Abstract
For many, the state of New Jersey still embodies something essential about the post-war American landscape. Littered with highway off-ramps and sub-divisions—and riven by municipal boundaries that reflect sharp racial and class stratification—the state is (for better or worse) synonymous with suburbia. Few have captured this physical and emotional terrain better than novelist Phillip Roth. In Goodbye, Columbus, he describes a character’s drive out of the sweltering city to the suburbs beyond:
It was, in fact, as though the hundred and eighty feet that the suburbs rose in altitude above Newark brought one closer to heaven, for the sun itself became bigger, lower, and rounder, and soon I was driving past long lawns which seemed to be twirling water on themselves, and past houses where no one sat on stoops, where lights were on but no windows open, for those inside, refusing to share the very texture of life with those of us outside, regulated with a dial the amounts of moisture that were allowed access to their skin.
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Yet even at mid-century, New Jersey’s suburbs were more heterogeneous and less tranquil than Roth (or some historians) might admit. Working-class and minority enclaves—places like Carteret and Garfield—were scattered amid burgeoning white suburbs. Other towns were sites of activism. In the 1930s and 1940s, African American women organized to fight segregation and discrimination in Summit—on the same hills near Newark that Roth idealized (and ironized) as “closer to heaven.” 2
If anything, the diversification of suburbs has only accelerated. Since the loosening of federal immigration restrictions in 1965, northern New Jersey’s immigrant population has exploded: in 2012, 32 percent of Bergen County’s population was foreign born, with most coming from South Korea, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. Nearly 40 percent of its residents spoke a language other than English at home. The townships that cluster around the junction of I-80 and I-95—Rochelle Park, Fort Lee, Hackensack—are emblematic of that diversity. African Americans, Orthodox Jews, and Filipinos brush past each other on sidewalks. Foodies flock from nearby Manhattan to sample mofongo in Teaneck and bulgogi in Palisades Park. These suburban communities are looking less and less like the iconic post-war stereotype. 3
Over the past two decades, the work of urban historians, planners, and sociologists has begun to reflect the present and past diversity of the American suburb. The four books under review demonstrate just how deeply this perspective has penetrated the scholarly firmament. Part of a “third wave” (or perhaps “deluge”) of literature on the suburbs, these works take racial, ethnic, and class heterogeneity as a starting point. Some confound the division between city and suburb, following residents who have moved across the divide. Others look in at the encroaching city, tracking suburbanization from a rural perspective—and in the process, reorient our view of metropolitan development. And still others overturn clichés about complacent suburbs with stories of radical activism and interracial communalism at the urban fringe. In this current moment of revisionism, complexity reigns.
Before examining each book in detail, consider the earlier literature on the history of the American suburb. Following classic sociological studies by Lewis Mumford and Herbert Gans, the first major wave of retrospective suburban histories was published in the 1980s. Anchored by Kenneth T. Jackson’s and Robert Fishman’s canonical works, this scholarship explored how the automobile fostered a new architecture of racial exclusion in the post-war United States. 4 But technology was not wholly (or even primarily) to blame. Discriminatory mortgage lending, inequitable federal subsidies, white homeowners’ privatism and racism—all were implicated in the rise of homogeneous suburbs by a raft of subsequent monographs. 5 Yet this vision of low-density, white, middle-class suburbs only went so far. While it proved useful as an organizing principle for sweeping national narratives, it failed to capture the diverse nature of local experience. How could this synthesis account for African American suburbanization? The persistence of white working-class enclaves? What about the multi-ethnic jumble of aging inner-ring neighborhoods? Taken too far, the first draft of American suburban history risked reproducing the same type of binaries—urban/suburban, black/white, poor/middle class—that it was attempting to historicize.
