SUBURBIA

History of American Suburbs

The American suburbs, the residential ideal of the 1950s, have a long tradition in the country's history. The U.S. Bureau of the Census first used the term suburb to designate an area that had economic ties to a nearby city (because the population worked and spent money there) but was outside the city limits. Suburbs had actually been around since much earlier, in the nineteenth century, for as long as families had wanted to escape the cramped conditions of innercity life. In the 1920s planned residential communities sprang up, as land developers divided vacant areas within the city into lots to sell to hopeful home builders. But the Great Depression ended most private construction in the country, and many lots remained undeveloped or with partially built houses that would never be completed.

New Suburbs

With the boom in marriage and birth-rates following World War II, growth of the suburbs began again. Real-estate organizations now sold lots with houses already built on them in a small variety of conservative styles: ranch or split-level, Colonial, Tudor, or Spanish. Developers were financed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression. The FHA encouraged home buying by offering low-payment, low-interest loans for purchases. Additionally, veterans returning from the war were offered even better lending rates and longer-term mortgages through the Veterans Administration (VA). Because of FHA and VA loans, houses were more affordable than ever before.

Levittown

Perhaps the most famous of these early mass-produced neighborhoods was Levittown, a suburb thirty miles east of New York City. Initially the construetion firm owned by the seventy-year-old Abraham Levitt and his two sons planned to build a community of two thousand sixty-dollars-per-month rental units for veterans. By 1948 Levitt and Sons had obtained the necessary land to build six thousand houses. By this time federal regulations had made it cheaper to sell the houses than to rent them. Even so, the Levitt company found no shortage of young couples prepared to make the commitment. With each expansion of Levittown, crowds camped out for the opportunity to buy the new units. When the suburb was completed in November 1951, it comprised 17,447 homes, as well as schools, stores, parks, and a community center.

Identical Floorplans

The houses in which Levittowners lived were very much alike. Their facades and color schemes varied slightly, but their floor plans were exactly the same. The first floor of each house consisted of two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, a bath, and a stairway leading to an unfinished attic. The house resided on a lot approximately sixty-by-one-hundred feet. Each house was furnished with a refrigerator, an electric stove, a washing machine, and, for the 1950 model, a television set built into the living room wall. After 1949 the Levitt company also offered a ranch-style home which was slightly larger than the original "Cape Cod" model but laid out along essentially the same plan. The Cape Cods sold for $6,990-$7,990, and the "Ranches" for between $8,000 and $9,500. These houses, especially if their owners improved upon them, could be resold for as much as $18,000, although a couple that could afford to pay that much for a home probably did not live in Levittown, which had a reputation as a low-income community.

Housing the Young

Levittown and the other suburbs like it were populated mainly by young families. The average age of a Levittown adult in 1957 was thirty-five. The average number of children in each home was 2.13, meaning that more children than adults lived in the community. A majority—nearly three-quarters—of suburban businessmen commuted to a nearby city for their jobs; but as businesses also began to move from the city, this figure dropped slightly, to 60 percent. Wives stayed in the suburbs almost exclusively, occupying their days tending to home and family or shopping at one of the growing number of nearby shopping malls. Because of the various demands of house, family, lawn, and community, the suburban couple often developed a division of labor in which each took on some of the other's traditional roles. Harold Wattel describes the situation in The Suburban Community (1958): "Father will do the family's weekly food shopping while mother may help paint the house; the male will help maintain the … tile floors while the female will represent the family at a civic meeting; the husband will participate actively in the local Parent-Teachers Association, while the wife keeps the family's monthly accounts."

