SUBURBANIZATION
"The United States," observed historian Richard Hofstadter, "was born in the country and has moved to the city." In fact, he was only half correct. Having moved to the city, Americans kept going and wound up in the suburbs. This shift was so profound and so enormous that by 1990 more than 45 percent of the population, or more than 120 million people, lived in suburban areas, a far higher proportion than resided either in rural regions or in central cities. Quite simply, the United States had become the world's first suburban nation.
Although the term suburb is vague and many different types of places are often labeled suburban, one may generalize about the American experience, especially in comparison with patterns elsewhere in the world. Indeed, the United States has thus far been unique in four important respects that can be summed up in the following sentence: affluent and middle-class Americans live in suburban areas that are far from their workplaces, in homes that they own, and in the center of yards that by international standards are enormous.
The first distinguishing element of metropolitan areas in the United States is their low residential density and the absence of sharp divisions between town and country. The outer boundaries of Tokyo, Paris, Moscow, Cologne, Stockholm, and Vienna, to take only a few obvious examples, abruptly terminate with groups of apartment buildings. But American cities blend into communities with broad streets and expansive lawns, which sprawl over hundreds and sometimes thousands of square miles. This dispersal results from the privatization of American life and the tendency of people to live in fully detached homes. Of the more than 90 million dwelling units in the nation in 1990, fully two-thirds consisted of a single family living in a single dwelling surrounded by an ornamental lawn.
The second distinguishing residential feature of American culture is a strong penchant for homeownership. In 1990, about two-thirds of all families in the United States owned their dwellings, a proportion approximately double that of Germany, France, Britain, Japan, Norway, and Switzerland. Only New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, all with strong frontier traditions, small populations, and a British-induced cultural dislike of cities, share the American home-owning experience.
The third and most important characteristic of the housing pattern is the socioeconomic distinction between the center and the periphery. In the United States, status and income correlate with suburbs, the area that provides the homes for an overwhelming proportion of those with college educations, those engaged in professional pursuits, and those in the upper-income brackets. Despite hopes and claims of a recent revival in American cities, the 1990 census revealed a widening disparity between residents of central cities and those of their surrounding suburbs not only in income but also in housing and family structure.
The situation in other nations again offers a striking contrast. The highest socioeconomic sections of Rome, Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, and Vienna are near the business districts; suburban areas are usually lower income in character. In Cairo, the affluent Garden City section lies along the Nile River almost at the center of the metropolis; the major slums are on the southern and northeastern fringes. In Calcutta and Bombay, the only areas with a passable water supply are at the core, where the wealthy live. The depths of squalor can be found in the thousands of legally defined slum districts, known as bustees, around the rim of the cities. Similarly, in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the concentration of the poor on the outskirts is so deeply rooted in the culture that the pastel-colored squatter settlements are called favelas after the name of a flowering tree that grows in profusion on the hillsides.
The final distinguishing characteristic of the American residential experience is the length of the average journey to work, whether measured in miles or minutes. According to the 1980 census, typical American workers traveled 9.2 miles and expended twenty-two minutes each way in reaching their places of employment. In larger metropolitan areas, the figures were much higher. Precise statistics are unavailable for Europe, Asia, and South America, but one need only think of the widespread practice of going home for lunch, often for a siesta as well, to realize that an easier connection between work and residence is more valued and achieved in other cultures.
How and why have living patterns in the United States become so different from those of the rest of the world? No single answer can account for such an important phenomenon, but it is clear that American suburbanization began even before the Civil War, by which time influential architects like Andrew Jackson Downing and Alexander Jackson Davis had already touted the cottage as the solution to social ills, and important authors like Catharine Beecher and Henry David Thoreau had extolled the virtues of yards and meadows to an audience that was coming to see cities as too large, too noisy, and too fearsome to raise children in. By 1900, suburbs had begun to sprout around every city. In New York City, a hundred thousand commuters were daily passing through Grand Central Terminal; in Philadelphia, the suburban Main Line was famous in European capitals; in Boston, affluent Brookline was resisting annexation and thumbing its nose at the Hub; in Chicago, a vast rail network was opening new suburbs to the north, south, and west. If the particular circumstances were everywhere different, the basic pattern was everywhere the same—a new kind of metropolis was emerging that was very different from the walking city of a century earlier. By 1900, the center of every American city had become an area of office and commercial uses that was almost devoid of residences. Nearby were the grimy factories, and just beyond them the first tenement districts of the poor, the recent immigrants, and the unskilled, persons unable to afford good housing. Along these same streets, the well-to-do had lived only two generations earlier.
