By the turn of the twenty-first century, the tenor of American suburban life had changed. News media, popular culture representations, everyday practices, and lived experiences demonstrated that a postwar world of expected privilege had become one of crisis turned to advantage. Beginning in the mid-1970s, environmental, criminal, and moral hazards continuously emerged in everyday suburban life. Toxic contamination, home invasions, kidnappings, and occult-inspired violence, among other hazards, appeared visible, real, and pervasive on the suburban landscape. The result of postwar suburban development, these newly discernible local hazards produced an increasingly fraught and contested landscape unlike the one homeowners expected to inherit. However, their materialization did not simply endanger lives and property or create a sense of hazard. Their existence engendered a new form of power through productive victimization whereby the realistic endangerment of home and family, as detailed in the preceding chapters, gave suburbanites a reasonable justification to defend themselves. In response, they enacted measures that went beyond mere defense to expand cultural and spatial power. Those legitimate threats, then, actually worked to empower individual suburbanites and facilitate the consolidation of their authority over their families, homes, and neighborhoods, marking a new era in the history of American suburbs.
The battles over privilege and power fought by suburbanites played an essential role in the rightward turn of American culture and politics. The mainstreaming of conservative values about government and family enabled suburban actions in response to local threats. In turn, suburbanites made real calls for privatism, localism, and a return to “family values,” giving evidence to both the need for and the success of these ideologies.
When faced with environmental and criminal threats, suburban residents blamed inept, incapable, and unwilling government entities for not protecting them from existential harm. In response, they credibly acted in their own defense within and beyond the state. To stop seemingly dangerous public projects like nuclear power plants, they cried “Not in my backyard!” to persuade corporations and government to shape land use around their parochial fears. Similarly, rather than be passive victims of criminals and the justice system, suburbanites took action to protect themselves through private means. They installed security systems, hired security officers, erected gates and walls, and educated themselves and their children about how to navigate an increasingly dangerous suburban landscape. Although suburbanites premised these actions on imperilment caused in some way by the failure of the state, they also leveraged state power to legitimate their actions and functionally regulate space. Elected officials and corporate leaders heeded the exclamations of fearful homeowners—their constituents and consumers—often by displacing projects to locales with less powerful or visible populations. Law enforcement also came to work with homeowners, neighborhood watch programs, and private security in order to better police suburban space. Urban space, meanwhile, was in the midst of the Wars on Drugs and Crime. In these ways, suburbanites could both understand government as broadly dysfunctional and call on government intervention to defend and affirm class, race, and homeowner privilege as manifested in suburban culture. In this era, the state did not so much pull back from American life as more selectively intervene in ways that favored suburban homeowners.
The rightward turn was also attended by a conservative cultural movement that played out most prominently in the suburbs. In responding to the foundational changes in sex, gender, and the family after World War II, many decried a crisis of the family as evidenced by increasing divorce rates, teen misbehavior, and popular culture that promoted “liberal” values. In response, conservatives called for a return to “traditional” family values—a nostalgic, largely false vision of earlier suburban life—in order to restore the morality of the family and the nation.
Heading into the 1980s, culture warriors highlighted the role that popular culture and the media played in supposedly destroying the family from the inside by corrupting the morals of young consumers and enticing them into dangerous behavior. To recapture and restore those mythic family values, their champions raised consciousness about the threats from popular occulture while emphasizing the role of parents—not government—in protecting children and teens. The ascendance of this worldview empowered suburban parents and clearly suggested which kinds of families were worth defending, particularly as seen in the different responses to urban versus suburban populations by both the state and culture critics.
To address these moral dangers symbolized by the “satanic panic,” the rise in teen suicide and substance abuse, and the massacre at Columbine High School, culture warriors figured suburban teens as innocent victims of amoral culture industries leading them to these violent outcomes. By tracing the cause and solution to these dangers to consumer choices, culture critics, and the suburban parents they empowered, largely eschewed medicine, science, education, and public policy in addressing teen social ills. Concerned parents, then, were able to more strictly regulate their children’s media consumption and discipline them, largely without reliance on or intervention by family services, police, or schools. And, in seeing the threats in these ways and responding through private action, suburbanites facilitated a turn away from broad-scale social policy. By further undermining the notion of effective state intervention, they slowed or stopped the implementation of policies that would more broadly and more effectively have addressed teen social problems.
Through these measures, suburbanites largely succeeded in eliminating, defusing, or marginalizing many of the environmental, criminal, and moral hazards that appeared so threatening. Even so, the values and practices of late-twentieth-century suburbanites remain with us today because they are persuasive and powerful. This persistence is due in large part to the coincidence of the suburb-under-siege’s emergence with the concomitant rightward shift in American politics and culture that is now mainstream. Indeed, the story of the suburban neighborhood of fear shows not just how this shift occurred but also why it persists and the terms on which suburban power and privilege are being challenged today.