A Sense of Community

The young suburban families naturally socialized with their neighbors, informally or as part of church and citizens' groups, the PTA, or Little League sports. A self-survey conducted among the residents of Levittown in 1956 showed that 76 percent of the respondents considered themselves primarily residents of Levittown, and 70 percent were willing to work to improve the neighborhood. Clearly a sense of community prevailed. At the same time, social critics warned that the positive aspects of community living were balanced by a pressure to conform, to keep as neat a lawn and own as many appliances as one's neighbors. In his novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Sloan Wilson gives fictional life to the drive to "keep up with the Joneses"; by the end of the novel Tom and Betsy Rath decide to reject the hollow values of corporate and suburban America. The Raths might have inspired those couples already tiring of the pressures of suburban living, but most families remained sold on life on the urban fringe. According to the Levittown self-survey, 94 percent of the community's residents would recommend it to others.

SLANG

Teenager's frequently use slang to talk to each other in order to create a sense of community and to keep their elders from knowing what they are saying. Movies such as American Graffiti and Grease and the television series "Happy Days" made a fad in the 1970s and 1980s out of 1950s teen slang but did not hint at the diversity of that decade's youth lingo, which varied widely from region to region.

In Saint Louis teens called a movie a "hecklthon," and if it was a really good one it was "real George." In Atlanta a "pink" was a snob; "Joe Roe" and "Joe Doe" were names for blind dates; and if someone tried to be a big wheel but did not make it he was a "hub cap." In New Orleans something exciting was a "large charge." Friends greeted each other with "What's your tale, nightingale?" and said goodbye with "Black time's here, termite." In Salt Lake City "she" meant yes and "schnay "meant no. In Boston, serious students were "book gooks," and if a girl wanted to know how much something cost, she would ask, "What's the geetafrate?"

Source:

Newsweek, 38 (8 October 1951): 28-29.

Sources:

Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985);

Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (New York: Pantheon, 1981).

SUBURBIA

Coming Home

As World War II ended, more than ten million soldiers were discharged from the U.S. armed forces. Where were they going to live? The answer, it turned out, was suburbia—1950s style.

House Builder Levitt

There were suburbs in America before the 1950s, but these were nothing like Levittown and its imitators. On 3 July 1950 developer William J. Levitt appeared on the cover of Time magazine, standing in front of a row of identical boxlike houses on newly bulldozed land. The caption read: "HOUSE BUILDER LEVITT: For Sale: a new way of life." First on Long Island, then near Philadelphia, and finally in New Jersey, Levitt built his dream houses and in the process created the suburbia of the 1950s.

The Levitt Design

Levitt and his sons, who had built houses for the navy during World War II, brought mass-production techniques to house building. The Levittown houses, built on concrete slabs with no basements, were nearly identical in floor plan, although there were some slight variations in exteriors and color. The original designs had two bedrooms and one bathroom, and a family could expand the house by converting the attic or adding on. Lots were of uniform size (sixty by one hundred feet) with a tree planted every twenty-eight feet (two-and-a-half trees per home). In the beginning the Levitts included free televisions sets and a Bendix washing machine as incentives.

An Orderly Neighborhood

The early deeds to the Levitts' houses specified that no fences were to be built, lawns were to be mowed at least once a week in season, and laundry could be hung only on rotary racks, not on clotheslines, and never on weekends.

Record Growth

A 1949 housing act helped finance suburban projects, and the low Levittown prices helped even more. World War II veterans—anxious for clean, less expensive, safe places for their children—streamed out of the cities and queued up to buy the new tract housing. Soon scores of builders adopted the methods pioneered by Levitt.

Housing Boom

In 1950, 1.4 million new housing units were built, mostly in the suburbs. This rate continued throughout the 1950s, as an average of three thousand acres of farmland per day was bulldozed into tract housing. By 1952 Levittown's population (in Long Island) had jumped to ten thousand, and a second Levittown in Pennsylvania was built for seventeen thousand families.

No Architectural Distinction

In terms of style, the suburban tract housing followed none of the principles of Wright or Mies van der Rohe or any other of the famous architects of the 1950s, except for the occasional inclusion of multipurpose rooms. Indeed, the Federal Housing Authority "refused to finance developers whose designs they deemed too Modern-looking, assuming that it was a fad that sooner or later would pass."