Beyond the compact confines of the walking city lay the new streetcar suburbs. The residential structures that filled them were not elegant, but they were spacious and affordable by European standards and they represented an attainable goal in 1900.
Farther out, the railroad commuters lived in houses that sprawled in ample yards, thick with trees and shrubbery behind iron or wooden fences. These residences represented a new American ideal. Unlike the in-town residences of the English gentry, the structures were uniquely American; with their pseudo-Gothic cupolas and mansard roofs, they set a suburban rather than an urban standard for achievement-oriented Americans.
How to account for the residential deconcentration of the United States? Why did a rich, powerful, and technologically sophisticated nation neglect its cities and concentrate so much of its energy, creativity, and vitality in the suburbs? Two factors—racial prejudice and cheap housing—were paramount.
In comparison with the relative homogeneity of Germany, Japan, Britain, and France, the cities of the United States, and particularly the larger metropolises, have long been extraordinarily diverse. In suburban terms, this has provided an extra incentive—fear—for persons to move away from their older domiciles. After the mass migration of African-Americans from the South gained momentum during World War I, and especially after the Supreme Court decision in 1954 outlawing school segregation as unconstitutional, millions of families moved out of the city "for the kids" and especially for the educational (as measured by standardized test scores) and social (as measured by family income) superiority of smaller and more homogeneous suburban school systems. The sprawling, single-story public schools of outlying towns, surrounded by playing fields and parking lots, became familiar symbols of suburban life and educational manifestations of tract developments.
Economic causes have been even more important than skin color in the suburbanization of the United States, however. Contrary to popular impression, the real cost of American houses has been relatively low and affordable over the past century and a half, especially in comparison with other nations of the world. There are essentially five reasons for this. The first has been per-capita wealth. With its vast middle class, the United States was the first society in history in which the distribution of wealth did not resemble a pyramid. As a "people of plenty," Americans could afford the wastefulness of low-density housing on the metropolitan fringe.
The second component of low cost has been inexpensive land. Building lots in North America have typically been priced from one-fourth to one-half of comparably sized parcels in Europe and about one-tenth of those in Japan. This is largely because the United States is a land of spaciousness and openness in contrast to its industrial rivals. Abundant land has meant cheap land.
The third component has been inexpensive transport, which has brought home sites within easy commuting range of workplaces. Although the omnibus, the steam railroad, the subway, and the automobile were all developed first in Europe, it was in the United States that they were most enthusiastically adopted and where they most immediately affected the lives of ordinary citizens. Especially before World War I, the subways, commuter railroads, elevated trains, and electric trolleys of American cities were faster, more frequent, more efficient, and more cost-effective than transportation options elsewhere in the world. The mass production of automobiles reinforced the pattern because for the first seventy years of the twentieth century the real price of both cars and fuel fell. Even in 1990, the cost of operating an automobile remained cheaper in the United States than in other advanced nations.
The fourth component of low cost has been the balloon-frame house. The development of an inexpensive and peculiarly American method of building houses with two-by-four-inch wooden studs simplified construction and brought the price of a private dwelling within the reach of most citizens. Whether the exterior material is brick, stucco, or clapboard, more than 90 percent of all single-family homes are made of wood at their core. Such structures are uncommon in other countries, in part because their citizens regard the balloon frame as flimsy, and in part because they lack the timber resources of the heavily forested United States.
And finally, government, particularly at the federal level, has played a central role in promoting affordability. Particularly important has been the unusual American practice of allowing taxpayers to deduct mortgage interest and property taxes from taxable income. The size of this subsidy to homeownership is staggering and typically exceeds by five or six times all the direct expenditures Congress grants to housing. Simply put, the Internal Revenue Code finances the continued growth of suburbia. Similarly, fha and va mortgage insurance, the highway system, the financing of sewers, the placement of public housing at the center of ghetto neighborhoods, and the locational decisions of federal agencies, to name only the most obvious examples, have encouraged scattered development into the open countryside.
These economic factors, combined with racial prejudice and a pervasive fondness for grass and solitude, have made private detached houses affordable and desirable to the middle class. They have produced a suburban pattern of work, residence, and consumption that has thus far been more pronounced in the United States than elsewhere.
Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1987); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985).
Kenneth T. Jackson
See also Automobiles; Balloon-Frame House; Housing; Levittowns; Public Transportation.
