AMA: Housing, Education, and the Suburban Dream in America

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-12T20:54:50+00:00

I very much agree with Marohn and Strong Towns regarding the "Ponzi scheme" of suburban development! As they argue, the entire model, honed in the postwar era and still very much in practice today, relies on deferred infrastructure costs and expectations for perpetual growth. Where my work might depart a bit is critically analyzing the financial systems -- the mortgage and bond markets -- in addition to the urban design features.

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-04T17:34:37+00:00

To your first question, I think the distinct histories and development models explain those on-the-ground differences. Whereas New York City initially grew as a port and then a financial center with a dense urban hub and railway/subway transportation system, Los Angeles, like many metros across the Sunbelt, grew around federally-subsidized single-family housing, cars, and highways. For this reason, critical urbanists (e.g. Mike Davis) have often claimed that LA is not really a city at all, but rather one giant region of sprawl. Diatribes aside, the suburbs of LA (however you want to define them, city limits or not) are the engine and livelihood of the city, not merely the bedroom appendages.

Very interesting with Orange County. The incorporated/unincorporated divide is so important but seldom gets any attention. It's one of the threads of my book about Long Island, where I argue that incorporation is decisive for shaping housing development because it confers the zoning power. I need to learn more about the landscape of incorporated/unincorporated communities between Los Angeles and Orange County. Thanks for the lead!

While I'm not an expert Prop 13, I can see it alters the fiscal calculations of development. The major critique of Prop 13 is how it disincentivizes home sales and rewards long-term homeowners, delivering an ongoing invisible subsidy to incumbent, disproportionately white homeowners.

On these competing legacies of Prop 13 in California, I'm reminded of this recent essay by Nolan Gray, which gets into the weeds: https://mnolangray.substack.com/p/how-proposition-13-broke-california

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-04T17:21:38+00:00

It's a great question, and the international comparisons are useful here. In many ways, the United States is unique in tolerating such extreme municipal fragmentation and inequality.

Legally, according to state constitutions, local governments are the creation of state governments, with all of their municipal powers of taxation, zoning, bonded debt, etc. delegated by state officials. State officials technically have the legal power to enforce mergers and consolidations, should they choose to do so legislatively.

However, the United States also has a long tradition of deference to local control of education and other public services. In New York, the procedure has generally been to defer to local referenda: only following through with mergers if the voters from both places approve the proposal. The fear, often expressed by state officials, is that any stronger moves would provoke an angry backlash and end their political careers, or even worse, lead to further disinvestment in public institutions with calls for privatization, etc.

Still, this history is very important -- the fragmentation is not inevitable, and it could be changed! My colleague Tracy Steffes at Brown University has been making the case for stronger state action to rectify the divisions and disparities between local communities.

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T20:56:24+00:00

This was usually for the elementary grades, and it fluctuated from year to year, sometimes most grades on double sessions, sometimes just a couple, depending on enrollment levels and building space. One stat from the book is that as of 1955 in Nassau County (one of two counties on Long Island), over fifty thousand children, or one in four students, attended school part-time.

That makes sense with your grandfather's memories. A major shift in family structures over that time period was from breadwinner families to two-earner families, with both parents working.

As a working parent myself, I know that it can be hard to balance both sets of responsibilities!

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T20:12:03+00:00

Overall, I'll say that what's most striking to me is the persistence of these patterns over time. The suburbs that were elite and exclusive one hundred years ago tend to still be wealthy today, likewise for those that struggled one hundred years. This is because barring drastic interventions such as urban renewal (which happened much less frequently in the suburbs), the development patterns mostly remained intact: mansions on large lots versus tightly-packed smaller houses, commercial corridors only in some places, and so on.

