColinAnd so there's a town there called Plano,
and it was kind of like theclassic prototypical suburb in the seventies and
eighties, it drew tons and tonsof people and families there for the schools,
and then it started to age andstarted to get a little more diverse.
And so Plano, much like MarineCounty, you know, it was
an area where you have all ofthis wealth toyotas you know, established headquarters
(12:43):
there. There's a lot of actthere's like a robust industrial tak space.
So in many ways, it hasmany advantages. So the town started saying,
Okay, we're going to develop anew comprehensive plan that's going to be
about sustainability, diversity, adding pocketsof density, starting to rely on mass
transit, and people freak out.There was this whole recall movement. There
was like this kind of backlash thatcame out on the council. The mayor,
(13:07):
who was black, was accused oftrying to turn Planeto into quote another
Harlem. You know, it wasjust all of this backlash against that kind
of effort to deal with the problems. And then what you saw actually in
the community further outside where the familywho's a white family who I ended up
following, they left Plano and endedup going into one of these far exurban
communities that's far wealthier and far wider, and thinking that they were in this
(13:28):
place that was going to kind ofat least be intact long enough for their
kids to get through the public schools, and what they find is like it
ends up in this kind of wickedbudget crunch for these from some of these
same issues. And when I startedtalking to the town leaders, they told
me just this incredible story of sayingthey kind of knew as early as like
two thousand that this was coming,like, we know, we're not really
paying full freight. And so theyhad these planning and zon and commissions,
(13:50):
and expert after expert would come andsaid, listen, this mix that you
have of all residential with large lotsand no real tax base and having low
time taxes and abundant services, like, you can't keep that up forever.
You either have to grow or youhave to raise taxes. And the community
was like not at all. Itwas so contentious that they had to move.
This is a tiny town of likefive thousand people. They had to
(14:13):
move the planning and zoning commission meetingfrom the town from city Hall into the
fire station so they could set upmore chairs in the baby because everyone was
so mad, and they ended upvoting out. They ended up like rolling
back this plan, so they endedup issuing more debt instead of raising taxes
or you know, allow and growth. And the town ended up voting out
every single council member who had evenvoiced any support at any point in time
(14:37):
for that time. So, youknow, there's a lot of pressure against
constructive ways of kind of proactively tryingto address this dynamic. It is so
frustrating to hear that and to knowthat the political pathways that are currently open
to any sort of I mean onejust maintaining what there is and two looking
(15:01):
to the future, which obviously alot of individual residents are not wanting or
willing to do. How do wechange these structures in a way that actually
facilitates people being able to live andbe near where they work, and also
(15:24):
in a way that is not detrimentalto the environment, because there's so many
environmental impacts. I mean, there'sso many issues beyond just the immediate maintenance
of these places, and yet they'renot even willing to do those basic things.
It is so frustrating. And Iwill mention also that I see what
they're called that. One of thethings that you talk about in your book
(15:46):
is that one of the cities theyrefuse to let the public transportation system go
to the suburbs. And I willnote also that when they were you know,
planning, you know, bart theBay Area rapid transit in the nineteen
fifties and sixties. Sure, whatdoes San Francisco, and it went to
(16:07):
the East Bay and the far EastBay, you know, Walnut Creek,
where I also lived for a time, but they absolutely refused to let it
come to morin. It's you know, it's it's it's actually really important that
you're bringing this up, because Ithink part of the problem that we have
and even just talking about suburbia,is that it's really this kind of fractured,
(16:27):
crazy, you know, quilt ofcommunities that are scattered all over the
place, and often they're competing witheach other, they're very small. It's
just really hard to find patterns acrosssuburbs because there's so many, and there
are often you know, there's somuch going on there. But once you
start kind of widening the lens andlook kind of common issues around schools,
(16:48):
around transit, around development, aroundzoning, it's like, oh wait,
this is actually a very clear patternthat we see again again. And in
many ways it does go back to, you know, the root of it
goes back to what she talked aboutearlier, kind of historic origins of post
war suburbia, which in many caseswere built explicitly with federal government support as
a means of really creating safe havensfor upwardly mobile, middle class white families
(17:11):
to kind of reap all these advantagesand keep everyone else out. That legacy
of racial exclusion really really lives ontoday. And so part of what you
know, in terms of thinking abouthow do we find our way out of
this, like the ended up beinglike the model of hope. For me.
