What's “new” about The New Suburban History? On the one hand, this volume of collected essays, edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, includes histories of “new suburbs,” areas that belie the suburban stereotype of the uniformly white, middle class, and residential. Some of the towns we visit are peopled with striving

African-Americans and recent immigrants, while others are host to a large industrial base or a string of high-tech corporate campuses. But, in a more conceptual sense, this is a “new history” of the suburban form itself. The editors lay out a framework in which the unit of analysis is neither the city nor its suburbs in isolation, but instead is the whole metropolitan area treated as a fragmented set of local governments competing with each other for resources.

The best entries in this somewhat uneven volume are those that hew closest to this framework. In “Prelude to the Tax Revolt,” Robert O. Self provides the back-story to California's Proposition 13, a groundswell against property taxation in the late 1970s which capped tax rates and limited reassessments. Self narrates the breakdown of a decades-long “suburban grand compromise,” under which towns kept residential tax rates low by attracting an industrial base and using corporate taxes to pay for public services. However, as “cities across the state compet[ed] for business investment … a constant pressure [built up] on local municipalities to redistribute the tax burden away from business” (p. 155). With the vise tightening, tax payers revolted, perhaps not realizing that the golden age of the industrial suburb had come to an end.

Competition between suburbs and the central city also, in many cases, doomed the court-ordered desegregation plans of the 1960s and 1970s. County-wide school districts experienced smaller declines in white enrollment than cities whose school districts stop at the city boundary. In his essay “‘Socioeconomic Integration’ in the Suburbs,” Matthew D. Lassiter takes us inside the consolidated school district of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina to investigate how this success is built from the ground up. After the initial court decision against the district, rich and working-class whites joined to protest the ruling. The first rift in this cross-class alliance arose from a proposed boycott of the public school system as working-class families complained that private schools were beyond their reach. The alliance frayed further over a bussing plan that exempted the outlying rich areas. Eventually, the coalition collapsed and the size of the school district ensured that well-off whites were not able to escape the consequences.

In these essays and others, political fragmentation is seen as an inherent but unfortunate part of the American landscape. Competition between jurisdictions leads to a race to the bottom, as towns vie to attract industry (Self), or allow the privileged to avoid their responsibilities to the polity (Lassiter). Indeed, the editors focus only on the costs of competition, such as the potential to “replicat[e] inequalities through the creation of suburban municipalities that provide differential services to their citizens” (p. 6). Any benefits of decentralization, including the evolution of a broader menu of local services from which to choose, are ignored. There is no mention of a Tiebout-style process, by which those who value public services most (usually the rich) sort into towns with high tax rates (Charles M. Tiebout, “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures,” Journal of Political Economy 64, no. 5 [October 1956]: 416–24). Also conspicuously absent is Paul E. Peterson's seminal City Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), which first emphasized the limits on local redistribution imposed by interjurisdictional competition. All told, the editors cite from a closed circle of historians, barely engaging with the more theoretical contributions from economics or political science.

These concerns aside, the essays on local government are more exciting than those on the federal government. Arnold R. Hirsch reprises his important but already well-documented claims that the exclusionary lending practices of Federal Housing Administration (FHA), coupled with urban renewal, which cleared many black neighborhoods and built segregated public housing in their stead, are responsible for the racial residential segregation of today (see Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). He reviews policy statements from a veritable alphabet soup of federal agencies —alongside the FHA, the VA (Veterans Administration), the HHFA (Housing and Home Finance Agency), the PHA (Public Housing Administration), and the DSCUR (Division of Slum Clearance and Urban Redevelopment) each make an appearance—responsible for homebuilding or lending in the postwar period. Rather than formulating a consistent policy on the question of race, these agencies “paid … deference to localism,” allowing each city to deny mortgage credit to blacks, if they so desired (p. 55).

This essay adds to our knowledge of what the federal government did to foster segregation. But, the historical literature on segregation will not move forward until we have a sense of the plausible counterfactual—how would residential space have been arranged if the federal government had not condoned discriminatory lending? David M. P. Freund's essay indicates that, while a small share of postwar mortgages were underwritten by the FHA, private banks followed the FHA's lead in denying mortgages to blacks. Was the private sector simply copying the government, or were its mortgage decisions an independent response to lower incomes and higher probability of default in the black community? And, if not for these mortgage restrictions, would blacks have achieved their dreams of suburban homeownership, or were the majority of black households too poor to afford suburban housing, with or without mortgage assistance?

A more novel contribution on the role of the federal government is Margaret Pugh O'Mara's essay on high-tech suburbs. O'Mara asks why, if agglomerations are important for innovation, did many high-technology firms choose to locate in the suburbs? She traces this pattern to the Cold War, during which firms with defense contracts were encouraged to locate on the suburban fringe, far from perceived nuclear targets in cities. Firm location was also dictated, in part, by the location of universities, which tended to be in small college towns. Stanford is the quintessential example of a research-industrial alliance, sustained by federal grant money. While Stanford's “low-rise, heavily landscaped, and distinctively suburban and western look and feel … [has been] deliberately imitated [by many] would-be cities of knowledge,” O'Mara argues that the role of the suburbs in this process is more than simply aesthetic (p. 73). Rather, the safety and amenities of suburban living appeal to a highly trained workforce of scientists and engineers. As a result, urban campuses have often failed in their attempts to imitate Stanford's technology center.

Finally, despite being out of place in this volume, Becky Nicolaides's punchy tour of “How Hell Moved From the City to the Suburbs” is well worth a read. Nicolaides demonstrates how, over the past century, the “environment that seemed most harmful to authentic community—most likely to kill off any chance for meaningful human interaction … moved from the city to the suburbs” (p. 80). The soulless, anonymous city of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, with its hulking skyscrapers, was replaced by the conformist, and equally soulless, suburbs of the Stepford Wives and later of American Beauty and The Truman Show.