Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States[1] is a book written by historian Kenneth T. Jackson and published in 1985. Extensively researched and referenced, the book takes into account factors that promoted the suburbanization of the United States, such as the availability of cheap land, construction methods, and transportation, as well as federal subsidies for highways and suburban housing.
Jackson attempts to broadly interpret the American suburban experience, which he views as unique. He states that "the United States has thus far been unique in four important respects that can be summed up in the following sentence: affluent and middle-class Americans live in suburban areas that are far from their work places, in homes that they own, and in the centre of yards that by urban standards elsewhere are enormous. This uniqueness thus involves population density, home-ownership, residential status, and journey-to-work." His working definition of suburbs has four components: function (non-farm residential), class (middle and upper status), separation (a daily journey-to-work), and density (low relative to older sections). Also dominant in the book is the notion that the wealthy began the flight from the city first—something that the middle classes eventually emulated as city tax rates gradually increased to pay for resulting urban problems—as the poorer classes remained in the older central urban areas.
Suburbs as substandard
From ancient times, the city's primary function was as a central meeting place to conduct business. Jackson argues that before 1815 and the Industrial Revolution, every major city was a "point" on a map that could be walked from edge to centre in two or three hours. Cities had five characteristics:[2]
High population density or "congestion", comparable to New York City in the 1980s: 35,000-75,000 residents per square mile.
Sharp distinction between country and city. In Europe the demarcation was a literal wall of defense (nowadays city walls may have been replaced by a ring road or business boulevard).
Mixture of functions with neighborhoods: without industrial factories, neighborhoods mixed commercial and residential activities.
Short distances between work and residence; most people had to walk to work, and often lived and worked in the same building.
Centrality of culture and elite residences. The upper classes lived within walking distance of work and cultural activities, while the poor laborers lived on the periphery of the urban areas along with the undesirable smells of trades like animal skin tanning and soap-making.
“Suburbs, then, were socially and economically inferior to cities when wind, muscle, and water were the prime movers of civilisation… Even the word suburb suggested inferior manners, narrowness of view, and physical squalor."[3]
Transportation innovation
Between 1815–1875, however, the situation began to change in the United States. With new transportation alternatives such as the steam ferry, omnibus, the commuter railroad, the horsecar, the elevated railroad, and the cable car came "an exodus that would turn cities inside out and inaugurate a new pattern of suburban affluence and centre despair."[4]
The steam locomotive in the mid 19th century provided the wealthy with the means to live in bucolic surroundings, to socialize in country clubs[5] and still commute to work downtown; these were the railroad suburbs.[6] However, "railroad commuting was not only expensive but… the steam engine generated speed slowly [so] that railroad suburbs were usually discontinuous and separated by …open space."[7]
After the American Civil War came the Age of the Trolley bringing commuting to the middle class and expanding the city. The "extraordinary prosperity and vitality of most urban cores between 1890 and 1950 cannot be understood without reference to the streetcar systems… by the turn of the century, a 'new city,' segregated by class and economic function and encompassing an area triple the size of the older walking city had clearly emerged… [so that] by 1904 inventor Frank Sprague could reasonably claim: "The electric railway has become the most potent factor in our modern life."[8] "In 1890, the number of passengers carried on American street railways (including cable and elevated systems) was more than two billion per year, or more than twice that of the rest of the world combined."[9] Tracks "radiated out from the centre like spokes [forcing] anyone using public transit to rely on the central business district."[10]
The influence of the automobile was initially slow, so that even "as late as 1918 the War Industries Board could regard the shutdown of the entire [automobile] industry as a mere inconvenience."[11] However, "of even greater significance …was the truck [which] could do four times the work of a horse-drawn wagon which took up the same street space."[12] Building roads to facilitate the "removal of horses from cities was widely considered a proper object for the expenditure of public funds. Indeed, the private car was initially regarded as the very salvation of the city, a clean and efficient alternative to the old-fashioned, manure-befouled, odoriferous, space-intensive horse."[13][14] This effort was so successful that "as Sinclair Lewis' popular 1922 novel Babbitt indicated, the private car had become no longer a luxury, but a necessity of the American middle class."[15]