It was actually the most surprising ofall. It was Compton, California,
And I think part of what Comptonhad going for it, you know,
it's a place where you know,the bottom really fell out starting in
(17:33):
the nineteen sepents against starting in thepublic schools, massive debt, quick demographic
changes. You started to see thiskind of violence and capital disinvestment, and
then you had this like really reallyrough couple decade stretch. But they're coming
out of it now, starting inthe public schools. And part of why
they're able to do that is becausethere aren't any white people there left.
And so the conflict it's still reallytense between black Compton and Latino content and
(17:56):
there's a lot of kind of interracialconflict. It's been going on for decades
now there. But when you havethis kind of thing of saying, Okay,
we're going to try and invest inall of the kids who are historically
excluded from suburban that means comptence,unified population ninety six percent black and brown,
largely poor, often immigrants, someundocumented, some still learning English.
(18:18):
Those kids are getting very much thesame deal that I got when I was
at leastying, so not just resources, but this sense of that he is
the one who is going to makeour future. That's something we haven't historically
been willing to do for all familiesin suburbia. And I think that's really
the key is saying, how dowe make this social contract more inclusive.
It's really fascinating to me the factthat you mentioned like once the white people
(18:44):
go away, things start to geta little better because there are so many
people like just digging in their heelsand complaining about things anymore. It really
is amazing. I wonder how oftenyou see you see that happening, especially
given the fact that now the majorityof school kids in suburbia are people of
(19:11):
color. Like what, Because thereseems to be so little hope to me
on a federal and even a statelevel in terms of how the politics is
just obstructed again and again, itseems unlikely to me that the solution comes
from that area. And what yousay about individual communities gives me hope,
Like, what strategies can these communitiesuse in order to, you know,
(19:37):
help reverse the damage that has beencaused by these these years of neglect or
just kicking the can down the road. Yeah, I mean, I think
part just the moot wment to makesure I'm being clear on my mind that
when white families start to leave asuburban community in mass there's a lot of
negative consequences that often come with thatin the short term. Sure, so
they're particularly the tax base. Youknow, white families like to take our
(20:00):
tax dollars with us. We don'tlike to share that money, and so
when we when we take that out, and kind of the disinvestment that follows,
Like that's a big part of whyCompton struggled for so long. No,
no, no, totally and Iget that. But but also in
a in a very cynical way,you know, I mean they you know,
you know, mow money more problemsin terms of suburban communities. So
(20:25):
I don't know it's it's but,but but how had these communities like found
ways to make things better because theydon't seem to be getting a lot of
outside help. Yeah, And Ithink part of it is you know,
part of what I talked about inthe book is like we had this moment
with COVID where it actually it shinedthis really bright light on a lot of
(20:45):
these tensions and problems and in manyways made them worse. But the federal
government, and this is both theTrump administration and the Biden administration, you
know, passed one hundred and ninetybillion dollars in relief for K twelve schools,
right and is called ESER dollars.And so that's you know, a
not insignificant chunk of change. Andso what I saw in a place like
Compton is, you know, youhave a twenty thousand student school district that's
(21:07):
getting tens of millions of dollars thatit otherwise wouldn't have had. And so
part of that is going to youknow, pay for remote school and disinfectants
and like those kinds of things.But part of what it allows them to
do is start repairing some of thisinfrastructure, start addressing some of these underlying
challenges. So on one hand,it's like kind of like almost like this
little pilot or like a glimpse oflike what kind of investment we would need
(21:30):
in order to start rebuilding and repairingsome of these communities. Now, the
challenge is when I talked to thesuperintendent and Compton, a man named Darren
Brawley, and I said, look, you know, you're getting tens of
millions of dollars and they just passedthis big bond package and like you can
do this now, right, Andhe's like, listen, don't get me
wrong, I am not going tosay no to tens of millions of dollars.