By the early 2000s, some scholars were challenging the contours of that historical paradigm. One important revisionist salvo came in 2001. That year, Richard Harris edited a special issue of the Journal of Urban History that advanced a “new synthesis” for American suburban history from 1900 to 1950. In addition to comparative pieces on international suburbanization, some authors stressed that suburbs had always encompassed a wide range of ethnic and class identities. Any seeming homogeneity was chimerical—an ideological construct that masked divides within and across communities. Shortly thereafter, Andrew Wiese and Becky Nicolaides brought empirical heft to that argument with works on African American and working-class suburbanization. But not everyone was satisfied. Historian Mary Corbin Sies maintained that scholarly paeans to diversity quietly preserved the old “suburban ideal,” since they assumed white middle-class suburbs as their baseline for comparison. Whatever the case, these scholars shared common concerns. They stressed the importance of representations and mythologies (in popular culture and in scholarship) in the making of the suburbs. Some began to blur distinctions between city and suburb. Others expanded the literature’s cast of characters, with black and working-class actors playing critical roles at the grassroots. 6
This emphasis on heterogeneity was not surprising. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, it was hard not to see suburban diversity wherever one looked. According to a 2011 Brookings Institution report, more metropolitan-area minorities lived in the suburbs than in the central city. During that same decade, Hispanics accounted for nearly half of the increase in the suburban population. African Americans—who have always faced disproportionate rates of residential exclusion—were, by 2010, more likely to live in neighborhoods outside of the city. In all, the number of racially integrated suburbs increased by 37 percent from 2000 to 2010. The suburbs also underwent a concurrent (though not necessarily related) economic upheaval. While suburbia had long housed people of all class backgrounds, suburban poverty rose starkly during the 1990s and 2000s. By 2013, there were more poor Americans in the suburbs (16.4 million) than in major cities or exurban and rural areas (13.4 million and 7.3 million, respectively). The image of the diverse suburb also found purchase in popular culture. In 2013, over 4.5 million viewers tuned in each week to the Bravo TV network’s “Real Housewives of Atlanta,” which featured a well-heeled, multi-racial suburban cast. 7
As these developments suggest, these four books find themselves on unsettled demographic and historiographical terrain. Consequently, each faces some difficult definitional questions. Do they understand themselves as studies of suburbs qua suburbs? If so, how do they justify their temporal, spatial, and analytic scope? Ultimately, we must ask ourselves a similar set of questions. What does it mean to do “suburban history” when authors like Sies have so problematized that framework? Has the concept of the suburb—whatever its ideological complexion—become so fractured that it has lost its use as a heuristic device? Or is it just the opposite: has the category been so overdetermined that it now explains everything—and nothing at all? In short, is “suburbanization” being asked to do too much of the heavy lifting in our narratives of twentieth-century history?
Those concerns aside, some urbanists continue to use the Garden State as a bellwether for the rest of the nation. Climbing Mount Laurel: The Struggle for Affordable Housing and Social Mobility in an American Suburb is one such study. Co-authors Douglas S. Massey, Len Albright, Rebecca Casciano, Elizabeth Derickson, and David N. Kinsey spent years conducting longitudinal research on a single public housing project in southern New Jersey. Their central question is an important one: Can “an affordable, primarily minority housing project . . . be developed within an affluent white suburb to further the goals of racial and class integration without negatively affecting property values, crime rates or tax burdens in the surrounding community?” (pp. xiii-xiv)
But this is not any just any housing project, and this is no ordinary New Jersey suburb. Mount Laurel was the site of one of the most infamous twentieth-century battles over restrictive residential zoning. A primarily black population of rural tenant farmers had long called Mount Laurel home. But by the 1960s, as white working-class families streamed out of the nearby cities of Camden and Philadelphia, new expressways and sub-divisions were built on New Jersey farmland to meet the demand. Hoping to capitalize on this surge of development, Mount Laurel officials razed dozens of African American dwellings. Residents decided to fight back. In 1967, they formed a committee, led by sixth-generation Mount Laurel resident Ethel Lawrence, to demand subsidized options. The township repeatedly ignored their requests. In 1975, affordable housing supporters were finally vindicated by the New Jersey Supreme Court, which issued a landmark decision ordering Mount Laurel—and other similarly booming municipalities—to “allow for the construction of their ‘fair share’ of regional needs for low- and moderate-income housing” (p. 39). This obligation to provide a proportionate number of affordable units (which was reinforced by the 1983 “Mount Laurel II” decision) became known nationally as the “Mount Laurel Doctrine.” In 2000, after decades of local opposition, Mount Laurel finally opened its subsidized housing project, the aptly named Ethel R. Lawrence homes. (Sadly, Lawrence passed away in 1994.)
Since the Lawrence Homes are the only low-income, primarily African American enclave within middle-class Mount Laurel, Massey et al. use them as a laboratory to test all manner of social scientific conjectures. Would the project result in negative consequences for the surrounding homeowners, either by harming property values or by increasing crime and taxes? For the Homes’ new residents—all of whom had incomes between 10 and 80 percent of the regional median—would the suburban-style development provide a higher quality of life? Would they enjoy the same kind of social and educational opportunities as their well-off neighbors?