The excessive localism of Nimbyism, though successful at stopping many projects, became by the late 1990s an epithet labeling suburbanites not as justified home defenders but as privileged localists uninterested in the public good.1 Branded as antigrowth by pro-business conservatives and as exclusionary by environmental justice groups on the left, Nimby protection of middle-class suburban neighborhoods carried less and less cultural heft.2 Moreover, Nimbyism was often no longer necessary as suburbanites’ successes at slowing, stopping, or moving projects suggested to government and industry that suburban opposition was usually not worth the risk. Instead, government and industry first handled suburbanites as legitimate stakeholders rather than staunch obstructionists so as to avoid costly battles.3
Still, suburbanites of the twenty-first century have taken their cues from their late-twentieth-century predecessors by developing and pursuing a privileged, middle-class consumerist environmentalism. Legitimated by the emergence of toxic America, suburbanites now express their fears of chemicals and additives by opposing genetically modified foods and those enriched with high-fructose corn syrup. And, in its most extreme form, they support the antivaccination movement, which is, at its core, an expression of privilege and self-determination and not an argument based on science or civic duty. Armed with the whiff of fact and the communicative power of the internet, suburban parents have leveraged unsupportable “scientific” claims into a powerful movement, one supported by celebrities and politicians, including President Donald Trump.4 The claims and actions of antivaxxers amplify those of suburbanites who began suffering from multiple chemical sensitivities and environmental illness in the 1980s and ’90s. However, those with MCS and EI experienced observable pain and ill effects even if the causes were not clear, in contrast to antivax supporters, who lack evidence to support their claims. Shunned by the medical establishment but firm in their beliefs, MCS and EI sufferers leveraged cultural and spatial privilege to attempt to protect themselves from the chemicals that they believed were destroying their lives. And yet, then as now, these expressions of privilege endangered and marginalized those without such power to protect themselves. As suburbanites pursue a varied and multipronged approach to protect the environment and ameliorate their suffering, the citizens of Flint and other cities still suffer from toxic chemical exposure through tainted drinking water, while many other urban apartment dwellers are exposed to lead paint.5 Similarly, children of privilege forego vaccinations while increasing numbers of people die from diseases preventable by vaccine each year.6 This worldview buttressed a broader attack on science and expertise that, at this writing (spring 2020), appears to have had dangerous consequences for the battle against the COVID-19 virus spreading across the United States. The focus on private interests at the expense of the body politic is part of the cultural heritage of late-twentieth-century suburban environmentalism detailed in this book.
Suburban crime culture of the late twentieth century, too, has proven powerful in shaping contemporary America. The continued expansion of private home security strategies and apparatuses, including the proliferation of gated communities, is a logical outgrowth of suburban security culture that operates under the notion of constant threat. While not new, technologically advanced, internet-connected smart homes and surveillance devices have expanded the carceral suburb, where homeowners feel both reassured and endangered through the implementation of security practices. New innovations like the Amazon-owned Ring smart doorbell continue to produce this suburban sensibility. It allows a homeowner to surveil their front door, speak to visitors, and generally mind their home even when not there all under the supposition that something could (or likely will) go wrong. As one Ring commercial demonstrates, its sales are premised on the same fears harbored by 1980s and ’90s suburbanites. In the ad, as the viewer watches a white man in a hoodie approach a house, the inventor, Jamie Siminoff, explains that most burglaries are perpetrated during the day.7 The man attempts to ascertain if someone is home before he breaks in in broad daylight. Hewing closely to the themes and imagery of 1990s ADT home security commercials, this ad reiterates the earlier notion of invisible, lurking burglars waiting to strike in the suburbs. Like other internet-connected devices and apps, the Ring-connected Nextdoor app, and its competitors Citizen and Neighbor, expand and enhance suburban paranoia as homeowners share information about strange characters, unfamiliar vehicles, and shifty deliverymen. As in the late twentieth century, homeowners today are using these powerful tools to protect homes and families. Yet their use is more likely to sow fear and skepticism of strangers, outsiders, or anyone who appears out of place, even as the crime rate continues to fall.8
In this way, suburban crime culture continues to facilitate and be facilitated by tough-on-crime culture and politics that produced disproportionate outcomes for people of color as seen in the “new Jim Crow” and the “golden gulag.”9 During this era, progressively militarized urban policing practices increasingly scrutinize populations of color subjecting them to strict regimes of surveillance and incarceration while suburbanites work with law enforcement and choose to monitor themselves.10 Today, this difference can be seen as Ring has partnered with dozens of police departments to work with homeowners in installing the devices to prevent home invasions and assist police in catching invaders.11 The ramifications of suburban crime culture can most clearly be seen in the incidents of homeowner violence committed against supposedly threatening individuals who seem out of place in their suburban communities, almost always young people of color. From George Zimmerman’s murder of Trayvon Martin in his gated community to the hundreds of legally defensible shootings justified by expansions of the Castle Doctrine, the homeowner’s right to use violence against perceived threats exists because of the suburban crime culture forged over the previous forty-five years, as detailed in chapter 3.
