The New Suburban History

More politically focused than Crabgrass Frontier, which all the authors take as a foundational text, the essays explore areas that Jackson did not go into detail on, though they don’t really disagree with his analysis other than to qualify it in certain ways. Essays consider segregation, the role of universities and research parks in shaping suburbia, visions of suburbia as Hell, African-American suburban experiences and aspirations, California’s tax revolt, claims for socioeconomic equity, and immigration. The most powerful for me was the first, David M.P. Freund’s Marketing the Free Market: State Intervention and the Politics of Prosperity in Metropolitan America, which argued that pervasive government interventions that allowed show more whites to move to the suburbs underwrote not just mortgages but a new narrative of racial innocence. By accepting the government’s own narrative that government intervention was only guaranteeing what the free market would naturally produce, and that this free market was necessary as an engine of American prosperity, whites were able to believe a number of related claims: African-Americans naturally drive down property values; white ability to move to the suburbs was a sign of deserved success; opposition to integration was not due to racism but to cold hard economic facts about property values. “It’s only natural, and thus we need to reinforce it with incentives and punishments”—the logic of oppression repeats itself again and again. show less