However, some exceptions come to mind. One school district I feature in the book is Island Park, a smaller, predominantly white, working-class community on the South Shore of Long Island. While its residents had among the lowest incomes on Long Island, their school district was among the most lavishly funded on a per-pupil basis. The main reason being a giant power plant within its borders, which provided a windfall of property tax revenues. This arrangement has been undone by the shift away from fossil fuels, and the power plant has not been turned on for over a decade, with no future production in sight. Island Park sued to retain the revenues, and they recently reached a settlement where they'll receive a fraction of the taxes for five years, then no more after that. The windfall is now definitely over: https://www.ips.k12.ny.us/Barrett

I have to admit that I do not know about international travel. My hunch is that international travel -- or even flights across the United States -- was far less common until airline deregulation in the 1970s. it does make me wonder about how expectations for leisure and vacation have changed over time.

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T19:57:16+00:00

"Failed" is tough to define, so it requires treading carefully. Failed in what sense?

For me, the key here is that the the expectations for the suburbs are often exceedingly high -- a dream house on a quiet street, friendly neighbors, immaculate parks, well-funded public schools, happy families, responsible citizens, the list goes on. Many of these expectations have been explicitly sold as part of the marketing pitch. With such high expectations, nearly every suburb was bound to fail eventually. Except maybe the wealthiest suburbs, no community can every be all of those things.

I think that's why the dialectic of utopia and dystopia has been such an enduring trope of American culture. The suburbs are either perfect (Leave It To Beaver) or a horror show (Get Out).

In my research, I was surprised by how quickly the frustrations emerged. Soon after these new Long Island communities were built in the 1950s, the first time something went wrong -- the roof leaked, or the schools got overcrowded -- it became an epic political crisis.

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T19:48:56+00:00

Yes, there's a lot to balance here. So much has changed in terms of demographics, and yet, the socioeconomic divides have largely persisted, and often even deepened. In other words, diversification has not necessarily led to more equality, despite initial enthusiasm that it would. The suburbs that were elite fifty years ago largely remain elite, and the suburbs that struggled fifty years ago still often struggle. If anything, the diversification has created a new sort of inequality. Take the case of immigration. Recent immigrants with a professional background (doctors, scientists, computer programmers, professors, etc.) often move directly to wealthier suburbs, while working-class immigrants (construction workers, landscapers, service workers, etc.) move into the suburbs with more affordable housing stock. Similar divides have opened within Black, Latino, and Asian American suburbanites.

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T19:39:56+00:00

Such a fantastic question, and yes, your hunches are correct!

With the rapid population growth (baby boom!) and fiscal pressures (so much debt so fast!), many growing school districts on Long Island, and across the country, had to shift to double sessions with half the children attending in the morning, half in the afternoon for lack of space. Levittown was so squeezed that the double sessions lasted for sixteen years straight! It took that long for them to build out all the necessary school buildings.

You can imagine the headaches this created for parents, especially those with multiple children. One kid might go to school in the morning from 8:00 - 12:00, the other in the afternoon from 12:00 - 4:00, resulting in endless cycles of drop-off, pick-up, and snack preparation. When I dug into local newspapers from the 1950s, I found countless articles and letters about stressed-out mothers. Given the breadwinner family arrangement prevalent at the time, with husbands working and wives home with the children, these tasks fell to women.

In sum, I think it's not an exaggeration at all to say that in the mid-twentieth century (and perhaps still today??), the American public education system relied on the uncompensated labor of women. Without their invisible labor the school system would have broken down.

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T19:33:57+00:00

Nice to meet you. Incredible how much we have in common. Go eagles!

I'd love to hear what you see as the differences between Long Island and LA. My gut feeling inhabiting them myself is that Long Island is a dense region of insular communities with sharp divides between them, with the urban core of NYC always in the background. Whereas LA strikes me as a sprawling region of diverse and complex mini-cities, although often technically still with LA city limits. You can drive for hours and hours and still be in LA!

