Suburbia Changing, but Still Part of the American Dream, Author Says : Urban Realities of the ‘80s Intruding Upon Idyllic Retreats That Flourished in ‘50s, ‘60s

Suburbia. The very word conjures up images of sprawling, ranch-style homes with backyard barbecues, safe and stable neighborhoods with tree-lined streets, and traditional nuclear families with dad commuting to work and mom staying home with the kids.

During their heyday in the 1950s and ‘60s, the suburbs were part of the middle-class American dream--an idyllic alternative to the cities and the urban ills that plagued them.

But while the suburban dream may still be flourishing in the mid-1980s, the reality has changed. Indeed, says urban sociologist Mark Baldassare, there is trouble in paradise.

“Initially,” said Baldassare, an associate professor in social ecology at UC Irvine, “the suburbs in the United States were a bastion for white, middle-class families, and that really persisted right through the 1960s. But in 1970 that started to change and became something else, and it’s the ‘something else’ that’s of interest to me.”

The new suburbia is the subject of Baldassare’s new book, “Trouble in Paradise” (Columbia University Press; $25), which examines “the suburban transformation in America.”

Baldassare maintains that although the suburban reality is over--that doesn’t necessarily mean the suburban dream is over.

The reason for the discrepancy, Baldassare said in an interview, “is that, despite rapid growth and industrialization and the fact that this is really a very different type of suburb than we’ve had in the past, people still want the same things: They want a single-family home. They want basically a family-oriented community. They want low densities. And they don’t want to be hassled by traffic and pollution.

“They want these things and they’re not going to get them, and that’s the dilemma. They’re holding out hope for the suburban dream and they’re ignoring the fact that suburbia was something that existed in the past and won’t exist (in that way) again.

“My guess is, as suburbanization progresses, increasingly there will be inequality within suburbia. Some communities will get more of this dream than others, but no one is going to get it as it was because of the densities and the diversity of people and activities in suburbia today.”

In “Trouble in Paradise,” Baldassare primarily uses survey data from his own research in Orange County--a suburban region he describes as a national pacesetter.

Orange County Laboratory

In fact, the Manhattan-born Baldassare, 34, says he chose to move to Orange County in 1981 because it offered the best “laboratory” in which to study suburbia. He has since interviewed more than 12,000 Orange County residents as director of a local newspaper poll and as study director for the Orange County Annual Survey at UC Irvine--in which county residents are asked about a variety of subjects, including housing, government, transportation, services and the quality of life.

“Orange County is a trend-setter in a lot of ways,” Baldassare said. “For one, it was the first suburban county to be defined as a separate metropolitan community--that happened in 1970. It has both the emphasis on high technology and the service industry and the lack of a smokestack industry, (qualities) which we expect our communities of tomorrow to have. And its residents--although they’re typically described as conservative Republicans--are actually in political philosophy new fiscal Populists, or that mixture of social liberals and fiscal conservatives.”

Moreover, Baldassare said, “Orange County has the political structure of the typical suburb in that there is a very weak county-level authority and 26 municipalities, each going their own way. So for a lot of different reasons it epitomizes what is going on in suburbia today and at the same time allows us to kind of look five to 10 years in the future at what’s going to happen when communities become high technology.”

Baldassare traces the beginning of what is now a predominantly suburban nation to the mid-1940s.

Mass Appeal

“Some people trace the suburbs as far back as into the 19th Century, but suburbs had more of a mass appeal to the middle class really after World War II when there was a big housing crunch in the cities,” he said.

At the time, Baldassare said, cities could no longer house all the people who worked in them. But with the aid of Federal Housing Authority and Veterans Administration loans, and by expanding the freeway system and other planning innovations, he said, the land on the fringes of the cities was opened up for housing developments that were affordable for the middle class.

In the 1950s, Baldassare said, “suburbs were primarily residential, so land use was segregated: It was all housing, or almost all housing and not mixed with industry or commerce. Suburbs also offered people what they wanted the most, which was single-family homes and backyards: private outdoor space.”

In addition, he said, the suburbs offered whites who wanted it segregation from the increasing influx of minorities into the cities that occured during the ‘40s and ‘50s, and the suburbs “provided an atmosphere that segregated the population life-cycle-wise in that the suburbs were where families lived and amenities such as schools and neighborhoods and parks were set up for families. So that’s basically what the (suburban) paradise was in those days: residential, low density, single-family homes, outdoor space, white, family-oriented and middle class.”

Change in the 1960s

That vision of suburbia began to change by the late 1960s, however. With race riots, skyrocketing crime rates and a growing influx of minorities into the cities, more white middle-class families joined the suburban stream, said Baldassare.

