The Price of Paradise: The Costs of Inequality and a Vision for a More Equitable America

2. All This I Made Myself: Assuming That Middle-Class Lives Are Self-Sufficient

41 2 ALL THIS I MADE MYSELF ASSUMING THAT MIDDLE-CLASS LIVES ARE SELF-SUFFICIENT We shall solve the city problem by leaving the city. Henry Ford The story of our assumptions about place begins in the suburbs, not our big cities, as you might think. For many of us, the city is a place to find yourself, to discover your identity like some unsolved mystery, and to prove yourself. But that quest is traditionally for the young. Soon enough those urges give way to a desire to complete yourself (or your family) in a place built for that purpose, one that provides the raw materials —privacy, safety, natural beauty, and control—with which to “settle down.” The suburbs, unlike cities, never take credit for your completion ; they merely preserve it. The assumption of self-reliance may be the foundation of how Americans think about opportunity—how it’s achieved, who deserves it, where it thrives—experienced, as always, in certain places. In our cultural imagination, the suburbs became that place over others. Even today, the ideal of suburban life politically and rhetorically continues to exalt the noble self-sufficiency of American middle-class personhood against the entitled, redistributive, and morally relativist character of the city. As this chapter shows, however, this basic assumption could not be further from fiscal reality. ALL THIS I MADE MYSELF 42 From its expansion in the postwar years, the suburban model of the American Dream has relied on a wise but extravagant government scheme of massive subsidization. For most, but not all of us, these unprecedented subsidies related to key ingredients of economic wellbeing such as mortgage financing, income tax policy, highway infrastructure , home values, and ultimately household wealth. There is nothing hidden about these subsidies, which leads us to ask not whether middle-class status is deeply subsidized, but why we assume it’s not. That irony is the focus of this chapter as we examine some postwar suburbs of the East Coast, the effects of New Deal supports, the ideals that evolved alongside that material history, and finally the contradictions and consequences of ideas and policies that valued exclusion above all. As Christina “Chrissy” Thomas relates, our assumptions about middle -class self-sufficiency came to life in the suburbs of Philadelphia where she first went with her husband in 1957, not in the teeming, corrupt , anonymous City of Brotherly Love where she grew up. “I was so proud,” she says, tugging lightly at the lapels of a black house vest and almost blushing. Her eyes sparkle with a flash of long-nurtured memory, reminding me of favorite aunts, even my own mother. The high pitch of her voice is precise, tender birdsong. We are sitting at her table, eating a delicious lunch of meatballs, salad, and quiche she has prepared in the same home she and her husband left the city for decades ago. “We had practically no furniture at all. Just a little TV and our bed.” When they first arrived in the new Concord Park subdivision, it was still winter. You could scarcely find the town of Trevose on a map, though it was not far from Pennsylvania’s new Levittown development in Bristol. The drive from Philadelphia felt like forever, she recalled. The miles seemed to stretch endlessly away from the city, though her friend Evelyn had told her it wasn’t a long trip. Ms. Thomas recalls how proud her husband was to choose their lot, surveying from this angle and that how the view of things would be from their windows, the fall of the sun, the trees that would grow. They were so giddy about the opportunity to live in their own house, with their own front and backyard. In no ALL THIS I MADE MYSELF 43 time, however, loneliness crept in. She didn’t work, though her husband did, so she was home alone. Even when a moving truck appeared and deposited another couple from the city whom she befriended, the loneliness could be the one disadvantage of their new home in “the country .” Otherwise, it was perfect. “When the weather got warm, you would hear the voices of children ,” she recalls, smiling. “You could hear them at a distance, and then little by little you would hear them closer until they knocked on the door. ‘Do you have any little children?’ they would ask me. ‘Can they come out to play?’ It...