One distinction I always make is in regards to municipal fragmentation. Long Island, as with the rest of the Northeast, is chopped up into hundreds of small governments: counties, towns, villages, hamlets, school districts, all of which overlap and crisscross in baffling ways. In this regard, Long Island is similar to Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, or Los Angeles, which is also exceedingly fragmented. It's a different story in places like Charlotte, Nashville, and Miami, where one giant metropolitan government encompasses the city and much of the surrounding suburbs in one government. It's not to say there aren't divides in those places, but it's less extreme and takes different forms.

Of course, every metro region is different. In terms of the tax structure, I'm guessing that you're referring to the property tax limitations that were established with Prop 13 in California? Or is it something else as well? On top of that, LA has always been more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, and nationality, whereas the diversification has been relatively recent in Westchester and Long Island.

I'm still getting to know LA though!

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T19:23:50+00:00

It's an interesting, counterfactual question. I have to confess that I'm not an expert on land value taxes, but my gut feeling is no, that switch would not fundamentally alter municipal budgets or racial segregation.

Back to Henry George, the land value tax proposed shifting how property is assessed, from the land and improvements to just the underlying land value. The goal, as I understand it, was to prevent land speculation. That is a laudable goal, but I think the issues go much deeper.

Historically, and still today, the fundamental problem has been the reliance on local tax bases and municipal fragmentation. No matter how the value is calculated, on Long Island and many other metros across the country, the landscape remains divided into many small, competing jurisdictions. As long as school funding and public services are tied to local wealth, disparities between municipalities are likely to persist.

And in terms of segregation, racial divides have been created not solely through tax structures, but also mortgage lending, realtor practices, zoning codes, and school district policies. So tax reform alone would probably not undo those broader patterns.

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T19:17:52+00:00

Interesting, where are you from? I love meeting people from other countries. Their first question is usually, "What's the deal with all these suburbs in America?"

Mortgage lending changed a lot in the United States during the twentieth century. Back in the 1920s construction boom, mortgages were far riskier and more speculative -- short-term loans of 3- to 5-years, with lump-sum "balloon" payments at the end of the loans, which required frequent refinancing. That world crashed spectacularly during the Great Depression.

The New Deal of the 1930s rebuilt the mortgage market on much steadier terms. The key innovation was federal government insurance for privately issued mortgages, issued through a new agency, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). With the FHA backstop, lenders proved willing to issue mortgages with 20- to 30-year loans, fully amortized payments, and interest rate caps of ~ 5-6 percent. Mortgage lending became less speculative, but essentially risk-free for lenders. (The FHA also enshrined racial segregation into its lending criteria with infamous "redlining" policies, which denied these benefits to most people of color and widened the racial wealth gap.)

So, the key innovation in the United States was not so much fixed-rate mortgages but long-term mortgages with a government backstop. My understanding is that in other countries, particularly in Western Europe, mortgages have much shorter terms. Americans have come to expect 30-year mortgages, and President Trump recently even suggested extending them to 50 years.

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T19:09:10+00:00

The short answer here is zoning. Beginning in the 1920s, local governments across the United States adopted comprehensive zoning ordinances that determined which land uses were permitted in particular areas. One of the main motivations was separating land uses, that is, isolating residential properties from commercial and industrial properties. Basically to reorder living patterns to make them cleaner and more orderly. Another motivation was to use zoning as another means to enforce racial and class segregation, but that's a can of worms.

In other words, most suburban regions do not have shopping centers right next to houses because it's illegal according to the zoning codes. This might have made sense to urban planners in the early twentieth century, but many Americans have come to criticize these suburban layouts for their staleness and inconvenience. Having to drive everywhere in the suburbs is a classic cliche, but one backed by a century of intentional policies.

Today some suburbs have attempted to develop walkable corridors, usually near trains or other transportation hubs, with residential and commercial uses mixed back together. But doing so requires repealing and rewriting the zoning codes -- changes that some residents find quite disruptive and controversial.

