Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
Encyclopedia
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States is a book written by Kenneth T. Jackson
. Published in 1985, it analyzes the development of American suburbs from their origins in the early 19th century. Jackson examines how a high quality of life in America came to be equated with home ownership in low density residential neighborhoods segregated from the urban workplace. Extensively researched and referenced, the book takes into account factors that promoted suburbanization such as the availability of cheap land, construction methods, and transportation, as well as federal subsidies for highways and suburban housing.
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 center in two or three hours. Cities had five characteristics:
“Suburbs, then, were socially and economically inferior to cities when wind, muscle, and water were the prime movers of civilization…Even the word suburb suggested inferior manners, narrowness of view, and physical squalor.”
, 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 center despair.”
The steam locomotive
in the mid 19th century provided the wealthy with the means to live in bucolic surroundings, to socialize in country clubs and still commute to work downtown; these were the "railroad suburbs". 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."
After the U.S. 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.”. “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.” Tracks "radiated out from the center like spokes [forcing] anyone using public transit to rely on the central business district
."
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”. 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." 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.". 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."
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 official might be unwilling to use the police against labor radicals
, most of whom came from Europe.
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." 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."
." 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."
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." "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."
Intended to spur housing construction after the Great Depression
, President Roosevelt
's Federal Housing Administration
established minimum standards for home construction 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", 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.
erected his first houses outside Paris in 1965, the European landscape has become littered with all the trappings of suburban America." "For better or worse, the American suburb is a remarkable and probably lasting achievement."
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."
, given by Columbia University
for the year's best work of history, and the Francis Parkman Prize
, awarded by the Society of American Historians.
Crabgrass Frontier was referenced to in Robert Collins's essay "Growth Liberalism in the Sixties. Great Societies at Home and Grand Designs Abroad".
Kenneth T. Jackson
Kenneth Terry Jackson is a professor of history and social sciences at Columbia University. A frequent television guest, he is best known as an urban historian and a preeminent authority on New York City, where he lives on the Upper West Side....
. Published in 1985, it analyzes the development of American suburbs from their origins in the early 19th century. Jackson examines how a high quality of life in America came to be equated with home ownership in low density residential neighborhoods segregated from the urban workplace. Extensively researched and referenced, the book takes into account factors that promoted suburbanization such as the availability of cheap land, construction methods, and transportation, as well as federal subsidies for highways and suburban housing.
Introduction
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 center 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
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times...
, every major city was a "point" on a map that could be walked from edge to center in two or three hours. Cities had five characteristics:
- High population density or "congestion", comparable to New York CityNew York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
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.
- 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 tanningTanningTanning is the making of leather from the skins of animals which does not easily decompose. Traditionally, tanning used tannin, an acidic chemical compound from which the tanning process draws its name . Coloring may occur during tanning...
and soapSoapIn chemistry, soap is a salt of a fatty acid.IUPAC. "" Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 2nd ed. . Compiled by A. D. McNaught and A. Wilkinson. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford . XML on-line corrected version: created by M. Nic, J. Jirat, B. Kosata; updates compiled by A. Jenkins. ISBN...
-making.
“Suburbs, then, were socially and economically inferior to cities when wind, muscle, and water were the prime movers of civilization…Even the word suburb suggested inferior manners, narrowness of view, and physical squalor.”
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 horsecarHorsecar
A horsecar or horse-drawn tram is an animal-powered streetcar or tram.These early forms of public transport developed out of industrial haulage routes that had long been in existence, and from the omnibus routes that first ran on public streets in the 1820s, using the newly improved iron or steel...
, the elevated railroad, and the cable car
Cable car
A cable car is any of a variety of transportation systems relying on cables to pull vehicles along or lower them at a steady rate, or a vehicle on these systems.-Aerial lift:Aerial lifts where the vehicle is suspended in the air from a cable:...
came “an exodus that would turn cities inside out and inaugurate a new pattern of suburban affluence and center despair.”
