Today, it is commonplace to view American suburbs as deeply unequal. Far from uniform bastions of wealth, many contemporary suburbs struggle with crumbling infrastructure, shaky tax bases, substantial levels of poverty, and spiraling costs for schooling and other government services, while plenty of suburban residents, including homeowners, find it difficult to make ends meet. The affordable housing crisis of recent years is in large measure a suburban crisis, and the inequalities that riddle public education spring in part from disparities between and within suburban school systems, not just differences between suburban and urban schools.
When did suburban inequality and insecurity grow so commonplace in the United States? The answer, according to Michael R. Glass’s exceptionally important book, is at mass suburbia’s inception.
Glass recovers this early history by focusing on Long Island’s Nassau County from World War II through the 1970s. In the face of a severe housing shortage during and after the war, Congress repeatedly liberalized the terms of the Federal Housing Administration’s mortgage insurance programs, including the incentives that they provided to builders to construct suburban homes. Housing construction in the suburbs boomed in large part thanks to these policies, but not quickly enough to satisfy immediate demand. According to an FHA analysis, in 1950, 44 percent of homebuyers in Nassau County had agreed to purchase their house merely after seeing a model home rather than the one they would eventually inhabit (p. 19). Once purchasers moved into their new residences, they often found that builders had cut various corners to maximize profits. After moving to Nassau County’s South Shore, for instance, Irene Mele and her husband discovered a large crack in the concrete flooring in the basement of their new home, experienced flooding in their living room that warped their floorboards, and noticed water collecting in large quantities in their backyard due to runoff from neighboring properties. Mele was one of many new suburbanites who complained of such shoddy construction before a congressional subcommittee in the early 1950s. But in the end, Congress largely blamed the victims and shied away from remedying the patterns that Mele and others sought to expose.
Glass sheds fascinating new light on a variety of dynamics related to the FHA’s mortgage insurance programs and, more broadly, on federal policymakers’ pivotal choice to make mortgage-based debt a key ingredient in national housing policy. Yet he also underscores that debt undergirded suburbanization in other consequential ways. Suburban builders constructed homes, not the infrastructure that new suburbanites expected in their new neighborhoods. Developers frequently tantalized prospective homebuyers with advertisements for new schools, but often those schools were just a promise, not a reality. With tax revenues far from adequate to provide the government services new suburbanites wanted, local communities turned to Wall Street’s municipal bond market. As Glass explains in his discussion of mass suburbia’s early years, “While the population of Nassau County doubled during the 1950s, the total bonded debt of its school districts increased sixfold” (p. 9).
The terms under which local communities borrowed such funds were sharply unequal, however, and these disparities compounded other spatial inequalities that had quickly taken hold in Nassau County. For various reasons, older, wealthier villages in the area could make their own zoning rules, which many of them deployed to prohibit anything but relatively high-end construction. Other parts of Nassau County did not enjoy the same powers. Those areas quickly became sites for the mass construction of new homes in the postwar period. As Glass explains, in older villages on Long Island’s North Shore, “zoning codes prohibited apartments and required lot sizes of one or two acres per house.” By contrast, lots in Long Island’s Levittown “were one-tenth of an acre, which meant that twenty of its Cape Cods could fit inside each North Shore lot” (p. 35). In newer suburbs like Levittown, as populations expanded, demand for public services skyrocketed, but home values remained relatively low. With local property taxes serving as the main source of revenue for financing bonded debt, Wall Street investors generally viewed those and related dynamics with concern. In the end, they charged less well-off suburbs higher interest rates on municipal bonds than they did wealthier locales.
Just as important, these quickly growing communities’ reliance on ever more debt helped drive local taxes upward. Newcomers often found themselves struggling to afford their homes due to unexpected property tax hikes, including because local officials faced spiraling debt payments that, Glass shows, had become a sine qua non of suburban growth. As Glass emphasizes, such “differences had compounding effects over time” and helped to propel suburban inequalities into the future. “Districts that received higher interest rates shouldered higher property taxes to repay their debt; in turn, high repayment costs diminished their credit ratings, leading to even higher rates in future bond issues. Uneven development created wealth disparities between suburbs, but credit rating amplified those disparities over time, rewarding the strong and punishing the weak” (p. 9).
Among other consequences, these dynamics spurred disparities in school funding across suburbs, a topic that Glass discusses at length, making this book essential reading for historians of US education. Nassau County residents pushed back against these inequities and the idea that school funding was primarily a local responsibility by lobbying state officials for monetary aid. New York’s state government offered some assistance, but the funding formulas that state officials relied on tended to reinforce rather than undermine existing inequalities. In the 1970s, a collection of frustrated suburbanites turned to the judiciary for help, but after initial victories, New York’s highest court rejected their argument that the state’s constitution demanded equality in school funding. Meanwhile, as Glass intricately documents, the problem of affordability had grown to crisis proportions in Nassau County’s housing market.
Nassau County remained overwhelmingly White throughout the era that Glass examines. Even so, Glass remains attentive to the profound racial inequalities that defined mass suburbanization, and he dedicates a substantial portion of Cracked Foundations to reconstructing the experience of Nassau County’s Black population, including through an intensive focus on the town of Roosevelt, home to a sizable number of Black residents. Historians of education will find value in Glass’s discussions of how school segregation took shape in Nassau County, how Black activists fought against it, and how those battles led to mixed results, especially since historical scholarship on racial inequality in suburban schools remains scarce. By reconstructing these and related stories amid his broader exploration of inequality and insecurity in postwar suburbia, Glass also pulls off a difficult balancing act. He succeeds in debunking portraits of White suburbs as simply idyllic while nonetheless detailing the many privileges that still accompanied Whiteness.
With Cracked Foundations, Glass joins a cohort of historians who are working to provide a history of metropolitan America as it is today—a moment when demographic diversity, inequality, economic insecurity, and a host of other patterns cut across regions and various kinds of municipalities in ways that have emptied the meaning out of neat dichotomies like “city versus suburb.” Tracy L. Steffes’s Structuring Inequality: How Schooling, Housing, and Tax Policies Shaped Metropolitan Development and Education is another magnificent recent book written in this vein, as is Becky M. Nicolaides’s The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945. Such works promise to inspire similar historical inquiries that continue this crucially important project. Scholars interested in that effort will doubtless refer to Glass’s book for years to come.