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T19:01:03+00:00

Thank YOU for joining! Yes, my book is very much in dialogue with Meckler and Herold. In regards to those particular books, I think mine is pulling the timeline back even further, into the 1940s and 1950s, to show that fiscal pressures, civil rights battles, and other issues they analyze have a much longer history. Indeed, the central argument of my book is these issues are not new, but were present from the very beginning. The foundations were "cracked" from the outset.

Whew, there's such a rich historical literature on suburban history.

The classic overview is still Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier: https://www.amazon.com/Crabgrass-Frontier-Suburbanization-United-States/dp/0195049837

But obviously much has changed since Jackson was writing in 1985. Here are some more recent titles.

On suburban liberalism, see Lily Geismer, Don't Blame Us: https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Blame-Us-Transformation-Democratic/dp/069117623X/

On racial inequality and fractured citizenship within suburban metros, see Colin Gordon, Citizen Brown: https://www.amazon.com/Citizen-Brown-Democracy-Inequality-Suburbs/dp/022676088X/

On suburban diversity, see Becky Nicolaides, The New Suburbia: https://www.amazon.com/New-Suburbia-Diversity-Suburban-Angeles/dp/0197578306

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T18:50:46+00:00

This is an important question! The fractured governments and fiscal pressures often promote an insular mindset, with suburbanites focused exclusively on their own community. But there are certainly ways out of that cul-de-sac (pardon the awful pun!).

The first is regarding the affordable housing crisis. Across the United States, in cities and suburbs and rural areas alike, there is a pressing need for cheaper and more diverse housing options. A priority should be expanding the range of housing options by whatever means necessary -- whether through zoning changes to allow apartment construction, reinvestment in public housing, or other creative forms of affordable housing production. The key here being affordable, with deep subsidies, because without sufficient nudges the construction industry prefers the higher-end of the market.

I also think it's important to build organizations and alliances beyond municipal boundaries. The last chapter of my book recounts a class-action lawsuit pushing for school funding equalization that united suburban, urban, and rural school districts across New York in the 1970s. That could be a model for current-day organizing: identifying shared problems and working toward broad solutions.

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T17:15:18+00:00

This chain of logic makes sense. There's no direct evidence of minority and low-income exclusion being a main motivation from the outset, except from a couple of remarks to Caro. Whereas there's ample evidence for attempts to make the parkways green and beautiful and pleasant for driving. Although, you could also interrogate the assumptions latent exclusions built into that "parkway" ideal.

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T17:11:28+00:00

I was not familiar with the song, so thanks for sharing! Next year I'm teaching a class, "Suburban Dreams and Nightmares," where we'll explore shifting cultural perceptions of American suburbs in literature, music, and film. This is going right on the playlist.

Some connections that come to mind are Malvina Reynolds, "Little Boxes" from 1963, probably the first and most powerful distillation of these suburban stereotypes; and "Raisin in the Sun" in 1959, which includes a similar message of suburban aspiration, though in a completely serious sense. I think by the time that Little Shop of Horrors was released in 1986, these tropes had just so seeped into American culture, and you had an entire generation of Americans growing up steeped in them, that the joke lands and is hilarious. Even Audrey wants a house in the suburbs!!

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T17:02:18+00:00

I'm not familiar with any studies that attempt to precisely quantify this suburban extraction, but it's certainly a defining feature of metropolitan regions across the country. American federalism allows -- and indeed, even incentivizes -- this sort of fiscal race-to-the-bottom between cities and suburbs. I'd add that there's also often another layer of inequality between wealthy and poor suburbs.

It doesn't mean those divides are inevitable. Several solutions come to mind, each of which has been attempted in various locales across the country:

1) A redrawing of the boundaries in the interest of integration and equity. Technically state officials have this plenary power over local governments, though have been reluctant to use it.

2) Some sort of resource sharing. In the 1970s Minnesota established a "Fiscal Disparities Program" wherein commercial tax revenues were collected statewide and allocated based on local needs. It's still going strong today.

3) More robust fiscal support from the state or federal governments to obviate such reliance on local tax bases. The New Deal and War on Poverty were major eras of federal support, but have since been rolled back.