The authors’ findings are astounding. One by one, they debunk all of the concerns suburbanites marshal against racial and class integration. After the construction of the project in Mount Laurel, crime fell. Home values kept inching upward. And tax rates held steady with adjacent towns. Those who moved into the Homes attended better schools, earned higher wages, and experienced fewer negative life events (violence, arrest, loss of housing, or employment). The project was also an aesthetic achievement. Planners, careful to avoid stigmatizing designs, mimicked surrounding market-rate sub-divisions by incorporating details like dormered roofs and tree-lined cul-de-sacs. Residents who had previously lacked access to recreational space discovered a newfound appreciation for nature. One father remarked,
They planted all the trees around here . . . I remember looking into the courtyard [and seeing] . . . not only the trees, but I look[ed] at my kids and how much they’ve grown, and we’re like, you know, putting down new roots. It’s a beautiful thing. (p. 183)
The project’s success serves as a useful rebuttal to opponents of affordable housing projects. But the authors’ policy prescription—that Mount Laurel serve “as a model for promoting greater integration and a pathway out of poverty for disadvantaged minority families” (xiv)—is only partially convincing. First, questions still remain about the broader applicability of their findings. Massey, a leading scholar of inequality, joins his co-authors in highlighting how socioeconomic segregation has intensified in recent years. In this, they are undoubtedly correct. Yet is Mount Laurel, which is internally homogeneous, low in density, and relatively wealthy, actually a representative of other suburbs as Massey et al. suggest? Are problems of social disorder confined to cities and absent in suburbs, as they imply? The recent epidemic of suburban job loss and poverty (particularly after the Great Recession) seems to undermine both conclusions. As it is, half of all Americans receiving subsidized housing vouchers already live in suburbs. By overlooking these complexities, Climbing Mount Laurel comes dangerously close to reproducing the reductive, ahistorical image of the American suburb that Sies, Wiese, and Nicolaides—not to mention the other authors under review—have tried to debunk.
The book is also plagued by an uncertain causal logic. How, one might wonder, are we sure that suburban landscapes necessarily produce better life chances? Could they merely reflect the preferred spatial arrangement of those who already enjoy outsize material privileges? While the authors’ focus on place is admirable, it prevents them from considering other important factors that move through and across space. Discrimination in hiring and housing tend to follow minorities regardless of where they settle. Simply put, dispersing racialized poverty will not rid us of the scourge of structural racism.
The authors also understate the role ideology plays in undergirding suburban exclusion. Neoliberalism operates via language as much as it does through market metaphysics. In Climbing Mount Laurel’s model, real estate markets and density zoning are irresistible—and strangely disembodied—forces. What is missing is the more elusive, if no less powerful, influence of culture in the making of the suburbs. Often, the suburban spatial order fosters a vision of “proper” residential forms and “normal” (white) neighbors. Self-interest, privatism, and colorblind racism are the result. Urbanist Michan Andrew Connor reaches similar conclusions in his analysis of a secession debate in Los Angeles. He finds that white homeowners created a language of colorblind self-determination to defend their economic prerogatives, even as their numbers dwindled. Clearly, rhetoric and culture—along with markets and laws—remain crucial to the maintenance of privilege. It is hard to imagine how these currents will change course. 8
That said, the relationship between place and subjectivity is not absolute. Like any landscape, suburbs have the potential to nurture both exclusionary and tolerant impulses. As demographics change and the lines between suburb and city blur, the historic association between suburbs and reactionary politics may weaken. Some take this line of reasoning even further, seeing newly diverse spaces as ideal incubators for a revived progressive movement. Christopher Niedt’s Social Justice in Diverse Suburbs, a superb edited collection of interdisciplinary research, drives this point home. 9
The essays in Social Justice in Diverse Suburbs demonstrate how stakeholders in communities from Alexandria, Virginia to Silver Spring, Colorado have fought residential inequality and neoliberal austerity. After Nancy A. Denton and Joseph R. Gibbons’ useful survey of contemporary American suburbs, readers will find nearly a dozen chapters that recover these spaces as “places of possibility” (p. 9). Several pieces are of particular note. Robert Gioielli explores the left-leaning political organizations that arose during the 1960s and 1970s in the “liminal space” between city and suburbia on Chicago’s outskirts (p. 91). Gioielli’s story of working- and lower-middle-class activism contradicts the dominant historiography—exemplified by Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors—that implicates suburbia as a site and source of post-war conservatism. Other chapters survey the shifting terrain of metropolitan politics in our age of ethnic and class diversity. Manuel Pastor contributes a rigorously quantified chapter on Latino social movements in Los Angeles’ poorer suburbs. The coalitions in these “distressed areas,” he argues, are “building ties across the suburbs” and joining with urban communities that share their concerns over immigration and economic inequality. Someday, they might realize Myron Orfield’s vision of a unified “metropolitics”—albeit with “a bit of salsa (and social justice) on the side” (p. 150). 10
Several other contributions share this forward-looking perspective. JoAnna Mitchell-Brown’s chapter examines how community-development corporations in Cincinnati’s older suburbs struggle to include affordable housing in their economic development initiatives. Civil rights attorney john a. powell and urbanist Jason Reece close the collection with a forecast for fair housing and racial integration in the suburbs. Their conclusion—that suburban diversity does not necessarily decrease regional segregation levels—tempers the more celebratory tone of the rest of the volume. This piece also serves as a useful reminder: suburbs are not (and have never been) monolithic entities. Recent developments have made this abundantly clear. Since 2008, the housing crisis has hit diverse inner-ring communities especially hard. Plagued by divestment and job flight, these areas are looking more and more like the central cities they surround. Meanwhile, a penumbra of expanding exurbs remains the province of wealthy whites. In light of these trends, Powell and Reece implore us to dispense with static, racialized suburban/urban binaries—even as we acknowledge the persistence of local segregation. Complexity, heterogeneity, movement, flux: these are the new watchwords of suburban scholarship.
