They came to the suburbs in pursuit of a dream—the way, in the 1920s, people flocked in droves to Florida looking for a land of sun and space. They came in search of green grass and trees, away from the hassle, a place where children and pets could run and play unattended, where there was room for a garden, a terrace, a backyard swing, a swimming pool, a tennis court, or a gazebo. They came to escape the city’s dirt and noise and crime and traffic, and to escape the tyranny of rents and landlords. They came for the promise of better schools, lower taxes, less indifferent police, more convenient shopping, to find an amorphous quantity called “greater freedom,” and to leave behind the alleged anonymity of city living. Many came for racial reasons, to escape what seemed an “invasion” of blacks, or Puerto Ricans, or Jews, or Mexican-Americans. More than anything else, they came because the suburbs symbolized the Good Life, and one of the most important factors of the Good Life—in America, at least—has been to own a home of one’s own, or at least to own a part of it, and to be invited to join the country club. The suburbs symbolized “making it.” They came by the millions.
The flight to the suburbs began before the turn of the century, encouraged at first by the coach and ferry, then spurred by the development of the railroad and the automobile. By 1925, suburbanization had become as national trend. But it was not until the economically booming days of the 1960s that the trend became a roaring phenomenon. In the decade between 1960 and 1970, the twenty-five largest cities in the United States had, all together, gained about 710,000 in population. Their suburban areas, meanwhile, gained 8.9 million people—or twelve times more. The suburbs of New York, for example, now have more residents than the city itself—nearly nine million—making the New York suburbs themselves the largest “city” in the country.
The escapees to the suburbs have found many of the things they were looking for: the grass, the trees, the cleaner air, and so on. But they have also found other things which they did not bargain for. They have found spiraling taxes, soaring real estate prices, schools that often seem less than satisfactory. They have found drugs, and crime, and dirt and noise from the freeways. They have found zoning battles, bond-issue fights, dirty politics, corruption in government, water shortages, crab grass, red spider, and the Dutch elm disease. They have watched the encroachment of industry, of high-rises, of tract developers, and of shopping centers set amid acres of asphalt. They have watched the racial minorities they hoped to avoid follow them, and they have cursed at suburban rush-hour traffic jams. They have discovered the value of the spite fence, and they have discovered boredom. Most of all, they have also discovered that curious anomie, that sense of disorientation, that indefinable “feeling of separation,” which living in suburbia so often seems to convey.