Suburbia: The New American Plurality

THE suburb has long had a powerful hold on the American imagination. In the national mythology it is a place of status and security: it is the persistent dream of a green and pleasant oasis not too far from the office, a plot of ground that offers the calm of the country with all the advantages of the city within easy reach. The dream ranges from the manicured privacy of Long Island's "Gold Coast" to the die-stamped uniformity of California's Daly City, which inspired Malvina Reynolds' derisive song Little Boxes. Between those extremes hovers a world of split levels and power mowers, station wagons and shopping centers, kaffeeklatsches and barbecue pits. "Most Americans are not urbanites," observes Sociologist Herbert Gans (The Levittowners) of the Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies. "The one-family home is something everyone aspires to, and the best place to get it is in the suburbs."

In pursuit of the suburban dream, Americans have precipitated one of the largest mass movements in history: during the past decade, the population of suburbia has grown by more than 15 million. According to the preliminary 1970 census reports, there are now 74.9 million people classified as suburbanites, a 25% increase over 1960. This surge has made suburbanites the largest group in the land, outnumbering both city dwellers and those who live in rural areas. So many Americans have already achieved the suburban goal that suburbia itself has undergone a mutation. Inevitably, the new migrants have undone the cliche image of an affluent. WASPish. Republican hotbed of wife swappers. In the suburban myth, all men are button-down commuters, swilling one martini too many in the bar car of the 5:32. Frustrated women spend their days driving from station to school to supermarket to bridge club. The kids are spoiled and confused. Families move regularly, as Daddy is transferred or climbs the corporate ladder.

A New Typology

That myth was nurtured in postwar fiction like Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and John Marquand's Point of No Return: it was caricatured by such writers as Max Shulman (Rally Round the Flag, Boys!) and Peter De Vries (The Mackerel Plaza), elaborated more darkly in John Cheever's Bullet Park. The stereotype was neither wholly wrong nor wholly accurate. But those who have taken the trouble to look carefully have recognized that suburbia has been steadily changing. Today the demographic realities are radically different from the cliche, a change that is clearly documented in a TIME-Louis Harris survey of more than 1,600 suburban Americans in 100 different communities across the land.

What emerges from the survey is a picture of unexpected diversity, some contradiction and occasional surprise. Suburbanites are not primarily transients: more than half have lived for more than ten years in the same community. Suburbanites are not automatically Republicans: on the voting rolls, half are Democrats, a third Republicans. They are not enormously affluent: nearly half of suburban families have an annual income under $10,000, and one-third of them contain a union member. They are not primarily commuters: not many more than a third of the principal wage earners travel to the central city to work. And they are not steeped in sin, at least by their own possibly self-serving accounts. Fewer than a fifth favor sex before marriage, and only one in ten believes that the neighbors would consider an occasional extramarital fling "a good thing."

One reason the Harris results are at odds with the myth is that they are based on what the Census Bureau considers to be a suburb, which is, roughly, that part of a metropolitan area surrounding a central city with a population of 50,000 or more. That includes some unexpected territory. Nassau County on Long Island is obviously suburban, reaching only 20 miles from Manhattan at its farthest point. Most Americans would also consider California's Marin County to be a suburb: many of its residents commute across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco from upper-bohemian Sausalito, sophisticated Mill Valley or nondescript San Rafael.

But as the census sees it, suburbia also includes such unlikely terrain as Cascade County, around Great Falls, Mont. --lightly populated towns in flat, rolling wheat country--and Minnehaha County, surrounding Sioux Falls, S. Dak., mainly onetime farming towns that have increasingly become dormitory communities. Northwestern University Sociologist Raymond Mack says a suburb has only two distinct characteristics: proximity to a big city and specific political boundaries, which result in local control of government. Most of the people whom Harris questioned do not even think of themselves as suburbanites. More often, they would say that they live in a small city, a town or even a rural area. Yet in the broader sense they are true suburbanites, living between city and countryside, geographically the middlemen between densely populated urban cores and the expanses of what remains of rural, smalltown America.

Sociologists have made studies of single suburbs, or the suburbs of a single city, or of specific aspects of suburbia (such as politics or race), but they have never attempted a systematic nationwide classification of the types of towns that make up suburbia. Louis Harris and his polltakers set out to do just that for TIME. "Our goal," he says, "was to examine suburban complexity and to find a systematic way of classifying suburban communities that would shed light on the real differences that exist within the wide and expanding belt between the cities and the small towns and farms."