While much of the “third wave” suburban scholarship focuses on contemporary communities, some authors are beginning to apply similar frameworks to historical case studies. How was racial integration achieved (or thwarted) in the twentieth-century United States? Was anyone militating for assimilation even as others erected the exclusionary suburban edifice? This scholarship may not have attained the same stature as classic accounts of white flight and urban crisis. But flying the banner of revision, this research appreciates integration as an intentional practice and a historical process. Historian Abigail Perkiss, at the forefront of this trend, argues that these works form the beginning of a new synthesis, where “scholars . . . use the framework of racial integration—rather than of segregation, alienation, violence, or flight—to understand the relationship between race and power in American cities.” 11
Walter David Greason’s Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey is a helpful first step in that direction. Along the space of contact between suburbs and countryside, racial integration became an inescapable—if not always beneficial—reality. Greason argues that throughout the last century, African Americans in New Jersey’s rural counties strived to secure membership in the democratic mainstream. But by mid-century, expanding majority-white suburbs remade the countryside and foreclosed these black visions of equality.
Suburban Erasure has implications beyond its admittedly narrow geographical scope. In particular, it enriches the still-sparse literature on the black experience in the rural North. Beginning his story in 1900, Greason examines how religious and kinship networks—often led by women—helped African Americans weather the successive upheavals of industrialization and suburbanization. Over the century’s middle decades, those structures of family and faith were formalized, creating what Greason calls a “politics of community” (p. 25). Later, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and similar organizations helped to turn informal ties between rural towns into a potent civil rights coalition. Even after the 1970s, as these communities were increasingly imperiled by development, activists continued to fight for economic security. But their hopes were ultimately dashed, Greason explains, by the twinned forces of colorblind racism and mass incarceration—both of which receive coverage in several (somewhat tenuous) closing chapters.
Along the way, Greason portrays suburbanization as many African Americans experienced it: from the vantage of the undeveloped hinterlands. Greason’s approach is reminiscent of recent work in borderlands and Native American studies—particularly Daniel Richter’s Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Greason, like Richter, inverts our historical gaze: we look in, rather than out, at metropolitan growth. Centered in the countryside, Greason’s actors understand sprawl as “an ominous advance that contracts the available spaces for the slower pace of rural life” (p. 4). Instead of a triumphal march into “empty” greenfields, New Jersey’s suburbanization is a process of intrusion and displacement.
Unfortunately, Greason’s intervention is marred by a sometimes confusing structure. Certain chapters are told as narratives; others take the form of vignettes recounting the experiences of New Jersey’s civil rights leaders. The latter allow Greason to incorporate information gleaned from remarkable oral interviews with black female activists. But they also obscure the causal and chronological relationship between events. The book’s thematic sub-sections—and their lack of discernible change over time—are also problematic. Suburban Erasure tends to slot its characters into a static racial dialectic, with heroic black actors pitted against omnipresent white supremacists and rapacious developers. Add to this occasionally confusing prose, and Suburban Erasure may stymie those who would otherwise benefit from reading Greason’s innovative work.
