ABSTRACT
Since ancient times urban elites have been building residential areas away from the crowding, crime, and pollution of cities. Kenneth Jackson (1985, 12) opens his book Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States with a telling quotation: “Our property seems to me the most beautiful in the world. It is so close to Babylon that we enjoy all the advantages of the city, and yet when we come home we are away from all the noise and dust (written in cuneiform on a clay tablet in 539 B.C.).” Although suburbanization in the United States began well before the Revolutionary War, mass suburbanization is largely a twentiethcentury phenomenon. As late as the 1920s cities were still draining rural areas of people (Fishman 1995, 395), but powerful forces were pressing inexorably toward suburbanization as a macroeconomic solution to problems of underconsumption by providing an alternative locus of capital investment (Harvey 1989, 2000; Smith 1996; Walker 1981, 1995; Zukin 1991, 140). Suburbs created a phenomenal growth in demand for private and collective consumption. As David Harvey (1989) points out, although suburbs were privately developed, they profited from large government subsidies in the form of government-backed housing finance and public investment in highway construction and other infrastructures. This massive building program has changed the residential, manufacturing, and service sector landscapes of the United States as manufacturing and service industries have also suburbanized at an increasing rate. Since the end of World War I, 85% of all new housing has been built in the suburbs (Zukin 1991, 140), and by 1950 one quarter of all Americans lived in suburbs. Fifty years later, over half of the population live in suburbs and only a third live in cities (Kasinitz 1995, 387). 1992 marked the first federal election in which suburbanites constituted the majority of the voters. The United States has become, in the words of William Schneider (1992, 33), “a suburban nation with an urban fringe and a rural fringe.”