The steam locomotive
Steam locomotive
A steam locomotive is a railway locomotive that produces its power through a steam engine. These locomotives are fueled by burning some combustible material, usually coal, wood or oil, to produce steam in a boiler, which drives the steam engine...
in the mid 19th century provided the wealthy with the means to live in bucolic surroundings, to socialize in country clubs and still commute to work downtown; these were the "railroad suburbs". 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."
After the U.S. Civil War
Civil war
A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same nation state or republic, or, less commonly, between two countries created from a formerly-united nation state....
came the Age of the Trolley bringing commuting to the middle class
Streetcar suburb
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. Early suburbs were served by horsecars, but by the late 19th century cable cars and electric streetcars, or trams, were used, allowing...
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.”. “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.” Tracks "radiated out from the center like spokes [forcing] anyone using public transit to rely on the central business district
Central business district
A central business district is the commercial and often geographic heart of a city. In North America this part of a city is commonly referred to as "downtown" or "city center"...
."
The influence of the automobile
Automobile
An automobile, autocar, motor car or car is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which also carries its own engine or motor...
was initially slow, so that even “as late as 1918 the War Industries Board
War Industries Board
The War Industries Board was a United States government agency established on July 28, 1917, during World War I, to coordinate the purchase of war supplies. The organization encouraged companies to use mass-production techniques to increase efficiency and urged them to eliminate waste by...
could regard the shutdown of the entire [automobile] industry as a mere inconvenience”. However, "of even greater significance ...was the truck
Truck
A truck or lorry is a motor vehicle designed to transport cargo. Trucks vary greatly in size, power, and configuration, with the smallest being mechanically similar to an automobile...
[which] could do four times the work of a horse-drawn wagon which took up the same street space." 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.". This effort was so successful that "as Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of...
' popular 1922 novel Babbitt
Babbitt (novel)
Babbitt, first published in 1922, is a novel by Sinclair Lewis. Largely a satire of American culture, society, and behavior, it critiques the vacuity of middle-class American life and its pressure on individuals toward conformity....
indicated, the private car had become no longer a luxury, but a necessity of the American middle class."
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 industrialized 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 IslandEllis Island
Ellis Island in New York Harbor was the gateway for millions of immigrants to the United States. It was the nation's busiest immigrant inspection station from 1892 until 1954. The island was greatly expanded with landfill between 1892 and 1934. Before that, the much smaller original island was the...
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 official might be unwilling to use the police against labor radicals
Labor history of the United States
The labor history of the United States describes the history of organized labor, as well as the more general history of working people, in the United States. Pressures dictating the nature and power of organized labor have included the evolution and power of the corporation, efforts by employers...
, most of whom came from Europe.
Jackson examined the New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
'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." By grading certain areas based on "desirability"
Redlining
Redlining is the practice of denying, or increasing the cost of services such as banking, insurance, access to jobs, access to health care, or even supermarkets to residents in certain, often racially determined, areas. The term "redlining" was coined in the late 1960s by John McKnight, a...
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
Federal Housing Administration
The Federal Housing Administration is a United States government agency created as part of the National Housing Act of 1934. It insured loans made by banks and other private lenders for home building and home buying...
“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
White flight
White flight has been a term that originated in the United States, starting in the mid-20th century, and applied to the large-scale migration of whites of various European ancestries from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions. It was first seen as...
.
"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
James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce
James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce OM, GCVO, PC, FRS, FBA was a British academic, jurist, historian and Liberal politician.-Background and education:...
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."
Lure of the Suburbs
"Throughout the nineteenth century...American cities annexed adjacent land and grew steadily...the predominent view in the nineteenth century was the doctrine of forcible annexationMunicipal annexation in the United States
Municipal annexation is a process whereby a city government expands the city limits into adjacent areas not already incorporated into cities, villages or other municipalities, and sometimes when they were...