Flight from the city
"The changing ethnic composition of the urban population also increased middle-class antipathy to the older neighborhoods, as Poles, Italians, Russians, and assorted Eastern and Southern Europeans, most of them Jews or Catholic, poured into the industrialised areas after 1880. Although only one-third of all Americans lived in cities in 1890, two-thirds of all immigrants did. By 1910, about 80 percent of all new arrivals at Ellis Island were remaining in cities, as were 72 percent of all of those 'foreign born'. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, mayors in New York, Chicago, and Boston were being elected by immigrant votes, and the possibility was raised that urban officials might be unwilling to use the police against labor radicals, most of whom came from Europe.[16]
Jackson examined the New Deal's contributions to public housing and concludes that "the result, if not the intent, of the public housing program of the United States was to segregate the races, to concentrate the disadvantaged in inner cities, and to reinforce the image of suburbia as a place of refuge for the problems of race, crime, and poverty."[17] By grading certain areas based on "desirability" i.e., more recently constructed and lacking of minorities, the government, through Home Owners Loan Corporation encouraged middle class white flight from the city. Meanwhile, the Federal Housing Administration "helped to turn the building industry against the minority and inner-city housing market, and its policies supported the income and inner-city housing market." FHA avoided providing mortgages to those in ethnic or minority neighborhoods, further promoting white flight.
"To this fear were added specific programs to tax property so as to create public improvements and jobs to benefit working class voters. The observation of Lord Bryce that municipal government was 'The conspicuous failure of the United States' was often quoted. The import of such projections was not lost on middle-class families, who often took the opportunity that low price and good transportation afforded to move beyond city jurisdictions."[16]
Lure of the suburbs
"Throughout the nineteenth century… American cities annexed adjacent land and grew steadily… the predominant view in the nineteenth century was the doctrine of forcible annexation."[18] However that would change toward the end of the century: "the first really significant defeat for the consolidation movement came when Brookline spurned Boston in 1874. [Thereafter] virtually every other Eastern and Middle Western city was rebuffed by wealthy and independent suburbs."[19]
By the turn of the 19th century, a middle class expectation of having residential space had emerged, which Jackson attributes to work of Andrew Jackson Downing, Calvert Vaux, and Catharine Beecher. "Family came to be a personal bastion against society, a place of refuge, free from outside control," with "the emerging values of domesticity, privacy, and isolation reach[ing] fullest development in the United States. The big, mean city, with its confidence men and squalor, did not promise the same haven as the suburbs. The "ideal house came to be viewed as resting in the middle of a manicured lawn or picturesque garden."
In 1833 in newly rebuilt Chicago, a new type of building appeared, 'balloon frame,' that "would absorb most of the population growth of the United States over the next one hundred and fifty years." A "new structure could be erected more quickly by two men than the [European-style] heavy timber frame by twenty… [so that] many poorly paid immigrant groups had homeownership rates as high [as] white Americans."[20] "For the first time in the history of the world, middle class families in the late nineteenth century could reasonably expect to buy a detached home on an accessible lot… the real price of shelter in the United States was lower than in the Old World."[21]
Intended to spur housing construction after the Great Depression, President Roosevelt's Federal Housing Administration established minimum standards for home construction[22] and low down-payment amounts, and home loans amortized for the full-term of 20 to 30 years. Before that, "first mortgages were limited to one-of or two-thirds of the appraised value of the property",[22] and loans had to be renewed every five years and interest rates were subject to revision every renewal.
After World War II, encouraged by the emergence of new cities of wartime production and government assistance for veterans, increasing numbers of Americans could afford to buy homes. Given the massive growth of affordable dwellings accessible by the highway and train, families flocked to planned towns such as Levittown where all the details such as schools and public works were already in place so that builders could erect as many as thirty homes a day to meet demand. Most importantly, the decentralization of post-World War II American cities led to the self-sufficiency of the suburbs around the urban core, both as the place of work and place of dwelling.