Using a computer programmed to recognize patterns among the characteristics of suburbs covered by the survey data, the Harris staff discovered that the interplay of two particular factors --income level and rate of growth--can be used to classify suburbs in four groups. The result is a new four-way typology of American suburbia. Each kind of suburb has distinctive traits, though no single suburb precisely fits the Harris statistical model (see boxes). The four composite types: AFFLUENT BEDROOM. Of the four classes of suburb in the Harris catalogue, this is the only one that comes close to fitting the stereotypical conception. (And of the four categories, this is the only one in which a majority of residents even confessed to living in a suburb.) Even so, in towns of this type--New Canaan, Conn., Winnetka, Ill., and Atherton, Calif.--less than half of the breadwinners work in large cities. The Affluent Bedroom communities are tops in income, home ownership, proportion of professionals and executives. They contain increasing numbers of wealthy retired individuals, and they are 98% white, 61% Protestant, 3% Jewish. They are Republican (62% for Nixon in 1968, 24% for Humphrey). Few in the Affluent Bedroom admit to feeling "really bored and stuck out here"; most believe that their fellow townsmen truly enjoy suburban living. The Affluent Bedroom comes closest to Lewis Mumford's description of the historic suburb: "A sort of green ghetto dedicated to the elite."

AFFLUENT SETTLED. This type of Suburb is not growing so rapidly as the Bedroom. It is more self-sufficient, even less of a dormitory for the central city. Here--the town of Fairfield, Conn., for example, or Huntington, L.I., or Arlington, Va.--the incomes may not be quite so high and there are slightly fewer homeowners. Protestants barely outnumber Catholics, though together they are a massive majority; only 6% are Jewish, double the proportion for Affluent Bedroom suburbs but hardly a significant minority. Here Nixon won--but only by 47% to 40%. The boredom quotient is higher; nearly half think that their community offers an inadequate range of things to do with leisure time. LOW-INCOME GROWING. These are towns like Sylvania, Ohio, and Billerica, Mass., with sizable populations of skilled workers, most of whom earn their living close to home. This tends to be upward-mobile blue collar country, where incomes are substantially lower than in the affluent suburbs: only 9% of the residents earn $15,000 or more. Still, four out of five are homeowners. Protestants predominate even more than in wealthier suburbia: they make up 64% of the population, and there are practically no Jews. Most townspeople claim a Democratic political preference, but Nixon won handily here in 1968. Interestingly, the Wallace vote--11%--was no greater than in the Affluent Bedroom communities. Exactly half of the residents rate their town above average as a place to live in their state, but 16% say that many live there only until they can afford something better.

LOW-INCOME STAGNANT. This classification includes Cambridge, Mass., McKeesport, Pa., Joliet, Ill., and Bell Gardens, Calif. Of the four types, it has the highest proportion of nonskilled and service workers--janitors, firemen, waiters, longshoremen, common laborers and the like--and the lowest proportion of commuters to the central city (34%). Here, on the average, 12% are black--although in some cases, as in East Orange, N.J., and Compton, Calif., blacks have become a majority. Residents register Democratic overwhelmingly, 63% to 28%, and generally vote that way as well. But even here, Nixon squeaked out a 1 % margin three years ago. Understandably, those who live in Low-Income Stagnant communities say they enjoy their lives less than Americans in other types of suburb. They are most often bored (25%) and most likely to feel that they and their neighbors are only biding time until they can afford to move (21%). Even so, 39% rate their community as above average; only 10% consider it below average.

Searching for Space

For all the variables, suburbanites of all four types have much in common --not least the reasons they give for moving to the suburbs in the first place. For nearly half of all the suburbanites Harris polled, the biggest single factor was the desire to have a home of their own. Next in order of importance came the search for a better atmosphere for the children (40%), a goal that they ruefully admit is not always realized. Suburban teen-agers are impressively unhappy with their surroundings: nearly three-fifths are "often bored," and 43% say that they would like to live somewhere else when they are no longer dependent on their parents. At least among the offspring of suburbia, the age of ecology has modified the urbanizing tradition that led their ambitious parents to the big city to seek their fortune. Of the kids who want to live elsewhere, more than half--54%--would prefer a more rural to a more urban setting. Says David Riggs, 16, of Virginia Beach, Va.: "By the time I'm out on my own, there will be too many people here. So I'll head for the open spaces."

Adult suburbanites often moved out of the city for the same reason: more than a third say that they were looking for "green, open spaces." Many also say that they came to the suburbs to find friends and neighbors more like themselves. "Life is slower out here," says Robert Pipp, 58, who lives in Lower Paxton Township, a suburban part of Harrisburg, Pa. Surprisingly few give negative reasons--the problems of the city: crime, racial tension, pollution--for getting out.

