Reflections on Crabgrass Frontier

John R. Logan
Department of Sociology
University at Albany
JRL40 @ ALBANY.EDU

Although Jackson's book ranges back to the early 19th century, the gist
of it is his analysis and critique of this postwar version of suburban
development.  It is a powerful and enduring statement.   I would like
to discuss it in terms of three questions: suburban culture and values,
the divide between city and suburb, and the emerging inequalities
within suburbia.

1. First, there is a question of culture and values.

Ken identifies a shift in the American value system that seems to have
been complete by 1875: an idealization of the nuclear family and the
home as a private space, separated from the male world of work.
Somehow people came to believe that an expansive home space could
represent domesticity, morality and achievement, and good health.  They
came to admire the notion of a "romantic community in harmony with
nature" (73).  The middle and upper classes - those who could afford to
get to the edge of the city at this time - wanted a single-family home
with grass and trees.  And so, by the late 19th century, low-density
developments were being created for these classes, as far from downtown
as the horsecart, or railroad, or eventually the streetcar could
conveniently reach.

As far as I can tell, Ken has no quarrel with these values.  But he
laments some cultural changes that he ties to suburbanization in the
mid-20th century.  One aspect of the change is what he describes as a
"drive-in culture."  More broadly he perceives a loss of community in
American society.  I am unsure of this evaluation or of the causal
attribution to suburbanization.  For at least a century social critics
have been lamenting the loss of community, attributed by Chicago School
sociologists in the 1920s and 1930s to urbanization, and by some of
their successors in the 1950s to suburbanization.  Yet researchers have
generally failed to discover any differences in modes of socializing
between city and suburban residents that could not be explained
directly by class differences. From my perspective as a student of
urban social movements, it seems counterintuitive to focus on the loss
of community at a time - the mid-1980s when Ken was writing - when the
neighborhood movements in both cities and suburbs had reached a new
peak of activity.

One clue about what he has in mind is the contrast that he draws out
between the new "drive-in culture" and the "significant sense of local
pride and spirit" that 19th century communities felt "as a result of
their struggles with other cities for canals, railroads,
factories, and state institutions" (p. 272).  Competitive solidarity,
he suggests, has been lost.  Ken is not alone in this view.  Another
very important urban analyst, the sociologist Gerry Suttles, has made
a similar critique of what has happened to community spirit in the
city of Chicago - not, in Suttles' case, a question of the impact of
suburbanization, but a broader question of the willingness of social
and political factions to pull together toward a more impressive
local future.  Here I take the opposite position, which is also
presented in the work I did with Harvey Molotch for the book
_Urban Fortunes_:  competitive solidarity is an achievement of local
growth machines.  It is an ideological manipulation, not a
manifestation of community.

2. A second feature of American suburbanization is the social and
political divide between city and suburb.

It is well known that in the older and larger metropolitan areas of the
country, especially in the North and Midwest, suburbia is very much
wealthier and whiter than the central city.  Much of the metropolitan
job base is also now found in the suburbs, especially jobs in
manufacturing and in retail and wholesale trade.  There was a time in
the 1960s and 1970s, when cities like New York and Cleveland were on
the verge of defaulting on their bond obligations,  when urban riots,
abandonment, and arson had laid waste to large sections of some cities,
when many of us felt that the viability of the city was at stake.  And
there across the city line were the well insulated suburbs.

What was the role of suburbanization in segregating Americans by class
and race?  Ken believes that the exclusionary suburb emerged most
clearly in the postwar period and that it had a large role in fomenting
social divisions.  Once again, his vision of the earlier period is more
forgiving:  At the end of the 19th century, he writes, homeownership
was "not a native-American, or middle class, or urban phenomenon, but
an American phenomenon" and, except for orthodox Jews and blacks, "all
ethnic groups participated in the suburbanization process by moving
toward the peripheral areas of the city" (p. 118).  By contrast, he
illustrates the exclusionary character of postwar suburbanization with
cases like Levittown, where blacks were not considered eligible to buy
newly built homes and where, despite a modest class composition, few
blacks live even today.

Ken is aware, of course, that segregation did not originate in the
suburbs.  Having described the walking city of the mid-19th century, he
notes that because of the streetcar and other transportation
improvements that allowed people to live farther from their work, "By
the turn of the century, a 'new city,' segregated by class and economic
function and encompassing an area triple the territory of the older
walking city, had clearly emerged" (p. 115).  So what changed between
1900 and the present?