Conclusion
"Recent changes in Europe support the thesis that suburbanization is a common human aspiration and its achievement is dependent upon technology and affluence. Since William Levitt erected his first houses outside Paris in 1965,[23] the European landscape has become littered with all the trappings of suburban America."[24] "For better or worse, the American suburb is a remarkable and probably lasting achievement."[25]
However, due to the energy inefficiency of the suburb, Jackson believed that the "long process of suburbanization, which has been operative in the United States since about 1815, will slow over the next two decades and that a new kind of spatial equilibrium will result early in the next century."[26]
Other writers and academics have written on the subject of the increasing suburbanization of the USA. For instance, some social scientists point out the role played by racism. During World War I, the massive migration of African Americans from the South resulted in an even greater residential shift toward suburban areas. The cities became seen as dangerous, crime-infested areas, while the suburbs were seen as safe places to live and raise a family, leading to a social trend known in some parts of the world as white flight. This phenomenon runs counter to much of the rest of the world, where slums mostly exist outside the city, rather than within them. With the increasing population of the older, more established suburban areas, many of the problems which were once seen as purely urban ones have manifested themselves there as well. These social scientists suggest that the historical processes of suburbanization and decentralization are instances of white privilege that have contributed to contemporary patterns of environmental racism.[28]
One team of writers have analysed the building of the Interstate Highway System, and have concluded that it and other policies of the Federal government played a significant role in American suburbanization. The building of an efficient network of roads, highways and superhighways, and the underwriting of mortgages for suburban one-family homes, had an enormous influence on the pace of suburbanization. In effect, the government was encouraging the transfer of the middle-class population out of the inner cities and into the suburbs, sometimes with devastating effects on the viability of the city centres.[29] However, some argue that the effect of Interstate Highway Systems on suburbanization is overstated. Researchers holding this view believe city centre populations would have declined even in the absence of highway systems, contending that suburbanization is a long-standing and almost universal process. They primarily argue that as incomes rise, most people want the range and choice offered by automobiles. In addition, there is no significant evidence directly linking the development of highway systems to declining urban populations.[30]
Related Research Articles
A suburb is an area within a metropolitan area which is predominantly residential and within commuting distance of a large city. Suburbs can have their own political or legal jurisdiction, especially in the United States, but this is not always the case, especially in the United Kingdom, where most suburbs are located within the administrative boundaries of cities. In most English-speaking countries, suburban areas are defined in contrast to central city or inner city areas, but in Australian English and South African English, suburb has become largely synonymous with what is called a "neighborhood" in the U.S. Due in part to historical trends such as white flight, some suburbs in the United States have a higher population and higher incomes than their nearby inner cities.
Gentrification is the process of change in the character of a neighborhood through the influx of more affluent residents and investment. There is no agreed-upon definition of gentrification. In public discourse, it has been used to describe a wide array of phenomena, sometimes in a pejorative connotation.
A ghetto is a part of a city in which members of a minority group are concentrated, especially as a result of political, social, legal, religious, environmental or economic pressure. Ghettos are often known for being more impoverished than other areas of the city. Versions of such restricted areas have been found across the world, each with their own names, classifications, and groupings of people.
Levittown is a hamlet and census-designated place (CDP) in the Town of Hempstead in Nassau County, on Long Island, in New York. It is a suburb of New York City, located halfway between the villages of Hempstead and Farmingdale. The CDP had a total population of 51,758 at the time of the 2020 census, making it the most populous unincorporated CDP in Nassau County and the second most populous CDP on Long Island, behind Brentwood.
White flight or white exodus is the sudden or gradual large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the terms became popular in the United States. They referred to the large-scale migration of people of various European ancestries from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions. The term has more recently been applied to other migrations by whites, from older, inner suburbs to rural areas, as well as from the American Northeast and Midwest to the milder climate in the Southeast and Southwest. The term 'white flight' has also been used for large-scale post-colonial emigration of whites from Africa, or parts of that continent, driven by levels of violent crime and anti-colonial or anti-white state policies.
Kenneth T. Jackson is an urban, social, cultural historian, author, and academic. He is the Jacques Barzun Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, where he has also chaired the Department of History.