The statistics testify that, beyond a doubt, most adult suburbanites are happy with their lot. Fully 44% had no serious reservations at all about their neighborhoods, and the major complaints joined in by more than one in ten --high taxes, high cost of living--are problems that plague city dwellers at least as gravely. "Many people really enjoy living in the community" is a statement that 74% agree with; 67% also feel that there is a strong sense of neighborliness. There is always a possibility that such satisfaction may be feigned, a defense against the anxiety-ridden image of the suburbanite in contemporary fiction. Yet most insist that the friendliness of their neighbors is the one thing that has given them most satisfaction. Also important: community services, particularly good schools and convenient shopping. Most, in other words, have found what they were looking for. Once they have arrived, they do not look back. Two out of three say that their lives would scarcely be affected if, aside from working there, they would never again set foot in the central city. And even for work, the city is less and less important to suburbanites' lives: the number of those who work as well as live in the suburbs is sharply on the rise.

For all the increasing self-sufficiency and sense of satisfaction, there is a notably less cheery underside to suburban life. Many have found that suburbia shares the same problems as the cities, though possibly less severely. Beyond taxes, the complaints of suburbia make a litany that any city dweller would find familiar.

CRIME. When asked to list the problems of their suburb, only 12% volunteered that crime is a major concern. Questioned more directly, however, 43% admitted that crime is on the increase in their community and 32% said they do not feel it is safe to walk around at night. (That proportion rises to 46% among women and 57% among nonwhites, who live in poorer neighborhoods just as they do in the city.) One out of four said that places they once visited at night are now off limits because they are not safe. Over 90% agree that "government at all levels should get much tougher on the subject of crime and law and order."

SCHOOLS. Suburbanites give their school systems high marks: 76% say that the quality of education is either "excellent" or "pretty good." There is some doubt, though, that the schools will stay that way, particularly in suburbs that are growing and therefore have expanding school populations. Already, three out of five feel that enough money is being spent on the schools in their community: only 28% are willing to spend more. A mere 18% of suburbanites would go along with higher taxes to raise extra money for education. Opposition to increased spending on schools is highest in upper-income communities--perhaps partly because their schools are already among the best, and partly because more of the population consists of parents whose children are grown. They have no further personal interest in improving local educational facilities with higher school budgets.

MORES AND MORALS. Despite occasional flurries that make headlines, sex education in the schools is not an urgent issue in suburbia: 78% are for it, though almost half--45%--do not even know whether their schools teach it or not. As for the stereotype of suburban swingers, suburbanites are not convinced: 86% feel that most wives in the community are faithful to their husbands, and 79% believe that most husbands reciprocate. Teen-agers reject premarital sex, 56% to 31%. Only 8% of suburbanites report that their neighbors do a lot of partying; 58% say that they personally go to parties no more than a couple of times a year. Few think that a lack of other diversions makes drinking a more serious problem in suburbia than elsewhere. But 40% say they know someone in the community who drinks too much, and 36% say they know someone who uses tranquilizers.

THE YOUNG. In the 16-to-20 age group, acquaintance with abuse of liquor is wider than might be expected: more than other suburban age groups, the young people interviewed know someone who drinks excessively (58%). All this despite the fact that suburban parents do not consider themselves particularly permissive. If parents found their teenager smoking pot, two-thirds would insist that he stop, nearly a third would try to talk him out of it, and only 1% would not interfere. The sentiment for a strict approach to child rearing emerges in other ways. Two-fifths of the parents would insist that a teen-age boy with long hair get it cut.

THE POOR. On the suburban evidence, President Nixon was politically wise to shoot down a HUD proposal to encourage construction of low-income housing in suburbia. The idea is distinctly unpopular. In suburbs where there is no low-income housing today, almost half the residents are against it (v. 38% favorable and 13% undecided): in high-income suburbs, opposition is strongest (68% to 22%). Only 26% of those interviewed said there already were low-income projects in their community.

BLACKS. Harris concludes that suburbanites do want a certain degree of exclusivity, but he found that it is more a question of class than of color. The same affluent suburbs that oppose low-income housing by more than 3 to 1 would welcome blacks, 50% to 32%. Blacks who can afford to live in a high-income community would be acceptable, it seems, while the poor, of whatever color, would not. Whites, some of whom possibly ascribe to neighbors prejudices that they would not admit to in themselves, feel strongly (67% to 12%) that most others in the community would be against blacks moving in. By 59% to 26%, they think the advent of blacks would hurt real estate values. Suburbanites favor integrated schools, but only on a limited basis. They prefer neighborhood schools and oppose having blacks bused in from other districts by nearly 3 to 1; even teenagers agree.

