The Suburbs Have Become a Ponzi Scheme
A new book looks at how white families depleted the resources of the suburbs and left more recent Black and Latino residents “holding the bag.”
www.theatlantic.com
THE SUBURBS HAVE BECOME A PONZI SCHEME
A new book looks at how white families depleted the resources of the suburbs and left more recent Black and Latino residents “holding the bag.”
By Alex Kotlowitz
By Alex Kotlowitz
Venice Gordon
JANUARY 24, 2024
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Nearly 25 years ago, I reported on the changing demographics of Cicero, a working-class suburb just west of Chicago. For years, the town, which was made up mostly of Italian and Eastern European American families, worked hard at keeping Black people from settling there. In 1951, when a Black family moved in, a mob entered their apartment, tore it up, and pushed a piano out a window. Police watched and did nothing. The governor had to call out the National Guard. By 2000, the nearby factories, which were the economic foundation of the community, had begun to close. White families moved out and left behind a distressed, struggling town to its new residents—Latinos, who now made up three-quarters of the population. It felt wrong. It felt like the white families got to enjoy the prosperity of the place, and then left it to these newcomers to figure out how to repair aging infrastructure and make up for the lost tax revenues.
After reading Benjamin Herold’s Disillusioned, I now realize I was witnessing something much larger: the steady unraveling of America’s suburbs. Herold, an education journalist, set out to understand why “thousands of families of color had come to suburbia in search of their own American dreams, only to discover they’d been left holding the bag.” In this richly reported book, he follows five families that sought comfort and promise in America’s suburbs over these past couple of decades, outside Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh. In each of these communities, Herold zeroes in on the schools, in large part because education captures the essence of what attracted these families: the prospect of something better for their kids.
The racial and economic fissures in our cities have gotten much attention, but less has been written about how these same fault lines have manifested themselves in the suburbs. This is surprising because the suburbs serve as such a deeply powerful symbol for American aspiration. A house. Good schools. Safe streets. Plentiful services. Consider that from 1950 to 2020, the populations of the nation’s suburbs grew from roughly 37 million to 170 million, which Herold writes represents “one of the most sweeping reorganizations of people, space, and money in the country’s history.”
Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs
By Benjamin Herold
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The suburbs have become such a strong emblem for the American dream that in the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump used their decline as a bludgeon against the Democrats to suggest that that dream was withering. “They fought all their lives to be there,” he declared about suburbanites. “And then all of sudden something happened that changed their life.” He posted on Twitter, “If I don’t win, America’s Suburbs will be OVERRUN with Low Income Projects, Anarchists, Agitators Looters, and, of course ‘Friendly Protestors.’” I can’t fully decipher Trump’s rant, but suffice it to say he knew that people feared the fall of America’s great experiment in community, and he played off white families’ fear that their communities would be “overrun” with residents who didn’t look like them. In the granular details of the lives of the five families Herold chronicles, it’s clear that Trump had it only partially right. The suburbs—especially the inner-ring suburbs, those closest to the urban centers—have been in collapse, but the people affected, mostly Black and brown families, are not necessarily the constituency Trump had in mind.
Herold opens his book by visiting his hometown, a Pittsburgh suburb called Penn Hills. In many ways, the story of this particular suburb captures it all. When Herold’s family moved here in 1976, the average home price in 2020 dollars was $148,000. Now it’s $95,000. Herold knocks on a door just down the street from where he grew up, and there meets Bethany Smith, who has recently purchased the house with her mom. She’s single and Black and undaunted, raising a son, Jackson, for whom she wants the absolute best, which means finding a well-resourced, nurturing school and buying a home, an investment that will serve as a foundation to building wealth. (She’s also gotten priced out of her gentrifying neighborhood in Pittsburgh.)
