The Shame of the Suburbs

[Celerity]

How America gave up on housing equality

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-shame-of-the-suburbs-denison



KENNETH T. JACKSON began Crabgrass Frontier, his 1985 history of American suburbanization, with three assertions: that “the treatment and arrangement of shelter” reveals more about a country’s people than any of the creative arts; that “housing is an outward expression of the inner human nature”; and that “no society can be fully understood apart from the residences of its members.” Those may have seemed like pleasing observations to readers basking in the “morning in America” optimism of the Reagan era, especially those ensconced in a prosperous suburb. Such readers may not have spotted the potential for searing social critique in the idea that our housing reveals who we are as a society. Hadn’t America steadily increased its rate of home ownership in the post-World War II boom years? Weren’t those ever-expanding suburbs proof the nation was succeeding in building a solid middle class with spacious homes and yards and patios, affordable mortgages, and safe, orderly neighborhood schools?



But today, nearly forty years after Jackson’s book was published, it’s hard to consider our shelter, our housing, our residences, without seeing—if you imagine gazing out across the country’s vast and varied landscape—a shameful societal failure. The United States is built out with sprawling suburbs, it’s true, containing everything from multimillion-dollar mansions to ticky-tacky starter homes. Older towns almost always have a central district with stately Victorians and Georgian colonials, and modest working-class subdivisions at the outskirts where fields used to be. In its full scope and scale, though, the American housing market is a study in the unjustness and disparities that permeate American society. In the big cities, you see penthouse-topped skyscrapers mere miles away from broken-down neighborhoods full of renters who are at risk of eviction if they can’t keep paying half their income to the landlord. You see encampments full of the unhoused who can’t, or choose not to, find space in an over-crowded shelter. These tent cities keep growing, as developers concentrate on market-rate and luxury housing, giving us more upscale townhouses and gated communities instead of low-margin housing for the poor.



Ours is a society that provides multiple homes for the fortunate few—perhaps one in the city, one in the country, and maybe an additional summer home in an exclusive enclave near the seaside. In the middle and working classes, people feel fortunate if they get a mortgage and a decent house. If their timing is unlucky and they buy just before a recession that throws them out of work, they can end up with an unsellable house valued at less than what they paid for it. Then the foreclosure sign goes up in their front yard. When a house is no longer an option, they endure the hell of competing to find an apartment—which might rent for as much as or more than the monthly payment on the mortgage they can’t get. If they qualify for subsidized public housing, they might end up on a list that can keep them waiting as long as eight years.

But maybe those priced out of the traditional housing market can scrape together enough to own something. There are about twenty-two million people—more than 6 percent of the U.S. population—living in “manufactured homes,” most often a mobile home that gets hauled to a trailer park, where it is plumbed and skirted, unlikely to be moved again unless by the force of a tornado. And all along the southern border there are settlements called colonias that were carved up in unincorporated areas by quick-buck developers and landowners who didn’t see the need for paved roads or running water or sewers. An estimated eight hundred forty thousand people live in colonias stretching from Texas to California, and about 85 percent of them are U.S. citizens, according to a report by a Texas housing agency. Some residents start out by assembling a crude structure out of salvaged materials and gradually work toward building a stable house, with the hope that infrastructure will arrive and a hurricane or flood won’t. The American Dream.

A Very, Very, Very Fine House.............

snip

[niyad]

1. KNR and bookmarking. For later. I may be sending this to our local officials,

whose collective heads have been up the8r collective asses for decades.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

2. This suburban living arrangement also keeps us in the thrall of Big Oil

It's no accident that suburbanization happened right along with increased fossil fuel extraction.

The sunk costs involved are no small part of why the world is doomed to eventual climate disaster and why the US will likely never be a real leader on the front of fighting it.