Okay, But Why Were The Suburbs Shaped By Racism?

For nearly a century, the suburbs have been a cornerstone of the American Dream. But for almost as long, some people have criticized the suburbs for being too conformist, too dependent on cars, and to be blunt, too… white. 

We know that the suburbs have been diversifying over the past few decades, and today “suburban woman” isn’t just code for “white woman” — no matter how much the media tries to simplify us. But there’s no denying that the suburbs have excluded families who weren’t white for most of their history, and if we’re not careful, they will again in the future.

President Trump has long tried to win over suburban women by scaring us, telling us that low-income housing (or immigrants, or Black people, or whoever is on his mind that day) will plunge the suburbs into crime and chaos. But not only is there no evidence for his claims, suburban women love their neighbors. We know that our diversity is our strength.

Trump wants to take us back in time to the days of “whites-only” suburbs by ending fair housing rules and investigations of discrimination. It’s up to us to say no way.

Transcript

Okay, But Why Were The Suburbs Shaped By Racism?

CLIP: TRUMP: “The suburbs, you know, the suburbs. People fight all of their lives and have a beautiful home. There will be no more low-income housing forced into the suburbs, I abandoned and took away and just rescinded the rule, it’s been going on for years, I’ve seen conflict for years, so enjoy your life, ladies and gentlemen.”

Narrator: For nearly a century, the suburbs have been a cornerstone of the American Dream. But at the same time, some people have criticized the suburbs for being too conformist, too dependent on cars, and to be blunt, too… white. Remember The Stepford Wives?

CLIP: Glenn Close in Stepford Wives: “Stepford is a family paradise. It has no crime, no poverty, and no pushing.”

Narrator: We know that the suburbs have been diversifying over the past few decades, and today “suburban woman” isn’t just code for “white woman” – no matter how much the media tries to simplify us. But there’s no denying that the suburbs have excluded families who aren’t white for most of their history, and if we’re not careful, they will again in the future.

So why – and how – did the suburbs end up so white for so long? What happened to make them more diverse, and why are some people worried that we’re reversing that progress?

The suburbs burst onto the scene of American life after World War Two. Veterans were returning from the war, getting married, and having kids – about 76 million of them, in fact. That “baby boom” is why folks of that generation are now called “Baby Boomers.” All of those new families needed a place to live, and combined with the new availability of cars that let people live farther out from city centers, that meant Americans were ready to move to the suburbs.

A man named William Levitt is often considered the “father of American suburbia” because he figured out that by buying up land in bulk, subdividing it into lots (which is where we get the term “subdivision”), and mass-producing houses using new technology, he could sell thousands of suburban homes to veterans and their families. And they wanted what he was selling: within just ten years, 85 percent of all new homes built in the United States were located in the suburbs. By 1970, America’s suburban population had nearly doubled, to 74 million people. And that popularity has continued to this day, with more than half of Americans living in suburban areas.

But unfortunately, even from the very start, families of color – and particularly Black people – were excluded. William Levitt didn’t just believe in segregation, he openly declared that his suburbs were for whites only. His first planned community, Levittown New York, had zero Black residents even into the 1960s. According to the 2020 census, Black families only make up 1.3 percent of Levittown to this day.

A Black woman named Dolores remembers what happened when her husband asked if they could purchase a home in the neighborhood in the 60s.

CLIP: DOLORES: “We went to the office where the gentleman was selling the houses. My husband said to him, you know, ‘my wife and I are interested in purchasing a home in Levittown.’ He said ‘get your *** out of here.’”

Narrator: But it wasn’t just individual developers like William Levitt that were discriminating against people of color. Banks refused to loan money for new homes in neighborhoods where non-white families lived in a practice known as redlining – the word comes from mortgage security maps that shaded minority neighborhoods in red, meaning they were “risky investments.” In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer struck down explicitly racist neighborhood housing covenants, making it illegal to consider race when selling a house. But it wasn’t until a series of housing acts passed in the 1960s that there was any real enforcement of that ruling.

It’s worth noting that these racist policies didn’t just keep Black families from owning houses in the suburbs. They also made it dangerous to even drive through them. “Sundown towns” were all-white communities, often suburbs, where people of color weren’t allowed after sunset under threats of violence. Not only were people of color not allowed to buy houses in these towns, they weren’t even allowed to step foot in them. And these weren’t just idle threats – there were thousands of beatings and even lynchings.

Around the 1980s, though, the suburbs began to change. There are a few reasons, including fairer housing laws, suburban houses becoming more affordable as they got older, the rising cost of housing in cities, and a growing Black middle class. In 1990, 20% of suburbanites were people of color. By 2020, that number had more than doubled to 45%. By some measures, the suburbs are now the most diverse places in America. In 2011, the Brookings Institution found that many suburbs, like in Houston, Las Vegas, and San Francisco, have actually become majority non-white, but that’s because white families are moving even further away from city centers into what’s now known as “exurbs.” Or in Atlanta, where 87% of the Black population lived in the suburbs by 2010… but in mostly segregated neighborhoods. 

