Disgruntlement about the loneliness, isolation and inconveniences of contemporary suburban life have now become central to the public conversation about sprawl. Recent public health studies show connections between suburban living and hypertension, obesity and depression.
Stuck in traffic, flanked by anonymous strip malls, city escapees who once yearned for backyards now long for sidewalks and the public life associated with cities and towns. The family dog has begun chasing its tail. While “town square developments” like Celebration, Fla., break new ground to manufacture the feeling, Dolores Hayden, a proud suburbanite herself, suggests we stop at the cul-de-sac and look around. A historian, she knows that in order to make the most of where we’re going, or where we should be going, we first need to understand where we’ve been.
Created consumerism is a keystone of her analysis. The “community” that many suburbanites feel is missing, she argues, was lost to developers whose concern was profitability. Suburbs were “deliberately planned to maximize consumption of mass-produced goods and minimize the responsibility of the developers to create public space and public services,” writes Hayden in her important new book, “Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000” (368 pages. Pantheon. $26). “Contestation–between residents who wish to enjoy suburbia and developers who see to profit from it–lies at the heart of suburban history.” Surprisingly, she makes the lessons fun to learn.
If you are inclined to dismiss the interestingness of the suburbs, Hayden will graciously cure you of the slur. She isn’t opposed to the idea of suburbia, in fact she believes in its promised dream of “home, nature and community.” But what disturbs her is how profit has been factored into the planning process for these communities.
If the phrase “housing subsidy” makes you think of poor people instead of rich ones, the book is more than a necessary read. Regardless of which side of the gated community you rest on, it’s a valuable primer on all the hope and misinformation we dump onto the vast tract of our culture’s fast track–the American dream gridlocked against the increasingly visible realities of American sprawl. During election season, it’s also useful to understand how, exactly, the collaboration of the federal government, private developers and real-estate interests continue to subsidize housing for society’s wealthiest without regard for environmental limitations, while neglecting existing public structures and spaces and saddling the taxpayer for the resulting gnarl of bills.
A professor of architecture and urbanism and American studies at Yale University, Hayden documents the evolution of the suburbs from their 19th-century utopian origins to the present day. “Building Suburbia” is Hayden’s fifth book in the field, and she deftly draws upon her wide breadth of expertise. This is the one she wrote for the lay reader, and her inviting and lucid prose capably steers one through any academic fray. The tour she’s guiding is an often surprising 180-year hike through metropolitan history that will leave one looking at the more mundane of American landscapes in an entirely fresh way.
Who would have guessed that the first suburbs were influenced by socialist aspirations? Or that Herbert Hoover “wanted to standardize the ways different localities regulated construction in order to maximize mass consumption”? That the white exclusivity of the suburbs was sustained by racist banking, real-estate and transportation policies shouldn’t be surprising, but there’s nothing like the force of detailed fact. Levittown, the largest all-white community in the United States as of 1960, contracted specifically that “residents must be of the Caucasian race, although they could employ household help such as maids or yard workers who were not.”
Class antagonism was reinforced by policies that quietly and substantially subsidized private housing for the privileged while more visible but meager housing was being built for the poor. Yet the poor didn’t benefit from ownership. The controversial “mansion subsidy”–larger tax breaks for larger mortgages–continues to cost $80 billion a year, more than the annual budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
To this day, she writes, “federal and state governments spend billions on growth while politicians argue that sound public transportation, public schools, health insurance, child care and paid parental leave are too expensive for extensive federal support.”
Despite debate and discontent and a chronic affordable-housing crises, sprawl continues. How can public planning balance the solitude, connection, convenience and respite we crave? What do communities need, not only to sustain themselves but to thrive? Unless we understand how the history of our complex suburbs unfolded, Hayden argues, current renewal campaigns–to reduce consumption or reintegrate pedestrian mobility, for example–are bound to fail. She advocates preservation and creative use of existing structures rather than unhindered greenspace development. Her sound knowledge is disturbing, but ultimately inspiring because, fact by fact, she shows us that it was not inevitable that our space turned out quite this way. By 2000, there were more suburban dwellers than residents in central cities and rural areas combined. However, like the traffic congestion of an “edge node” (“cityless” cities, characterized less by residential feeling than the square-footage of leasable office space), the lack of planning has its daily consequences, and those consequences take their toll. Wherever your heart is, home is, ideally, where your time’s spent–or what’s left over of the 8 billion hours Americans annually spend in traffic jams.