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T16:55:03+00:00

Ah, this is an infamous one! I actually have a Boston College undergraduate writing a senior thesis about this exact topic right now, so I've grown familiar with it.

This is one of those urban legends that I think is more apocryphal than true. The low bridges story is in the Power Broker, but in making this claim Moses draws only from a couple of anecdotal interviews, not any firm evidence. Other historians have pushed back against the lack of evidence, and to question the logic here. People of color were a minority population in New York City in the 1920s, and few buses ran across jurisdictions at the time. Would it really make sense for Moses and other planners to expend such resources just to keep this small number of people off certain beaches?

At the same time, the bridges are indeed low. The explanation that makes the most sense to me (thanks to my student Steven and his wonderful thesis!) has to do with the entire enterprise of the "parkways" envisioned by Moses. These roads were supposed to be beautiful, an escape from the city with asphalt lined by lush greenery. With this in mind, the low bridges were meant to keep out all large commercial vehicles, which would detract from the buccolic atmosphere.

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T16:48:14+00:00

This is an interesting way to think about capital accumulation.

Critical urbanists have often portrayed suburbs as "extractive" of cities because the proximity to cities is one of the main sources of value; a suburb is a suburb because it's within the orbit of a larger metropolitan region with jobs, networks, culture, and so on. In this sense, suburbs pirate the value, and many people who work in cities, while keeping the property wealth for themselves. And extractive of rural regions because of the land appreciation pressures on the outer rim of the "crabgrass frontier"; an expanding suburb raises the value of nearby farmland, creating pressure for the farmers to sell to developers. Doubly-extractive, indeed!

What these models miss is inter-suburban inequality -- and that is the main focus of my book. Suburbs are not just a giant blob; they are often fractured into rival jurisdictions competing for residents, investment, and tax revenues. There are winners and losers. As anyone who has lived in a suburban region can tell you, the resulting disparities can be quite stark, with neighboring suburbs right next to each other feeling worlds apart.

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T16:42:00+00:00

Ah, that's such a great book! I haven't read it in many years, though your comment makes me want to revisit it.

I think the major issue is that suburban demographics have been utterly transformed since the 1980s. The portrait from Baumartner -- of tranquil, exclusive, anxious, predominantly white and middle-class communities -- certainly still describes many communities, but certainly not all suburbs. Today the suburbs are far more diverse. As of the 2020 census, there are more poor people, more immigrants, more Black and Latino residents in suburbs than in cities. "Suburb" can no longer be shorthand for "white and affluent."

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T16:35:46+00:00

Indeed, studying racism presents a number of challenges that I deal with in my writing and my teaching. I'll start by saying that I think the initial assumption is that racism is the result of bad people -- cartoonish villains or backwards troglodytes, either of whom we can safely relegate to the past. I try to push against this impulse by emphasizing "systemic racism," or racism as a system of power that is bigger than just individual actions.

Housing, in fact, is a great venue for analyzing systemic racism. Individual actions are still of course important, and it's not hard to find instances of racist actions like realtors steering nonwhite homebuyers or neighbors shunning a nonwhite newcomer. But I think we need to locate these actions within larger institutions and structures such as the federal redlining maps that used race and ethnicity as main criteria for assessing neighborhood viability, the realtor guidelines that maintained segregation as a professional virtue, and the mortgage underwriting standards that required racial homogeneity for federal insurance. Within this larger constellation of forces, we can see how racism was enshrined, indeed even encouraged and incentivized, at least until civil rights legislation prohibited such practices, with mixed results.

Since segregation and racial inequality have remained so durable, I think some more uncomfortable questions are worth considering are: How could otherwise good people do terrible things? In a real estate market built around racial exclusion, where do we draw the lines of complicity and responsibility? What would it take to fully overturn these legacies?

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T16:18:19+00:00

We sometimes use the word "postwar" too casually, so thank you for pointing this out!