Patterned Lives

Block after block of identical houses dotted suburbia. Children quickly memorized the exact route to their homes, lest they get hopelessly lost among the similar structures. Only the strange color combinations inside some of these homes gave them any individuality. Early American furniture was popular in suburbia, as were antiques. The houses had few interior walls, ostensibly to cut down building costs. But this also promoted the family "togetherness" that seemed so important in the 1950s.

The Community

Soon shopping centers were built, followed by schools, libraries, movie theaters, restaurants, and churches—all in the same boxlike version of modern architecture that developers liked and, apparently, so did consumers.

The Same People, Too

The 1950s suburban communities tended to attract similar people: young, white, middle-class, and newly married. Blacks, Jews, and Hispanics were not welcome; neither were singles, gays, the elderly, or unmarried people living together. Only the nuclear family was acceptable, with the young married couples usually between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Most had at least one child. Incomes averaged between six thousand and seven thousand dollars.

Suburban Psychosis

Suburban life was orderly and convenient, but also unreal and sterile. It produced harried husbands, bored wives, and alienated children. Not surprisingly, the middle-class children who grew up in 1950s suburbia began the counterculture of the 1960s.

Sources:

Richard Horn, Fifties Style, Then and Now (New York: Beech Tree, 1985), pp. 132-133.

Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977), pp. 133-134, 137.

suburbs. Walls (see walled towns) protected most urban dwellers for the first millennium of Irish urbanization, but even in the 12th century the Anglo‐Norman capture and refortification of Hiberno‐Norse centres (notably Dublin, Waterford, and Cork) led to the partial or complete exclusion of the earlier citizenry beyond the walls. Other suburban settlements (the Irishtowns of Kilkenny and Limerick) may have developed in tandem with the Norman citadels that overshadowed them as they became centres of artisan activity. The Franciscan and Dominican religious orders generally chose sites outside the walls and these often formed the nucleus for secular development. In the case of Dublin, by 1300 most of the city was located outside the walls, partly on the north side of the river. Suburban settlements there and elsewhere bore the brunt of warfare in the 14th and 15th centuries, and some disappeared at that period or were incorporated inside walled towns.

The resurgence of suburban development around 16th‐century Dublin and elsewhere in the early 17th century was a measure of general urban expansion; it was also because of the clustering of craft activities not suited or not welcome in the urban core. Liberties, notably that of St Thomas and Donore south‐west of Dublin's walls, became distinctive urban communities outside the jurisdiction of their parent city. The religious purges during and after the Confederate War either temporarily or permanently swelled the suburbs of leading corporate towns and contributed to the religious segregation evident for example in 18th‐century Cork.

However, in the long cycle of city growth, sharp distinctions emerged between types of suburban settlement: old artisanal neighbourhoods (Blackpool in Cork and Ballymacarett abreast of Belfast); new areas of high‐status residential development (Ballsbridge and Clontarf outside Dublin); and satellite settlements centred on specialized economic activities such as textile finishing, quarrying, or seafaring (Douglas, in the case of Cork, Palmerstown, Rathgar, and Ringsend in the case of Dublin). And by the early 19th century there was a swathe of villa residences inhabited by the well‐to‐do pioneering commuters around Irish cities; they in turn were serviced from the satellite villages.

Railway construction in the 1830s and 1840s created the first commuter suburbs of Dublin (Blackrock, Kingstown) and the pattern was repeated slightly later around Belfast and Cork. The horse omnibus, the horse tram, and towards the end of the century the electric tram articulated the process. Only in greater Dublin did independent township authorities emerge in the mid‐19th century; some of these were controlled by private landowners (e.g. Pembroke), railway companies (Kilmainham), or a tight group of speculative developers (Rathmines). All but Kingstown/Dún Laoghaire were absorbed into Dublin corporation in the early 20th century.