And the suburbs, which previously had not been absorbing population in great numbers, “all of a sudden had to deal with this rapid growth,” said Baldassare, noting that, as people began to move to the suburbs, businesses began to follow. Large department stores in downtown Los Angeles, for example, started opening branches in the suburbs.

“Before you knew it, industries, which were located in central cities, began to move to the suburbs for a lot of the same reasons that individuals had,” he said. “Plus, increasingly, that’s where the labor force was--in the suburbs.”

As Baldassare sees it, the turning point for suburbia came in 1970.

According to the U.S. Census, he said, that was the year when more people lived in the suburbs than anywhere else in the nation. It also marked the year that Nassau-Suffolk counties, (a suburb of New York City) and suburban Orange County were designated as separate metropolitan communities.

“So what you had in the beginning of the ‘70s was a change in the landscape of suburbia because all of a sudden you had rapid growth and industrialization. . . . They created the problems and issues in suburbia, which are still being grappled with today.”

Six Challenges

During the interview, Baldassare discussed what he describes in his book as the six challenges facing the suburbs of the ‘80s:

- The housing crisis. “The basic problem with housing is what the people want and what the people can achieve are two different things,” he said. “People continue to want the suburban dream: the single-family home and home ownership.” But, he said, “the cost of housing is such that most people cannot afford to buy homes and those who can afford it, can’t get the kind of housing that they most desire. They have to settle for something a lot less.”

The challenge for local government and builders, Baldassare says, is to provide smaller homes that people can afford to buy.

- Controversies over growth. “Despite the fact that the suburbs are rapidly growing, residents still have the notion that suburbia is a place where the status quo prevails and they, at every turn, resist growth and industrialization in suburbia.”

But growth, Baldassare said, is inevitable. “One community that has it together politically can stop it and maybe Newport Beach can stop it, but the people are going to move to Costa Mesa which is right next door and what are you doing really?”

What is needed, Baldassare says, is a regional growth plan--a plan in which “communities can absorb population at a reasonable rate which won’t affect the quality of life in another community. There’s got to be more give and take between communities, so that some don’t suffer because others won’t allow anybody to move in.”

- The tax revolt and fiscal strain. “The dilemma there is that residents complain about how inadequate (government) services are such as police and transportation, parks and hospitals, and yet they don’t want to pay for those services.

“They want government to figure out some way to use money more efficiently or find money at the state or federal level that will help provide better services. So they won’t let government increase spending and taxes to improve the services that they see as deteriorating or inadequate.”

This, he maintains, is a problem peculiar to suburbia. “People are so extremely locally oriented that they fail to see the big picture and where they fit in the big picture: of being part of a larger community that has needs and problems.”

- Distrust of local government. “Because suburban residents are so locally oriented, almost all the studies done suggest that they focus more on the local area and less on the cosmopolitan, or larger area, than city people do.

“People tend to have little trust in the higher levels of authority which govern their lives. They might place trust in their city council but will place no trust in their county or higher levels of representation. This is what makes it difficult to get people to think about solving problems on the regional level because they won’t trust government.”

- The emergence of special service needs as suburbia has grown and become industrialized.

“Increasingly,” he said, “the services that are demanded in suburbia today are services that are large and complex enough that they can’t be met by any one city. They are services which demand the cooperation and coordination of agencies and governments, and what you have in suburbia is a lack of coordination among agencies and governments so it’s hard to solve those service-problem needs.

“The best examples are transportation, schools and health services. It’s hard to get these small cities to link up and provide both the level of services and specialty services because they, in themselves, are too small to provide them and they won’t get together and share resources and knowledge and expertise to provide a network of services which is really what you need. This gets back to the point that no city in suburbia is an island.”

- Social diversity in the suburban population and the resulting special interests.

“It used to be that suburbs were white, middle class,” said Baldassare, “but because most people who move to the suburbs today are attracted for job reasons, you see more and more minorities and lower income people moving to suburban areas. And also more elderly people are in the suburbs today than in the past, partly because they were previous residents here and they became elderly.”

Special Populations

In part because people still think of suburbia as white, middle class and family oriented, Baldassare said, “suburbs are not set up to serve the needs of special populations” and they overlook that there are now these special groups in suburbia. Studies have begun to show these special groups have a harder time living in suburbia than in the cities because their needs are overlooked.”

Despite all of challenges faced by suburban residents, Baldassare concludes that suburbia will still be the community of the future.

“Not only do all the trends suggest it, but it (suburbia) still does offer the best compromise for what people want,” he said. “What people have said they’ve wanted since the 1940s in the United States is to own their own home, to have a single-family home and to live outside of big cities but to be within reach of urban amenities.

“And suburbs still offer all those things, so I believe that by the next decade over 50% of the population will live in the suburbs--right now it’s about 43%--and that by the beginning of the 21st Century it will be even more.”