." However that would change toward the end of the century: "the first really significant defeat for the consolidation movement came when Brookline
Brookline, Massachusetts
Brookline is a town in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States, which borders on the cities of Boston and Newton. As of the 2010 census, the population of the town was 58,732.-Etymology:...
spurned Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
in 1874. [Thereafter] virtually every other Eastern and Middle Western city was rebuffed by wealthy and independent suburbs."
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
Andrew Jackson Downing
Andrew Jackson Downing was an American landscape designer, horticulturalist, and writer, a prominent advocate of the Gothic Revival style in the United States, and editor of The Horticulturist magazine...
, Calvert Vaux
Calvert Vaux
Calvert Vaux , was an architect and landscape designer. He is best remembered as the co-designer , of New York's Central Park....
, and Catharine Beecher
Catharine Beecher
Catharine Esther Beecher was an American educator known for her forthright opinions on women's education as well as her vehement support of the many benefits of the incorporation of kindergarten into children's education....
. “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
Confidence trick
A confidence trick is an attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confidence. A confidence artist is an individual working alone or in concert with others who exploits characteristics of the human psyche such as dishonesty and honesty, vanity, compassion, credulity, irresponsibility,...
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
Great Chicago Fire
The Great Chicago Fire was a conflagration that burned from Sunday, October 8, to early Tuesday, October 10, 1871, killing hundreds and destroying about in Chicago, Illinois. Though the fire was one of the largest U.S...
, 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
Timber framing
Timber framing , or half-timbering, also called in North America "post-and-beam" construction, is the method of creating structures using heavy squared off and carefully fitted and joined timbers with joints secured by large wooden pegs . It is commonplace in large barns...
by twenty...[so that] many poorly paid immigrant groups had homeownership rates as high [as] white Americans." "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."
Intended to spur housing construction after the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, President Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
's Federal Housing Administration
Federal Housing Administration
The Federal Housing Administration is a United States government agency created as part of the National Housing Act of 1934. It insured loans made by banks and other private lenders for home building and home buying...
established minimum standards for home construction 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", and loans had to be renewed every five years and interest rates were subject to revision every renewal.
After World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, encouraged by the emergence of new cities of wartime production and government assistance for veterans
VA loan
A VA loan is a mortgage loan in the United States guaranteed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs . The loan may be issued by qualified lenders....
, increasing numbers of Americans could afford to buy homes. Given the massive growth of affordable dwellings accessible by the highway
Interstate Highway System
The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, , is a network of limited-access roads including freeways, highways, and expressways forming part of the National Highway System of the United States of America...
and train, families flocked to planned towns such as Levittown
Levittown, New York
Levittown is a hamlet in the Town of Hempstead located on Long Island in Nassau County, New York. Levittown is midway between the villages of Hempstead and Farmingdale. As of the 2010 census, the CDP had a total population of 51,881....
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 LevittWilliam Levitt
William Jaird Levitt was an American real-estate developer widely credited as the father of modern American suburbia. He came to symbolize the new suburban growth with his use of mass-production techniques to construct large developments of houses selling for under $10,000...
erected his first houses outside Paris in 1965, the European landscape has become littered with all the trappings of suburban America." "For better or worse, the American suburb is a remarkable and probably lasting achievement."
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."
Awards
Crabgrass Frontier won both the Bancroft AwardBancroft Award
The Bancroft Award is an award of the Royal Society of Canada "given for publication, instruction, and research in the earth sciences that have conspicuously contributed to public understanding and appreciation of the subject". It is named in honour of Joseph Austin Bancroft . It is awarded...
, given by Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
for the year's best work of history, and the Francis Parkman Prize
Francis Parkman Prize
The Francis Parkman Prize, named after Francis Parkman, is awarded by the Society of American Historians for the best book in American history each year. Its purpose is to promote literary distinction in historical writing...
, awarded by the Society of American Historians.
Crabgrass Frontier was referenced to in Robert Collins's essay "Growth Liberalism in the Sixties. Great Societies at Home and Grand Designs Abroad".