Building Suburbia (eBook)

THE SHAPES OF SUBURBIA We're in the American Dream business. -advertisement for Fannie Mae Flying across the United States, airline passengers look down on dazzling, varied topography, yet from Connecticut to California, monotonous tracts of single-family houses stretch for miles outside the downtowns of major cities. Subdivisions interrupt farms and forests. They crowd up against the granite coast of Maine and push into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Next to residential areas lie highways, shopping malls, and office parks. They overwhelm small town centers. More Americans reside in suburban landscapes than in inner cities and rural areas combined, yet few can decode the shapes of these landscapes or define where they begin and end. Demographers still describe suburbs as 'the non-central city parts of metropolitan areas,' a negative definition, but suburbia has become the dominant American cultural landscape, the place where most households live and vote. Describing suburbia as a residential landscape would be wrong, however, because suburbs also contain millions of square feet of commercial and industrial space, and their economic growth outstrips that of older downtowns. Most confusing of all, suburbia is the site of promises, dreams, and fantasies. It is a landscape of the imagination where Americans situate ambitions for upward mobility and economic security, ideals about freedom and private property, and longings for social harmony and spiritual uplift. For almost two hundred years, Americans of all classes have idealized life in single-family houses with generous yards, while deploring the sprawling metropolitan regions that result from unregulated residential and commercial growth. With no national land use policy in the United States, single-family housing has often driven suburban planning by default. Between 1994 and 2002, real estate developers completed about 1.5 million new units of housing every year, most of them suburban single-family houses. The production of millions of houses-involving massive mortgage subsidies by the federal government, huge expense to individual families, and extraordinary profits for private real estate developers-has largely configured Americans' material wealth and indebtedness, as well as shaped American landscapes. The metropolitan building process holds the key to many aspects of American culture, yet few know its social and spatial history. This book is an account of suburbanization since 1820, exploring how entrepreneurs and residents have transformed fields, meadows, and woods into habitable space. The speed and spatial scale of land development have increased with each decade. In the earliest years of mercantile capitalism, a few suburban entrepreneurs launched isolated experiments in subdividing property and building new communities with the help of family and friends. Some real estate developers and boosters began to work together, forming political alliances called 'growth machines.' Between 1870 and 1920, at the height of industrial capitalism, developers extended their reach and promoted urban peripheries systematically, often working in partnership with transit owners, utilities, and local government. After the rise of a powerful real estate and construction lobby in the 1920s, the federal government took a major role-largely through tax, banking, and insurance systems-in subsidizing private development of residential and commercial property on a national basis. By the mid-1950s, federal tax supports for commercial developers and direct federal support for highways provided incentives for unchecked growth on a scale that...