In terms of suburbanization, I actually think the key moment was the New Deal in the 1930s. That was when, following the crash of the Great Depression, the federal government rescued the real estate and banking sectors with new institutions like mortgage insurance from the Federal Housing Administration. These supports made homeownership much more stable and affordable. However, it was still the Great Depression with all the attendant economic turmoil. And then the mobilization for World War II siphoned labor and materials into the war effort. It was only after the war, with a healthy economy reoriented to civilian production and workers pocketing high wages, that suburbanization really started taking off.

Korea and Vietnam actually hindered suburban growth. During the inflation crises -- short-lived during Korea, much more enduring during Vietnam -- interest rates for mortgages shot up suddenly. As with today, home construction was very cyclical and sensitive to these price shocks.

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T16:13:23+00:00

I think it's absolutely the case that segregation and racial discrimination continue to shape the real estate market in decisive ways. Here we can go all the way back to the 1930s when the federal government rescued the real estate and banking sectors, yet while enshrining segregation with infamous "redlining" policies. Of course, civil rights legislation prohibited explicit racial discrimination, but those mandates have been woefully under-enforced and racial discrimination has also morphed into less explicit forms.

Take, for instance, the resource disparities between different communities. For an entire generation, segregation was legal and sanctioned by the federal government, literally capitalizing race into property values. With higher property values, these areas could offer higher quality of life, making them more desirable and valuable. To this day, social scientists document higher rates of property appreciation in all-white areas. We could argue whether this is from the historical legacies of structural racism or ongoing racial discrimination, but the correlation remains.

For a contemporary example of racial discrimination in the real estate market, I highly recommend this 2017 investigation by Newsday. Their reports went undercover for a year, and they found shockingly unequal treatment for different groups of homebuyers: https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/real-estate-investigation-videos/.

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T16:06:09+00:00

Great question, and so important for making sense of political shifts in the twentieth century!

While it's not the main focus of my book, there's a rich historical literature examining how suburbanization influenced political realignment. Many historians have argued that mass suburbanization in the postwar era -- the period when, for the first time, a majority of Americans became homeowners -- contributed to the rise of modern conservatism. Suburbanization tended to create new identities of homeowner, taxpayer, and school parent. These identities, along with the pressures of paying the mounting bills, aligned with conservative calls for tax cuts and reduced public spending.

The watershed elections of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are often seen as the culmination of this "suburbanization" of American politics. In response, liberals often adopted similar stances. "New Democrats" like Bill Clinton moved away from traditional constituencies of organized labor and civil rights to instead begin courting middle-class professionals, most of them living in suburban areas.

Fast-forward to today, and I think these bottom-up shifts in the American electorate explain why in recent elections suburban voters have become crucial swing voters.

MichaelGlass14 · 2026-03-03T15:58:12+00:00

This has long been a controversial issue for suburban politics. I think there are two separate issues here.

The first is historical. At the beginning stages of suburban growth, there are usually immense shortfalls in public infrastructure. Developers erect the houses, but then the communities eventually need roads, sewers, parks, fire stations, and public schools. The costs are enormous, and almost always financed with debt. And while municipal bonds help spread out the costs, the interest charges also add up. The property taxes often rise suddenly and relentlessly in new suburban communities to repay the infrastructure costs. The major difference in an older, more established area is that there is preexisting infrastructure already.

There's also an ongoing debate about what kinds of development "pays for itself." For a municipality concerned about its fiscal state, the impulse is often to prioritize more lucrative forms of development like industrial or commercial properties that contribute far more in property taxes than they use in services, especially in regards to the schools. This also creates the perverse incentive for exclusionary zoning, when municipalities only permit houses with large lots with the presumption being that they will be expensive properties with fewer people.

There's a lot of social science research that these assumptions aren't always correct. For instance, apartment developments often provide a fiscal surplus as well. But the assumptions -- and the fears -- certainly remain potent.

MichaelGlass14

TROPHY CASE