"Disillusioned" by Suburbia

There's a review in the NY Times today of a book called "Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs," by Benjamin Herold. This book makes an argument I think is important, if not enitrely correct. From this review, and other places I have encountered this argument, I will summarize it like this:

Beginning in the 1910s, white Americans began to move in large numbers to the suburbs. To house the growing population and provide everyone with the trappings of a modern life – house, yard, neighborhood – millions of new houses were built. Many of them were built cheaply, and the infrastructure to serve them was also often shoddy: sewers, electrical systems, gas lines, streets. Especially from the late 1940s to the mid 1960s, America built millions of crappy suburban houses served by leaky sewer lines and inch-thick sidewalks. 

Also, while before WW II most suburbs were built around streetcar or commuter rail lines, after WW II they became entirely car-centric, and many of them closed old public transit lines or refused new ones to keep out undesirables. They also zoned out most economic activity, especially anything industrial.

The result is what Herold calls a "time bomb." All of those shoddily built houses are decaying, as are the water lines, sewer lines, streets, and so on built in such a hurry, while the tax revenue needed to pay for upgrades falls. For jurisdictions funded mainly by property taxes, it is simply not sustainable to rely on a tax base that consists of moderately-priced houses; the people who live in them cost the county or city more than they pay in taxes. You need some amount of commercial, industrial, or high-end housing to balance the budget, or big apartment buildings. The problem is worsened by white folks leaving older suburbs to move even farther out in search of whiter schools and bigger lawns.

And there is some truth to this. But.

Right now we have a very different sort of construction regime in America. Now, housing developers have to pay up front for good sewers and streets and even new schools and other amenities; to get approval for a big housing development in Haymarket, Virginia, the developer agreed to pay for a new high school and a new commuter rail station. They have to pay for stormwater management systems to reduce flooding, mitigation measures for wetlands they destroy, and on and on. As a result, new housing developments are more sustainable in a lot of ways, especially fiscally, but we have a severe shortage of affordable housing. Say what you want about the Levittown model, it provided affordable housing for millions of families. A big part of why many Americans feel like their standard of living has declined is that our housing costs so much more.

Also, it is not true in general that older, inner-ring suburbs are declining. I should know, I live in one that is booming, with new housing being wedged into every available space and the price of existing homes up about a hundred percent in 25 years. In places like South San Francisco, little Levittown-style houses are going for big bucks to tech workers who enlarge or upgrade them, even though the taxes have to be high to upgrade the crumbling infrastructure.

Herold makes much of the racial side to this, with minority folks driving whites ever farther into the suburbs. This has happened in many places. But right now the reverse is just as likely, with richer white folks buying poor people out of gentrifying inner ring suburbs, forcing minority people to move farther out and endure monstrous commutes. In Maryland we have the interesting case of Prince George's County on the east side of DC, where the black folks moving in are richer than the white folks who are leaving for outer exurbia, so we have gentrification and white flight at the same time.

Part of the point of Herold's book is to say that the American Dream of circa 1965 was an illusion, propped up by unsustainable tax subsidies and shoddy infrastructure, defended by racial exclusion policies and anyway not affordable to many people. Fine. But I don't really get the point of writing about five hard-luck families in five different hard-luck suburbs. Everybody knows that not everyone in America is thriving; everybody knows that some communities are "troubled." I'm sure the massive development of the 1948-1973 period could have been done better. But it simply is not true that most older suburbs are decaying; their status depends on the overall economic health of their regions, and also sometimes on little details like where school district lines are drawn.

There just isn't enough money in the world to make life great for everyone. Compromises have to be made. In Europe, housing for their booming post-war populations was largely provided via government-constructed concrete apartment blocks. But they, it turns out, were also shoddy and also now need to be replaced or restored (at great expense). Many apartment blocks that were perfectly decent places to live in 1965 have now become decaying, crime-ridden hell holes. This suggests that the suburban model was not the root of the problem.

No system works all the time, for everyone. As long as our society is founded, in a very deep way, on individual effort and achievement – or, if you prefer, on a rigged competition played out across a massively tilted playing field – it will continue to generate unequal outcomes. What we do for those at the bottom is a deep and hard problem that this critique of suburbia does not touch.