The key here is that suburbanization clearly spilled across the central
city line by mid-century in many cities.  Less developed areas within
the city could not accommodate the new growth, and in many cases cities
were prevented from expanding into the suburban zone through
annexation.

We have good evidence about the effects of suburbanization on racial
segregation in the metropolis.  But the evidence goes against the
theory of suburban exclusion.  Let me use New York as an example.
Black-white segregation (by our standard measure, the index of
dissimilarity) was about .75 in New York City in 1920.  By 1990, within
the city alone, it was .83.  And for the whole metropolitan region it
was .82.  So, there was almost no change in segregation through this
long period.  What did change is that "white" New York spread way out
into the hinterland - in terms of where most whites were found -
instead of being confined mainly to white neighborhoods in the city.
Another piece of evidence comes from studies of where individual blacks
and whites live today.  Controlling for their income, occupation,
education, and other aspects of their personal backgrounds, African
Americans live in more segregated, poorer, and higher-crime
neighborhoods than do whites - or Asians or Hispanics.  The size of
this disparity is a very sensitive measure of the degree to which
segregation is specifically racial, not derived from class or other
differences.  And it turns out that the disparity is actually higher
within central cities than it is within the suburban ring - that is, if
anything, the city housing market is more racially exclusionary than
the suburban one.

I have long been an advocate of opening up the suburbs to minority
groups, and I have been active in fair housing organizations because I
consider this to be such a central issue in race relations.  But it is
a mistake to blame segregation on the suburbs.  Even where suburbs were
not allowed to grow independently of the city, where they were annexed
into the city, there is a sharp racial and class division between inner
and outer rings.

The city limits do make a difference, however.  As Ken emphasizes, the
political autonomy of suburbs is fateful for people's access to public
resources and services.  Nowhere is this fact more important than in
the domain of public education.  On the whole, suburban school
districts have an advantage in their very composition: a more
homogeneous education-oriented student body.  Another advantage is
the high level of public investment in the school infrastructure that
derives from the local financing of public schools.  Ken points out
that there is a continuous jockeying between the city and its suburbs
for public resources, in which the long-term movement of industry out
of the city has given a strong edge to suburbia.  Besides, suburbs have
the "capacity to zone out the poor, to refuse public housing" (277) and
to offer financial incentives to build up their tax base from business.
Suburbanization, then, means more than the separation of people by race
and class in the metropolis - it virtually guarantees that these groups
will be both separate and unequal, unequal before the state. There are
deep constitutional questions here, and the courts have for decades had
to struggle with the issues of zoning, urban planning, and school
finance that the rise of suburbia has posed.  In Kansas City, for
example, the courts have required hundreds of millions of dollars of
compensatory spending in the city schools.  A special achievement of
_Crabgrass Frontier_ has been to bring these questions of public ethics
and public policy to a wider audience.  In order to have great cities,
Ken argues, we need to develop "awareness of responsibilities beyond
the local neighborhood or village" (p. 278).  I am with him one hundred
percent in this position.

3. A third feature of American suburbanization is the heterogeneity of
the suburban population and the growing polarization among
suburban communities.

Every scholar who has looked closely at the suburban ring in the last
fifty years has found that it encompasses a vast range of kinds of
places.  Suburbia includes commuter towns along the railroads,
industrial satellites, rural settlements and enclaves of millionaire
estates left over from the last century.  It includes aging streetcar
suburbs close to the city line, working class and middle class
subdivisions built both before and after World War II, new industrial
and commercial suburbs where corporate headquarters and assembly plants
and warehouses have concentrated.  It includes all-white communities,
as well as ghettos of African Americans or Puerto Ricans, and growing
enclaves of Asian or Latino immigrants settling in large numbers in
suburbia as in the central cities.