Urban sprawl is defined as "the spreading of urban developments on undeveloped land near a more or less densely populated city". Urban sprawl has been described as the unrestricted growth in many urban areas of housing, commercial development, and roads over large expanses of land, with little concern for very dense urban planning. Sometimes the urban areas described as the most "sprawling" are the most densely populated. In addition to describing a special form of urbanization, the term also relates to the social and environmental consequences associated with this development. In modern times some suburban areas described as "sprawl" have less detached housing and higher density than the nearby core city. Medieval suburbs suffered from the loss of protection of city walls, before the advent of industrial warfare. Modern disadvantages and costs include increased travel time, transport costs, pollution, and destruction of the countryside. The revenue for building and maintaining urban infrastructure in these areas are gained mostly through property and sales taxes. Most jobs in the US are now located in suburbs generating much of the revenue, although a lack of growth will require higher tax rates.
A streetcar suburb is a residential community whose growth and development was strongly shaped by the use of streetcar lines as a primary means of transportation. Such suburbs developed in the United States in the years before the automobile, when the introduction of the electric trolley or streetcar allowed the nation’s burgeoning middle class to move beyond the central city’s borders. Early suburbs were served by horsecars, but by the late 19th century cable cars and electric streetcars, or trams, were used, allowing residences to be built farther away from the urban core of a city. Streetcar suburbs, usually called additions or extensions at the time, were the forerunner of today's suburbs in the United States and Canada. San Francisco's Western Addition is one of the best examples of streetcar suburbs before westward and southward expansion occurred.
Suburbanization, also spelled suburbanisation, is a population shift from historic core cities or rural areas into suburbs. Most suburbs are built in a formation of (sub)urban sprawl. As a consequence of the movement of households and businesses away from city centers, low-density, peripheral urban areas grow. Proponents of curbing suburbanization argue that sprawl leads to urban decay and a concentration of lower-income residents in the inner city, in addition to environmental harm.
Urban decay is the sociological process by which a previously functioning city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude. There is no single process that leads to urban decay.
On October 7, 1873, Brookline, Massachusetts rejected annexation by a larger neighboring city when it voted down annexation by Boston. When its citizens voted 707-299 to keep its independence, Brookline not only stopped Boston's string of annexations, but it also set an example for wealthy suburbs throughout America. The vote was a significant event in the history of American suburbs.
Urban history is a field of history that examines the historical nature of cities and towns, and the process of urbanization. The approach is often multidisciplinary, crossing boundaries into fields like social history, architectural history, urban sociology, urban geography, business history, and archaeology. Urbanization and industrialization were popular themes for 20th-century historians, often tied to an implicit model of modernization, or the transformation of rural traditional societies.
The African-American middle class consists of African-Americans who have middle-class status within the American class structure. It is a societal level within the African-American community that primarily began to develop in the early 1960s, when the ongoing Civil Rights Movement led to the outlawing of de jure racial segregation. The African American middle class exists throughout the United States, particularly in the Northeast and in the South, with the largest contiguous majority black middle-class neighborhoods being in the Washington, DC suburbs in Maryland. The African American middle class is also prevalent in the Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, San Antonio and Chicago areas.
An inner suburb is a suburban community central to a large city, or at the inner city and central business district. The urban density is usually lower than the inner city or central business district, but higher than that of the city's rural–urban fringe, or exurbs.
African-American neighborhoods or black neighborhoods are types of ethnic enclaves found in many cities in the United States. Generally, an African American neighborhood is one where the majority of the people who live there are African American. Some of the earliest African-American neighborhoods were in New Orleans, Mobile, Atlanta, and other cities throughout the American South, as well as in New York City. In 1830, there were 14,000 "Free negroes" living in New York City.
A large number of books and articles have been written on the subject of suburbs and suburban living as a regional, national or worldwide phenomenon. This is a selected bibliography of scholarly and analytical works, listed by subject region and focus.
Black Detroiters are black or African American residents of Detroit. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Black or African Americans living in Detroit accounted for 79.1% of the total population, or approximately 532,425 people as of 2017 estimates. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, of all U.S. cities with 100,000 or more people, Detroit had the second-highest percentage of Black people.