Whether white suburbanites like it or not, the suburban scene is being altered. Blacks are moving to the suburbs in growing numbers, although the white influx over the past decade has been so great that the percentage of blacks in suburbia has risen only imperceptibly--4.5% overall in 1970 v. 4.2% in 1960. As of 1968, however, there were proportionately more poor blacks in the suburbs than in the cities. Industry, too, has been deserting the central city for the suburbs.

Despite the changes, suburbanites who feel that their community has become a better place to live over the past few years outnumber those who think there has been a decline. But the problems of the central cities are inevitably being exported to the suburbs along with the new suburbanites. According to Department of Justice figures, excluding petty thievery and traffic violations, crime increased by 181% in the suburbs from 1960 to 1969, while the major urban centers saw a rise of 117%. "We are urbanizing the suburban areas to the point that many of them are coming to resemble the cities of a few generations ago," says Milton Rakove, a University of Illinois urbanologist. The quest for a home of one's own is increasingly frustrated. As demand goes up, supply diminishes, and prices have risen steadily. Now, by some estimates, half of all new suburban housing around

Chicago is multiple dwellings, and the proportion rises as high as 90% in such suburbs as Oak Park. At the core of the problem is sheer population pressure. "It's more crowded here now," says Joseph McCarthy, 36, a Grumman Corp. engineer who lives in East Northport, L.I. "A few years back it was almost a rural area. Now you have traffic to contend with that you never had to worry about before."

As a result of its demographic dominance, suburbia may soon achieve a political primacy that the cities never quite managed in the long era of malap-portioned, rural-dominated state legislatures, which traditionally hold the key to everything from congressional districting to the parceling out of state aid funds. According to a National Urban Coalition study, "suburban gains in political power through court-ordered redistricting have been steady since 1966." Charles Richard Lehne, a Rutgers political scientist, foresees that the suburbs will pick up 25 seats in the House of Representatives as a result of redistricting based on the 1970 census.

Harris found, however, that few people change their political registration on moving to the suburbs, so the suburban migration does not necessarily mean a gain for the Republicans. (Though suburbia voted for Nixon in 1968, it now gives him a 52% negative job rating.) Reapportionment helped the cities get fairer representation in the state legislatures, but it also boosted the number of legislators from the expanding suburbs. Now urbanologists fear that suburban representatives may combine with rural lawmakers to perpetuate the historic discrimination against cities in the allocation of state funds.

"The battle of the cities will be fought on the suburban front," says Robert Wood, president of the University of Massachusetts and author of the political and governmental study Suburbia. The cities have already been diminished by the movement of people and industry to the suburbs. "This trend," says Harris, "if not reversed, will have major consequences for urban America: declining tax bases within cities, less incentive for the cities themselves to develop efficient mass transportation, greater reluctance in the state capitals to provide aid for cities. In short, the isolation of the central city." That need not happen, however; planned development of new towns at the city's edge and a greater amount of regional urban-suburban cooperation could help jump the mounting barrier.

Toward a New Localism

Some urbanologists think that a second big wave of migration to the farther suburbs is beginning already, made up of the offspring of the first wave, which began just after World War II. In one view, says Berkeley Sociologist Carl Werthman, the city is becoming "a place for all the oddballs and deviants of our society: the lower class, the ethnic minorities, the homosexuals, the artists." As a result, "the young married seldom even look at a place in the city," says Rakove. "The older suburbs are just like the city for them. They are settling way out, where the prices aren't so high and the schools are the best." He cites the example of Schaumburg, Ill., 25 miles from the Loop. Barely more than a pasture ten years ago, Schaumburg now numbers some 50,000 residents. Its 1980 population, he predicts, will be 250,000.

All this suggests a picture of new American population patterns emerging in the next decade or so. The rural population, which is diminishing, is not likely to be replaced by big-city or suburban dropouts in search of a better life. The cities will become increasingly the habitat of singles, childless couples, blacks and the other nonwhite minorities. "Manhattan may be the prototype city of the future--for either the poor or the rich," says Rakove.

In between the farms and the cities will be an ever growing, ever more self-sufficient suburbia expanding into one continuous blur, as it does already along the northeast corridor from Boston to Washington. In these spreading suburbs, in all their diverse forms, will come a further test of American democracy. The auguries are good: the Harris survey points to a high incidence of civic concern, and the example of Evanston indicates that the combination of civic concern with a manageable governmental unit can work very well indeed. Suburbia may never re-create the New England town meeting, but it could be the locus of a new localism that will succeed in allowing its citizens to reassert some control over their lives and their governments, to create a fresh sense of community and roots across the land.

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