But Bethany has walked into a mess of a town. Signs of wear and tear are everywhere: most notably, a collapsing sewer system and a school district that is $9 million in debt. According to Herold, the town didn’t invest in infrastructure improvements, kicking any needed repairs down the road. Financial mismanagement is everywhere. Enrollment in the schools has steeply declined. White families like Herold’s have moved out; Black families have moved in. It’s a pattern, Herold writes, repeated in suburb after suburb. It’s what I witnessed in Cicero with Latino families. Herold poses the question that drives his reporting: “How are the abundant opportunities my family extracted from Penn Hills a generation earlier linked to the cratering fortunes of the families who live there now?”
Read: What Duante Wright’s killing foretells about the suburbs
We have, Herold suggests, been looking directly at this problem—and either haven’t acknowledged what’s occurring or, worse yet, don’t care. He points to Ferguson, Missouri, an inner-ring suburb just outside St. Louis, where in the summer of 2014 a white police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, a Black teen. In the news coverage that followed, people were shocked to learn that more than 20 percent of the town’s operating revenue came from fees, fines, and court summons collected from the town’s mostly Black residents, a result of aggressive policing. This was because Ferguson had gone the way of so many inner-ring suburbs.
At the peak of its prosperity, in the 1960s and ’70s, the town was 99 percent white, and local leaders borrowed large sums of money and took state and federal subsidies to quickly build its infrastructure. (Herold points out that many of our suburbs were built with endowed money, either government-constructed infrastructure such as expressways or cheap mortgages through federal loan guarantees.) To keep taxes low, Ferguson postponed budgeting for long-term maintenance. By 2013, Herold writes, the town was in steep decline, and that year spent $800,000 to pay down the interest on its debt, leaving just $25,000 for rudimentary services such as sidewalk improvement. Hence the need for revenues from unlikely places, including fees, fines, and court summons. White people had left long ago, leaving the new residents—the town was now two-thirds Black—with the waste and debris of their prosperity. “The illusion that suburbia remains somehow separate from America’s problems,” Herold writes, “is no longer viable.”
Charles Marohn, whom Herold describes as “a moderate white conservative from Minnesota,” is the one to lay out Ferguson’s decline to him. According to Herold, Marohn had a hand in building suburbs, but he has since had an awakening. Marohn suggests that what’s happened in places such as Ferguson and Penn Hills is the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme. It’s “the development version of slash-and-burn agriculture,” he tells the author. “We build a place, we use up the resources, and when the returns start diminishing, we move on, leaving a geographic time bomb in our wake!”
This is a sprawling book, which is its virtue and the source of its occasional misfires. Five families are a lot to keep track of. I found myself at times having to flip back in the book to remember the contours of each family and their respective suburb. I wasn’t convinced that Herold needed all these people to make his point. So many of their stories echoed one another, and at times I simply wanted to hear more about the architects of America’s dream, especially those like Marohn who have apparently become disillusioned with their grand vision. I so wanted to know more about Marohn. Who is he exactly? How did he help build America’s suburbs? I wonder if this isn’t a missed opportunity, given that Marohn is helping Herold make sense of what he’s witnessing.
Despite its imperfections, though, Disillusioned is an astonishingly important work. We know what’s happened and happening in our cities. Finally, here’s someone to take us to the places that early on served as an escape valve, mostly for white families fleeing the changing demographics of urban America, the places where many Americans imagined a kind of social and economic utopia.
Read: Revenge of the suburbs
At one point Bethany tells the author that she worries he’s pigeonholed her, that she isn’t a victim, that she is more—far more—than just a struggling single Black mom. To his credit, he doesn’t walk away but instead reflects on how he may have failed her. After some consideration, he offers to let her write the epilogue to the book, and in those few sharply written pages we have a clear-eyed take on what has occurred in a place like Penn Hills coupled with a passionate plea for what could be.
“We want to build good lives for ourselves,” Bethany Smith writes. “We want to raise our children in safe environments. We want to have them in schools where they are being taught and governed by folks who have their best interest at heart. We want the same deal that the suburbs gave white families like Ben’s. This time, though, we want it to last.”