American urban history is the study of cities of the United States. Local historians have always written about their own cities. Starting in the 1920s, and led by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. at Harvard, professional historians began comparative analysis of what cities have in common, and started using theoretical models and scholarly biographies of specific cities. The United States has also had a long history of hostility to the city, as characterized for example by Thomas Jefferson's agrarianism and the Populist movement of the 1890s. Mary Sies (2003) argues:
At the start of the twenty-first century, North American urban history is flourishing. Compared to twenty-five years ago, the field has become more interdisciplinary and intellectually invigorating. Scholars are publishing increasingly sophisticated efforts to understand how the city as space intersects the urbanization process, as well as studies that recognize the full complexity of experiences for different metropolitan cohorts.
Ghettos in the United States are typically urban neighborhoods perceived as being high in crime and poverty. The origins of these areas are specific to the United States and its laws, which created ghettos through both legislation and private efforts to segregate America for political, economic, social, and ideological reasons: de jure and de facto segregation. De facto segregation continues today in ways such as residential segregation and school segregation because of contemporary behavior and the historical legacy of de jure segregation.
↑ Morris, Eric A. (Spring 2007). "From horse power to horsepower"(PDF). Access Magazine. No.30. Berkeley, California: University of California Transportation Center. pp.2–9. Archived from the original(PDF) on 24 January 2014. p.6: In New York in 1900, 200 persons were killed by horses and horse-drawn vehicles. This contrasts with 344 auto-related fatalities in New York in 2003
↑ "France: A Lesson from Levitt". Time. 10 December 1965. New European housing often looks elegant from the outside, but much of it is backward in kitchen equipment, bathroom layout, floor plans, heating, plumbing and lighting—the innards that make the shell truly livable. The gap yawns nowhere wider than in France, where 51 years of rent control have helped create a gargantuan housing shortage. Thus it is not surprising that the French have enthusiastically greeted an invasion by Long Island's William J. Levitt, the U.S.'s biggest homebuilder (fiscal 1965 sales: $60 million). More than 60,000 Frenchmen have poured out of Paris to gape at Levitt's recently opened American-style subdivision in suburban Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis (pop. 2,000)
Arnold, Joseph L. (1986). "Review: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States". The Public Historian. 8 (2): 148–151. doi:10.2307/3377446. JSTOR3377446.
Bell, Thomas L. (1986). "Review: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States". Geographical Review. 76 (3): 327–329. doi:10.2307/214153. JSTOR214153.
Chapelle, Suzanne Ellery Greene (1987). "Review: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States., Kenneth T. Jackson". The Journal of Southern History. 53 (2): 350–351. doi:10.2307/2209134. JSTOR2209134.
Cunliffe, Marcus (1986). "Review: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States". American Studies International. 24 (1): 87. JSTOR41278834.
Daniels, Bruce C. (February 1987). "Review: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States". Urban History Review. 15 (3). University of Winnipeg: 290–291. ISSN0703-0428. JSTOR43559355.
Desai, Bindu T. (1987). "Review: The Suburban Nation". Economic and Political Weekly. 22 (8): 323–324. JSTOR4376705.
Findlay, John M. (1986). "Review: CRABGRASS FRONTIER: The Suburbanization of the United States". American Studies. 27 (2): 63. JSTOR40642037.
Goldfield, David R. (1986). "Review: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States". The New England Quarterly. 59 (4): 611–613. doi:10.2307/365254. JSTOR365254.
Hoffecker, Carol E. (1987). "Review: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States". The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 17 (3): 691–692. doi:10.2307/204639. JSTOR204639. S2CID147509483.
Marsh, Margaret (1986). "Review: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States". The American Historical Review. 91 (3): 755–756. doi:10.2307/1869317. JSTOR1869317.
Mohl, Raymond A. (1987). "Review: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States". The Florida Historical Quarterly. 65 (4): 508–510. JSTOR30147859.
O'Connor, Carol A. (1987). "Review: The Unique Suburban Nation". Reviews in American History. 15 (1): 115–120. doi:10.2307/2702229. JSTOR2702229.
Schneider, Eric C. (1986). "Review: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States". The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. 110 (3): 476–478. JSTOR20092036.
Sternlieb, George (1986). "Review: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States., Kenneth T. Jackson". Political Science Quarterly. 101 (3): 493–494. doi:10.2307/2151640. JSTOR2151640.
Teaford, Jon C. (1986). "Review: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States". The Journal of American History. 73 (1): 227–228. doi:10.2307/1903693. JSTOR1903693.
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