Three processes transformed the scale of suburbanization in 20th‐century Ireland: the pronounced general growth of towns since the 1920s; the huge local authority programmes for the rehousing of the inner‐city working classes; and transport changes, first cheap motor‐bus services and later the popularization of car ownership. Thus by the end of the century most Irish people resided in what technically were suburbs.

Bibliography

Graham, B. J., and Proudfoot, L. J. (eds.), An Historical Geography of Ireland (1993)

David Dickson

Everyday Life: Suburbs

Sources

Growth of Suburbs. During the first part of the nineteenth century Americans thought of a suburban home as an isolated country house to which a wealthy family retired. As railroads began to extend farther from cities, as the cable car was put into use in the 1870s, and as the electric streetcar was developed in the 1880s, however, more and more city dwellers were able to move outside the city limits to more rural areas. Such changes permanently refashioned the image of suburbia in the United States as more and more suburbs grew up along rail lines. These “streetcar” or “railroad suburbs” placed suburban living within the reach of middle-class Americans. Suburbs fulfilled the desire of many late-nineteenth-century Americans for the beauty and serenity of the country without the isolation of truly rural areas. Convenient and affordable, suburbs offered many a compelling reason to commute.

City Services for the Suburbs. Throughout the 1880s many early suburbs tried to provide residents urban-style amenities—including parks, schools, and cultural associations—and services such as running water and sewer connections. These additions took time and money. Community associations and real-estate developers met some of these needs, but residents also turned to local governments. By the 1890s the best suburban communities advertised their paved streets, schools, good transportation, and other services formerly available only in cities. As suburbs grew, rural life also changed. In many regions agricultural villages became suburbs.

Industrial Suburbs. By the turn of the century factory owners took advantage of the services suburban homeowners had obtained from their local governments.

Drawn away from urban areas by less expensive lands, industrialists build large suburban factories supported by good roads, mass transportation, sewerage, and water services. The first to take advantage of business opportunities in the suburbs was George Pullman, who built his Pullman car works and the model town Pullman in a southern suburb of Chicago in 1882. Such an arrangement, where workers lived in a single-industry suburb, provided them access to good services but left them vulnerable to the dictates of their employer and landlord.

Sources

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973);

Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

SUBURBS, RISE OF

The growth of U.S. cities in the nineteenth century was integrally linked with expanding industrialization and economic development. This process of urbanization led to the formation of a "classic" pattern for U.S. cities by the 1930s. Commercial centers that included banking districts and retail establishments were located in downtown areas. Enclaves of working-class neighborhoods were often distinguished by a predominance of ethnic or minority populations circling the downtown. There were industrial and manufacturing pockets, and a growing white middle class concentrated in residential developments toward the ever-expanding city boundaries. Bus and trolley lines radiated outward from the city center to provide a transportation network. The city was a socioeconomic mosaic.

Immediately following World War II (1939–1945), urbanization quickly transitioned into suburbanization. Suburbs are largely independent communities located in close proximity to large central cities. Many suburbs have their own local governments with mayors or city managers and police departments; county governments govern others. Federal investment in economic development immediately following the war included low-cost mortgages for veterans and highway construction programs. Reorganization of American life resulted. The average white middle class family moved to newly created communities on less expensive land outside the city boundaries. Suburbs offered yards, lower density single-family housing, less noise and air pollution, and relief from declining city neighborhoods with their escalating social ills. Millions of farmland acres were converted into bedroom communities. The exodus left cities with declining property values, significant loss of tax revenue, and diminished political and social importance.

Just as urban areas were experiencing a new wave of Southern African Americans migrating to cities in search of employment, white taxpayers, jobs, and capital were migrating in mass to the suburbs, leaving the cramped ghettos and industrial areas behind. Suburbs replaced cities as the place of upward class mobility and economic prosperity. In contrast to urban social mosaics of the early twentieth century city, suburbanites most valued racial, religious, and social class homogeneity. The African American middle class and other minorities ran into social barriers in this resettlement movement, spawned by racism.

