Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly elect Democrats, but the party had a rude awakening when one of it pet projects — turning the suburbs into mere extensions of cities — was recently rejected. Twice.
In the western suburb of Newton, a city of 87,000 people that gave Donald Trump only 16.7 percent of its votes in 2020, a city councilor who had served for fourteen years was voted out of office last fall following her push to increase multi-family housing. At a community meeting in the town’s Nonantum district, a less expensive neighborhood where 20 percent of the population is of Italian ancestry, residents were told that they couldn’t have backyards large enough for a swing set anymore. “Are you kidding me?” a local real estate professional asked. “That’s why people move to the suburbs.”
Animus towards the suburbs has given rise to calls for congestion pricing in New York City, with a toll of $15 for a vehicle to enter Manhattan.
In the southern suburb of Milton, voters turned down by a wide margin (54 percent) a land-use plan that would have allowed more multifamily development, primarily in East Milton, a less-affluent neighborhood cut off from the rest of the community by a highway. The town as a whole gave Joe Biden 73 percent of its votes in the 2020 presidential election.
The particular stick being used to beat the suburbs into submission is a relatively new Massachusetts law that requires municipalities served by public transit to approve multifamily zoning of at least 15 units per acre. Communities that don’t comply face a loss of state funding, but judging by the reaction of these two towns, residents are willing to run that risk to keep their suburbs the way they are. (READ MORE from Con Chapman: The Modern Monetary Theory Meltdown)
While measures such as the Massachusetts law are supposedly based on solid public policy grounds, their unstated subtext is disdain for the suburbs, and the lifestyle they make possible. As described in the 1962 folk song “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds, the suburbs are filled with “Little boxes made of ticky-tacky” that “all look just the same.” In these soulless dwellings live people whose children “go to summer camp and then to the university,” and then “are put in boxes, little boxes all the same.”
This sentiment was repeated in sixties and seventies novels (“Revolutionary Road” by Richard Yates) and movies (“The Stepford Wives”) and has now become such an accepted part of the dogma of American life it would be heresy to suggest — from a seat in a guest chair of a late-night talk show, for example — that one really liked the suburbs, even if one actually lived there.
The root of this despairing attitude is the belief that suburbs are a relatively new phenomenon that sprang up after World War II in the form of developments such as Levittown, New York, where standardized housing was mass-produced for returning servicemen and their families. In fact, the suburbs have a much longer history; they are mentioned in Plato’s dialogue Laws, for example, in which an Athenian says there “will have to be” superintendents “to secure decent civil conditions within the city walls and in the suburbs.” From that era (late fifth to mid-fourth centuries B.C.E.), one can leap forward to 1599, when Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar, in which the character of Portia asks her husband Brutus “Dwell I but in the suburbs of your good pleasure?” Shakespeare’s theatre was in fact located in the suburbs, at Southwark, close to the south bank of the Thames.
Those who hold the suburbs in contempt must face the fact that while the conventional wisdom may denounce them, a majority of Americans — 52 percent — choose to live in one. The percentage of those living in suburbs comes to around 70 percent if regions developed on the suburban pattern within city boundaries are included. The horror expressed in “Little Boxes” that one’s children will go on to college and good jobs after spending their childhood in pleasant surroundings seems to be limited to those who get their political views from folk singers and their ilk. The conventional wisdom is rejected by the vox populi. (READ MORE: Horace Mann: America’s Favorite Bigot Who Elevated Educators Over Parents)
Animus towards the suburbs has given rise to calls for congestion pricing in New York City, with a toll of $15 for a vehicle to enter Manhattan. Boston is eyeing the experiment as an outlet for the politics of envy: “Add a bit more populism” to the New York model, The Boston Globe suggests, “like bombastically high taxes on luxury vehicles and high earners.”
Based on the reaction of actual voters, the iron law of injecting urban housing schemes into the suburbs seems to be that one’s enthusiasm for a multi-family project plunked down in a suburb is inversely proportional to its distance from one’s own home. Given the political realities of the market for land, state and federal subsidies for affordable housing go furthest in neighborhoods where property values are lowest — like Nonantum and East Milton — even in the suburbs. These factors combine to place the burden of state-mandated affordable housing initiatives on those who are closest to the bottom of the ladder of success, for the benefit of objects of sympathy just beneath them.
John Cheever, who chronicled suburban angst in his short stories and described the culture there as “a cesspool of conformity,” later confessed that he didn’t mean it.
“The truth is,” he wrote in 1960, “I’m crazy about the suburbs and I don’t care who knows it.”
Con Chapman is the author of Kansas City Jazz: A Little Evil Will Do You Good (Equinox Publishing).