There is also the lingering problem of representativeness. Greason’s choice of New Jersey is not arbitrary; like Massey et al. in Climbing Mount Laurel—or Lizabeth Cohen in her magisterial survey of mid-century suburbia, A Consumer’s Republic—Greason uses the archetypal suburban state as a proxy for nation-wide transformations. But as discussed above, the Northeastern experience of suburbanization was in many ways unique. What would the experience of racial integration look like in a locale with different sorts of ethnic communities? How would examining the American West, for example, complicate Greason’s rural–suburban binary (a close cousin to the classic racialized suburban–urban divide)?
Carol Lynn McKibben’s Racial Beachhead does just that. A lecturer and public historian at Stanford University, McKibben traces how citizens in a town on the Monterrey Peninsula joined together to champion racial and ethnic integration. “Seaside women and men, white, black, Asian, and shades of brown,” she writes, “worked together across racial lines to meet the highest goals of racial equality and inclusion at every level of economic, social, and political life” (p. 12). McKibben argues that residents’ time at the town’s base, Fort Ord, inured them to interracial contact. Their common experience—along with the equal opportunities the mid-century military offered African Americans—helped create “a political culture of inclusivity” that lasted well into the 1990s (p. 7).
Even though McKibben’s study is limited in scope, she provides myriad lessons for students of suburban history. In particular, Seaside serves as a counterpoint to the otherwise dismal role that government played in post-war urban America. At the same moment, other federal initiatives—especially the interstate highway system and the Federal Housing Administration loan program—were helping to create segregated sitcom suburbs, the military was pushing integration in Seaside. While many municipalities were passing laws forbidding mixed-use zoning and multi-family housing, Seaside’s residents fought (and sometimes defeated) similar measures. And unlike in nearby Oakland and San Francisco, the city’s urban renewal program emphasized refurbishment over demolishment and displacement. Following the military’s progressive example, the Seaside Redevelopment Agency sought to “improve rather than destroy multiracial minority neighborhoods” (p. 127). In 1963, the Department of Defense made this policy explicit, mandating fair housing practices in civilian towns near its bases.
Yet the influence of the military extended beyond its de jure support for integration. In the 1950s and 1960s, the armed forces acted as a source of national authority that local citizens could invoke in support of racial liberalism. Seaside soon became an important node in the broader civil rights struggle. Echoing Mark Brilliant’s work on civil rights in California, McKibben recounts how Seaside’s diverse population—Asian, black, Latino, white—banded together to fight racialized housing and schooling practices. When developers tried to restrict African Americans from sub-divisions in the 1960s, white activists “bought homes on the [Monterrey] Peninsula, then immediately resold them to African Americans, who were able to move in . . . effectively desegregating neighborhoods” (p. 151). In the same period, Charlie Mae Knight, an African American primary school teacher and military wife, recruited nearly seventy teachers of color to work in the area. 12
Unfortunately, the strength of Racial Beachhead—its tight focus on one exceptional community—also proves to be its greatest weakness. While McKibben situates her analysis within civil rights, military, and Californian historiographies, readers may have a sneaking suspicion that Seaside, like New Jersey, remains a singular case. What exactly are the implications for non-military communities? What would have happened if Seaside, like countless other cities, had suffered the deindustrialization that exacerbated mid-century racial tensions? Ultimately, one wonders if Seaside’s racial communalism is a phenomenon we can expect to find elsewhere. Could the town’s success even be duplicated via policy? Barring an extraordinary federal intervention, it is hard to imagine how.
Despite those criticisms, Racial Beachhead is a model for those looking to write the history of diverse suburbs. As in many other communities, immigration is a big part of the story. McKibben deftly handles all of the Peninsula’s demographic intricacies, especially the interplay between its African American, Filipino, and Mexican populations. But McKibben never loses sight of the importance of municipal politics nor of larger national narratives. Whether she is discussing civil rights, suburbanization, or urban renewal, Racial Beachhead remains resolutely contrarian. “The example of Seaside,” McKibben explains, “demonstrates that policies of contact, integration, and assimilation coupled with a vigorous civil rights movement in the civilian population . . . can indeed shape values and behavior in exceedingly positive ways” (p. 3). Seaside, for all of its distinctiveness, represents a legible moral example for those seeking to desegregate America’s small towns and suburbs.
As the rest of the United States begins to resemble majority–minority Seaside, our histories need to follow in McKibben’s footsteps. In order to fully grasp the saga of race and integration in post-war America, historians have to complicate well-worn racial dialectics. We must study those cases, like Seaside, that confound suburban history’s regional and temporal biases. And we must attend closely to the contingency of local stories, even as we situate them within national and international frameworks. Only then will we grasp the new face of suburban America: diverse, but still segregated; heterogeneous, yet stubbornly unequal.