By the late twentieth century the United States had fully transitioned from the urbanization of a century earlier to a suburbanized nation. By the 1960s urban factories, office complexes, and shopping centers had followed the population. Telecommunications developments in the 1980s further stimulated suburban growth. Businesses enjoyed more flexibility, locating in desirable settings as suburban business complexes increasingly linked to international economic markets. Suburbs developed their own economic bases independent of the earlier central-city business districts. Suburban "downtowns," known as edge cities, developed on the fringes of metropolitan areas by the mid-1980s. New regional shopping malls replaced city center retail areas and neighborhood shopping centers. By the mid-1980s more Americans lived in suburbs than in central cities.

With the original inner cities in continuing socioeconomic crisis, efforts by cities to annex suburbs were normally resisted by suburban residents wishing to maintain their governmental independence. Planners also explored options of consolidating regional metropolitan tax bases and redistributing suburban revenues. Regional governments advocated "fair share" policies in proposing to locate industrial areas and low-income housing in suburban areas, rather than concentrating them in inner cities.

Suburban sprawl became a key issue with the proliferation and growth of suburbs. New suburbs ringed earlier ones. The rise of suburbia lead to the formation of metropolitan areas with the central city at their core. By the late 1980s about 75 percent of the U.S. population lived in metropolitan areas. Planners predicted the coming of the megalopolis representing the consolidation of multiple metropolitan areas spatially merging together.

As sprawl continued in the 1990s, the inner suburbs faced the same socioeconomic problems as the cities, including declining property values. In an endless cycle, lower values prompted higher property taxes, which forced more movement out to newer suburbs. With suburban residents frustrated over traffic congestion and sprawling commercial development, the growth of suburban populations began to slow in the 1980s. Rising gasoline prices and urban renewal attracted some back to the city. Urbanization of the suburbs was occurring, and urban renewal was becoming suburban renewal. Ever-expanding suburbs faced the same issues encountered earlier by cities. Revenue to provide water, sewer lines, fire protection, road maintenance, police, and new schools for the fast growing suburbs became issues as the cost of government services proved to be higher for low-density tract development.

Through the later decades of the twentieth century, areas of land development increased substantially faster than population growth. Regional governments in some areas adopted urban growth boundaries in an attempt to control the rapid loss of surrounding rural lands. Many attributed metropolitan air pollution problems to urban sprawl, low density housing patterns, and greater dependency on automobiles. The number of automobiles had grown several times faster during this time period than had the actual population. In total, the rise of suburbs in the late twentieth century was one of the more profound socioeconomic transformations in U.S. history.

See also: Industrialization, Urban Renewal, Urbanization

FURTHER READING

Angotti, Thomas. Metropolis 2000: Planning, Poverty, and Politics. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Dobriner, William M., ed. The Suburban Community. New York: Putnam, 1958.

Orfield, Myron. Metropolitics: A Regional Agenda for Community and Stability. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1996.

Rusk, David. Cities Without Suburbs. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Whitehand, J.W.R. The Making of the Urban Landscape. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992.

sub·ur·ban / səˈbərbən/ • adj. of or characteristic of a suburb: suburban life. ∎  contemptibly dull and ordinary: Elizabeth despised Ann's house-proudness as deeply suburban. DERIVATIVES: sub·ur·ban·ite n. sub·ur·ban·i·za·tion / səˌbərbənəˈzāshən/ n. sub·ur·ban·ize v.

sub·ur·bi·a / səˈbərbēə/ • n. the suburbs or their inhabitants viewed collectively.

suburb XIV. — (O)F. suburbe or L. suburbium, f. SUB- + urbs city.
So suburban XVII. — L. suburbānus. Hence suburbia XIX.

sub·urb / ˈsəbərb/ • n. an outlying district of a city, esp. a residential one.

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