The diversity of suburbia and the disparities among suburban places are
not hidden in the slightest, and yet they are still invisible in the
public eye.  Even _Crabgrass Frontier_, comprehensive in so many ways,
barely acknowledges this underside of suburbia.  A very selective
conception is built into Ken's definition of suburbanization as a
process involving "a lifestyle involving a daily commute to jobs in the
center" (p. 13).   Already by the turn of the century, the cost of
space in Lower Manhattan was resulting in displacement of factories to
new and more distant areas.  The Steinway piano factory, for example,
was the first step in the development of Astoria, Queens.  Brownsville
in Brooklyn developed quickly as a second center of the Jewish garment
industry.  So commuting coexisted with working in "suburbia" as early
as this.  Ken recognizes that by the early 1960s industrial employment
was more than half suburban (pp. 266-269).  He also briefly notes the
trend of black suburbanization by the 1970s (pp. 301-302).  He does not
mention immigration, though by 1980 the suburban rings of Los Angeles
and San Francisco together included two million Hispanics and half a
million Asians.

We have cast so many issues into the city/suburb mold that it is
inconvenient to deal with the fact that spatial inequality is as much a
within-city and within-suburb phenomenon as it is a matter of the line
between the two.

Let me give a prominent example from the field of sociology of how this
affects our thinking.  Bill Wilson has identified the racial problem of
the metropolis with the underclass neighborhood.  The black middle
class, he argues, has escaped the ghetto; it is the "truly
disadvantaged" left behind in the inner city who need attention.  And
their problem is economic: the city job base that could have supported
them has slipped away to the suburbs.  But what if the black middle
class has left the inner city only to be resegregated in the poorest of
suburbs, in neighborhoods adjacent to suburban slums, in school
districts whose graduation rates and test scores are similar to the
worst city districts, in places with no job base and inadequate
transportation to the employment centers elsewhere in the ring?  Then
don't issues of race cut across class, and is not the experience of the
black middle class testimony to continued institutional racism in our
society?

Like Wilson, _Crabgrass Frontier_ simplifies the metropolis to a
dichotomy of city vs suburb.  Newark represents the central city in Ken
Jackson's imagination, while places like Levittown - because of its
racial exclusivity - and Greenwich, Connecticut, even more - because of
its whiteness, its wealth and its corporate presence - represent
suburbia.  With these images in mind, certainly it is the divide
between city and suburb that demands our attention.  But they are not
the only images, and if we also thought of Chester, PA, or Hempstead,
NY, or East St. Louis, or East Cleveland, or East Palo Alto, we might
be led toward different concerns.

Every book has its limits, and the reward for a really good book is
that we explore its contributions and its limits carefully.  Authors
are repaid for their effort when others are challenged to build on what
they have done.  _Crabgrass Frontier_ continues to have an impact because
of the breadth of its vision and clarity of its exposition.  It has
found an audience well beyond urban history.  Indeed, based on
citations to the book, it has found its largest audience outside of
history. There have been about 75 citations in the past ten years in
journals of law, planning, and public policy - fields where
practitioners have practical concerns about the impact of urbanization
on people's lives.  Another 60 or so are found among various urban
social sciences, including sociology, political science, and geography.
In these fields we value _Crabgrass Frontier_ for the historical context
that it provides us, and especially for its documentation of the impact
of politics and public policy on suburbanization.

The smallest share, less than 40, comes from historians.  It is an odd
role for a sociologist to encourage historians to make more use of a
seminal historical work. Ken Jackson points toward central questions
about American society, questions for which suburbia can be a symbol:
how spatial inequalities fragment the metropolis, how growth and
prosperity bypass so many places, how the futures of young people are
limited by where they live in the city or in the suburbs, how
segregation constrains the life chances of minorities at every level of
social class.  Historians have much to offer on these questions,
especially to help us understand what is new or different in current
patterns, and what is a continuation from earlier times.  If _Crabgrass
Frontier_ can stimulate more historical research on these issues, that
will be its most enduring contribution.


John R. Logan, Professor
Department of Sociology, University at Albany
Albany, NY 12222
518-442-4656  fax 518-442-4936
email jrl40@castle.csbs.albany.edu

[Ed: John R. Logan is the author (w/ Glenna D. Spitze) of _Family Ties:
Enduring Relations Between Parents and Their Grown Children_
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); co-editor (w/ Todd
Swanstrom) of _Beyond the City Limits : Urban Policy and Economic
Restructuring in Comparative Perspective_ (Temple University Press,
1990) and author (w/ Harvey L. Molotch) of _Urban Fortunes: the
Political Economy of Place_ (Berkeley: University of California Press,
c1987).]

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