That’s right – the suburbs are certainly more diverse than they used to be, but that doesn’t mean that they’re integrated. The dream of families of all races living next door to each other is beautiful, but it’s still not really the way most suburbs work.  Not only are many white residents leaving for further-out suburbs and exurbs, they’re also now returning to downtowns, often displacing communities of color that had been living there for decades in what’s known as gentrification.

But it’s great news that America’s suburbs have been growing more and more diverse. Red Wine & Blue itself is an organization of more than half a million diverse suburban women. Contrary to what pundits say, we don’t all look the same, think the same way, or drive matching minivans. What we do have in common is political power. In 2018, support from suburban women helped Democrats retake the House of Representatives in what became known as the “Blue Wave.” Suburban women know that our diversity is our strength.

But change has always made some people uneasy, and the suburbs are no exception. Suburban public schools in particular have become a battleground, like we saw when Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s war against so-called “Critical Race Theory” in Virginia and nation-wide dismantling of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. Extremist groups like Moms for Liberty have made it their mission to swoop into suburban neighborhoods and stir up chaos at school board meetings over books that include characters who are Black or LGBTQ.

Of course, most suburban women aren’t afraid of their neighbors or books in their public libraries. In 2023, a whopping 73% of school board candidates endorsed by Moms For Liberty lost their races in suburban districts where Red Wine & Blue did on-the-ground organizing. But we’re still hearing so much of the same dangerous rhetoric about the suburbs that was used back in the days of sundown towns. President Trump in particular has talked extensively about the, as he put it, “suburban lifestyle dream” in ways that echo William Levitt in the 1950s. He’s been overturning policies and laws that aimed to reduce discrimination in the suburbs, like the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, or–

CLIP: TRUMP: “AFFH Rule.”

Narrator: AFFH was a part of the Fair Housing Act signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968. It was extended in 2015 by President Obama to require that all cities and towns have to publicly report whether there’s any patterns of racial bias in their neighborhoods and take actions to make things more fair before they can get money from the federal government for housing development. Not only did Trump remove that rule, meaning that neighborhoods no longer have to prove they’re working to be more equitable in order to get government funding, he’s also gone further to say that fair housing rules would lead to the suburbs becoming “dens of crime and chaos.” There is no data that shows that low-income people are inherently criminal, obviously, but it’s also a racist statement because a disproportionate number of low-income families in the United States are Black or Hispanic. Despite experts studying these things for years, there is no evidence that fair housing policies have increased crime – in the suburbs or anywhere else.

Under Trump, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is also preparing to shut down seven major investigations into housing discrimination, including some where they already found civil rights violations. But then, the Trump family has been known to discriminate against Black renters and home buyers for decades. Both Donald Trump and his father, Fred Trump, were sued by the Justice Department in the 1970s for their company’s practice of discriminating against Black tenants.

To this day, some Black families will send a white friend or relative in their stead when they’re looking to buy a home or get their own house appraised. Like Paul and Tanisha, who knew their home outside San Francisco was worth at least 1.3 million dollars. But when they brought an appraiser into their home, they were told it was only worth–

CLIP: TANISHA: “998,000 dollars.”

Narrator: They applied for a new appraisal, but this time…

CLIP: TANISHA: “I’m gonna guarantee that my house gets the appraisal it’s supposed to get.”
REPORTER: “And in the United States, how do you get the best rate possible?”
TANISHA: “By being white.” 
PAUL: “Being white.”

Narrator: They removed family photos, books, and art that might indicate their race and asked a white friend to step in and pretend to be the home owner instead. And this time, the appraisal came back at–

CLIP: TANISHA: “1.482 million.”
PAUL: “Almost 500,000 dollars difference. Like we shouldn’t have to repeat what my grandparents had to go through 50+ years ago. It’s frustrating. We’re not as far along in America as we think we are.”

Narrator: We’ve come a long way since William Levitt and his whites-only suburbs, but clearly we still have work to do. We can’t let politicians and real estate developers reverse our progress. Our diversity is our strength… and that includes the suburbs.
Sources

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6145815/

https://nlihc.org/resource/myth-white-suburb-and-suburban-invasion

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory2ay/chapter/the-rise-of-suburbs-2/

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/baby_boomer.asp

https://www.npr.org/2022/11/08/1135190346/suburbs-are-now-the-most-diverse-areas-in-america

https://washingtondc.jhu.edu/news/three-facts-about-americas-changing-suburbs/#:~:text=Suburbs%20have%20grown%20more%20racially,more%20than%20doubled%20to%2045%25.

https://datausa.io/profile/geo/gwinnett-county-ga

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmatively_Furthering_Fair_Housing

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/todays-suburbs-are-symbolic-of-americas-rising-diversity-a-2020-census-portrait/

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-hud-drop-housing-discrimination-cases-housing-pollution?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailynewsletter&utm_content=river

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cySli8JxpaM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5HTimy3oF4