It's important, it's valuable. Wewant it. But just for Compton
(21:51):
Unified, just for our schools andjust for the facilities, we need three
billion dollars. And so you know, in terms of the scale of the
need across suburbia, I think we'redramatically underestimating how profound that is. And
again, part of the thing toremember is because so many of these communities
were built in such a short periodof time between nineteen forty and nineteen seventy,
(22:14):
and so when they all age atonce, of course they're going to
need repairs. We just haven't gotit in our mind or in our policy
to make that kind of investment.Yeah, and until it hits the people
who are in a position of powerto be able to do something about it,
and who have an influence on thingsthat is, you know, outside
(22:36):
to their actual population, it's goingto be a very slow road. I
mean, you know, frankly,you know, richer, wider people are
not going to feel these impacts asmuch. They're moving out of these areas,
and so it's going to be difficultto get policy solutions across. And
while it's wonderful that in a situationlike COVID you get us and influx and
(23:00):
you can see what's possible, youknow, clearly they have been you know,
pulling back on you know, thoseprograms, you know, pretty quickly
in a lot of ways. Anduh, it's it's not likely that there
are going to be circumstances in whichwe're going to see that again. And
it's you know, it's it isvery depressing to my mind, you know,
(23:22):
And I think part of part ofwhat is both a little fearful and
alarming but also potentially a room forhope is that because that that option of
just moving out and running away fromthe problem is available to fewer and fewer
of us. Yeah, Like,I think what we're seeing is a lot
of conflict as a result, anda lot of that conflict is coming up
around things like critical race theory andbook bands and LGBTQ issues and school curriculum
(23:47):
and those kinds of things diversity equityand inclusion initiatives, and so all of
those things matter and are really important, and they make a big difference for
families who are trying to make suburbswork for them. But I also believe
that a lot of times those areor we can't understand those as kind of
symptomatic of this larger issue. Andif we're willing as a community to say,
hey, what's actually happening in ourcommunity, is these bills coming doe
(24:10):
for something that already was taken outof here, and so we need to
be able and we can't escape this. We're all subject to this in one
way or another. There's that atleast hypothetically opens the door to say,
hey, we have some common interestshere. We may not like each other,
we may not even want to liveon the same street to send our
kids to school together, but we'restuck in this together and we need to
figure this out in a way thatmy fate is bound up in your faith.
(24:34):
No, that's a good point,because at a certain point if you
have five hundred Flint Michigans across thecountry where everybody's you know, water is
failing, and you can't just isolateit to one particular you know, part
of the country or one particular typeof person. If everybody's you know,
water systems or sewer systems or roadsystems are failing, then ultimately that holds
(24:59):
a lot more weight when those immediateproblems come to bear on people than just
theoretical things about you know, youknow, critical race theory that have been
you know, ginned up by rightwing media. So maybe you're right,
you know, if things get youknow, bad enough in a way that
you know hits people, and eventuallyit will hit people because as you say,
the escape valves are are not asavailable as they used to be,
(25:22):
then we can finally, hopefully cometogether and solve this. I would say
that's definitely the hope. I hopeyou know, people who read dissolusion to
walk away with two things. Youknow, one, this sense of like
understanding this pattern that's playing out inyour communities all around you. We've historically
been very bad kind of recognizing what'sactually happening in suburbiaan and I hope this
(25:42):
gives us a framework for looking toand then also giving us examples of how
communities actually start to listen to eachother hear each other. So I appreciate
you having me on to talk aboutit, and you're excited for this conversation
too. Absolutely, and Benjamin Harold, again, the author of Disillusion,
Five Families and the Unraveling of America'sSuburbs, thank you so much for being
(26:03):
with us today on Facebook America.Thanks for having me, Thanks for listening
to the podcast today. I wantto thank Ace Elson and Rosabel Hine,
who are the producers. You canalways reach us at two zero two six
five six six two seven one,either by message or by calling us.
We can get your voice on theprogram if you would like, or just
send us some words and we willread them on the show. And until
(26:26):
next time, enjoy the day.
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