This understanding of the suburban neighborhood as essentially dangerous has had other ramifications as well. Across the country, police and neighbors have accused parents of neglect for letting their children walk to school alone or play without supervision in public space. As these cases demonstrate, the coding of suburban space as inherently dangerous and requiring vigilant surveillance lest a tragedy occur is now dominant.
This understanding of space has also buttressed the failure of many enclosed suburban malls. By most accounts, the shopping mall of the twenty-first century is dying or dead as many malls close while few are being built to replace them. The rise of e-commerce and the expense of renting brick-and-mortar locations are clearly significant contributors to this decline. As Josh Sanburn of Time Magazine notes, however, the failure of the shopping mall is about more than shopping.12 The increased policing of the 1980s and ’90s shopping center and the policies that effectively drove out teenage patrons to protect profits negatively affected the bottom line while destroying the notion of the shopping center as an open, civic space. Experts estimate that 25 to 35 percent of malls will fail by 2030. Though a considerable rate of closure, that still leaves a large percentage of malls still operating. However, these will largely be luxury malls with even stricter security to protect customers who desire a nearly privatized consumer experience for purchasing products from high-end retailers like Gucci and Louis Vuitton.13 Indeed, upscaling and adding amusements has offered a way for many centers to survive in the era of Amazon. Centers like The Grove in Los Angeles run a mall trolley and host a summer concert series, suggesting that pure shopping experiences are not enough to sustain the mall. Some of the malls that have closed, so-called “dead malls,” are being reimagined as different kinds of capitalist spaces, chiefly workspaces for tech companies, rather than serving as suburban town squares.14 Others are simply being bulldozed to make way for new kinds of development, such as mixed-use open-air centers that hark back to the early visions of the shopping mall modeled on urban downtowns. Nonetheless, 80 percent of malls are considered healthy, but these have largely hewed to the luxury shopping model that perfectly articulates the privatized world of suburban living born of 1980s and ’90s understandings and regulations of public space.15
Frequenting the mall less, suburban teens have further receded into the home, their retreat facilitated in no small part by the expansion of residential high-speed internet into their communities, while many low-income places lag behind in internet availability.16 As teenagers have returned, the idealization of the home as a safe social hub for suburban children and teens has persisted. Similarly, the notion of dangerous popular culture products sneaking into the home has not only persisted but grown stronger, as has the elaboration of cultural explanations for tragedies with more viable social or medical justifications. The need to explain these tragedies and address their causes has become ever more urgent as an epidemic of shootings has occurred in the United States since the 1999 attack at Columbine High School. The mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary, Stoneman-Douglas High School, and Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, to name but a few, found wild media speculation over the pop cultural habits of the perpetrators. While Satan and the occult have largely receded as explanations, there continues to be a framing of mass tragedies as caused in some part by cultural influences. Post-9/11, these have included violent media, as well as Middle Eastern heritage or Islamic worship, even as activists highlight other, more plausible causes, such as easy access to the high-powered weapons central to these tragedies. In this way, our contemporary calamities look much like those of the 1980s and ’90s. In those instances, structural causes of and responses to tragedies were marginalized in favor of simpler and more reassuring but ultimately ineffective cultural explanations, paving the way for George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism and faith-based initiatives for addressing, in particular, teen social issues.
The era of the neighborhood of fear also fundamentally shaped domestic responses to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In a suburban world characterized by the ongoing pursuit of security in a hazardous world, the attacks brought new urgency to the security consciousness of suburbanites. However improbable, they could envision another terror attack in their own backyard, particularly as the daily trip to the mailbox took on increased anxiety after the discovery of anthrax sent to politicians and media figures.17 This preparedness to see the world as not just dangerous but locally hazardous facilitated the political and national security responses to terrorism. Suburbanites were ready to see increased communications surveillance and travel security as reasonable measures to achieve a sense of security, because they felt scared but were confident they were unlikely to be targets of such measures. When asked to reenter the marketplace in response to the attacks, suburbanites did as they had before. They worked to protect themselves by purchasing plastic sheeting, safety masks, emergency radios, weapons, and bunkers. Lastly, with other threats seemingly less urgent, suburbanites turned back the clock to register increasing skepticism of people, beliefs, and practices that seemed out of place. Knowing that many of the hijackers lived, studied, and worked in suburban locales, residents believed they were manning the front lines against another attack and must turn their security apparatus to that task by practicing the racial profiling clearly in use by homeland security. In total, these responses both to the attacks and the Bush administration’s actions sprang from previous decades of suburban history and culture in which residents learned to address a catastrophic disaster through private security practices and marketplace consumption in order to achieve a sense of safety in a world tailored to their needs and desires and yet seemingly beyond their control.