The Suburban Lifestyle Dream

The Making & Mythologizing of the American Suburb

In Genesis, God plants a bucolic garden for Adam and Eve: Eden was the opposite of a city, and God saw that it was good. After the fall, when Adam and Eve’s misbegotten descendants attempt to build a tower in Babel, God fears what they might do together and so disperses them across the land. Later, He visits a holy-rolling earthquake upon the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah. In Revelation, John of Patmos prophesies the annihilation of the Whore of Babylon, which God will destroy in punishment for her “ungodly lusts” and sins “piled up to heaven.” As Ben Wilson writes in Metropolis, while some other cultures revere the city as “the gift of the gods to humanity,” in the Judeo-Christian tradition, “cities are oppositional to God, a necessary evil.” 

God is not an urbanist. He’s probably not a fan of “Sex and the City,” either.

Even as the West has built some of the world’s most extraordinary cities, this Puritanical, anti-urban throughline runs across our culture. The desire to return to an Edenic state is a central theme in the story of how the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” first entered our collective conscience. That dream has powered the unique pattern of suburbanization that typifies much of modern America—one marked by “stratified and segregated social geography” and “relatively low density.” As Kenneth T. Jackson chronicles in Crabgrass Frontier, the full story of the American suburb is one of technological progress, industrialization, wealth creation, race relations, and government policy—but it cannot be told without understanding the importance of the “new cultural values” that fueled those factors. 

This cultural seachange was not inevitable.

In preindustrial cities, the “inner city” of the urban core was the place to be and where the wealthy built their homes. Before 1815, a suburban fringe around the urban core had always existed in cities—it was where the slums were. Indeed, to be suburban was to be less than urban. In an era “when paving was rare and nature was threatening, the city street represented progress and the control of man over his environment.” Cities were seen as “agents of progress and culture.”

But during the 1800s, attitudes began to change, and by the end of the century, a cultural inversion was already underway. The catalyst was the invention of the nuclear family, a relatively new concept before the 1700s. Historically, family life in cities was organized around work, and home was often a place of business, where families worked alongside servants, employees, and customers. But by the next century, the “zone of private life began to expand, and the family came to be a personal bastion against society, a place of refuge, free from outside control.” 

By the middle of the Nineteenth Century, the explosive growth in American wealth fueled the development of the “emerging values of domesticity, privacy, and isolation,” encapsulated in the idea of the family home. These virtues began to be extolled with religious fervor:

In countless sermons and articles, ministers glorified the family even more than their predecessors had done, and they cited its importance as a safeguard against the moral slide of society as a whole into sinfulness and greed. They made extravagant claims about the virtues of domestic life, insisting that the individual could find a degree of fulfillment, serenity, and satisfaction in the house that was possible nowhere else.

The Reverend William G. Eliot, Jr. even went so far as to proclaim that the foundation of American freedom was “not in the declaration that all men are free and equal, but in the quiet influence of the fireside, the bonds which unite together in the family circle. The corner-stone of our republic is the hearth-stone.”

If a free man’s home was his castle, what was it to a woman? 

Catherine Beecher, sister to Harriet Beecher Stowe of Uncle Tom’s Cabin fame, emerged as a champion of a new “cult of domesticity.” In her 1831 Treatise on Domestic Economy, Founded Upon Experience, Reason, and the Bible, she describes the urban environment as masculine while the suburban as female. She believed that man’s physical superiority was matched by woman’s moral superiority, which could only be protected by the family home. A strident opponent of the women’s rights movement, she argued that “woman’s relation to man should be one of dependence and subservience.”

Her message was clear: a woman’s place was in her home, sweet home. 

Feminists, in particular, saw the family home as a means for the domestic enslavement of women, viewing these paragons of liberty and virtue as “lace-curtain prisons.” They might have had a point. 

The cult of domesticity centered, if not confined, the homemaker in the single-family home and elevated the home as a moral ideal, a bulwark of piety, sobriety, and chastity. Indeed, champions of this worldview disparaged urban apartment buildings as “sexually racy,” believing that the “presence of several unrelated families on the same floor would encourage promiscuity.” Naturally, the French had been living in apartments for years. Thus, the “single-family dwelling became the paragon of middle-class housing, the most visible symbol of having arrived at a fixed place in society, the goal to which every decent family aspired.”

Nestled within the idyllic expanse of an ornamental lawn, the family home would sit protected from urban filth of both the moral and literal variety. Indeed, the “lawn was a barrier—a kind of verdant moat separating the household from the threats and temptations of the city.” This view was shared by Calvert Vaux, who designed Central Park with Frederick Law Olmsted and celebrated the bucolic suburbs, which he thought appealed to our innate “preference for the works of God to the works of man.” In his view, the most offensive aspect of man’s urban works was the street grid. 

Suburban romantics like Vaux and Olmsted believed the curvilinear suburban street should conform to nature so that suburban man could commune with nature. They blamed the rectilinear grid for urban woes: right-angled lots, which facilitated real estate speculation; tenements, which were overcrowded and disease-ridden; even the brownstone, which proved the city couldn’t adapt to the “civilized requirements of a single family.”

From God’s lips to American ears, the anti-urban view appeared frequently in the wider culture. Jefferson deemed cities “pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man,” which I suppose he thought could be best preserved by plantation slavery. As I described in “The Revolt of the Cities,” he and other founders were willing to sacrifice American cities for the sake of the Revolution. William Jennings Bryan extolled the superiority of the farm at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1896. Henry James deplored the smokestacks and the slums in The Bostonians, while hugely popular magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal championed the cult of domesticity. Later, promoting homeownership would be seen as a way to fight communism.

Its strident moralism and inherent sexism notwithstanding, the appeal of the suburban ideal was not without merit. 

Unlike European cities that were well established before the Industrial Revolution, American cities grew around industrialization. Factories were located within the urban core and competed for residential space. Tenements became crowded—and, as Harper’s magazine put it, “morality [was] as impossible as happiness” there. Cities were noisy and polluted. There was crime and sexual promiscuity. God (presumably) would regularly visit cities with biblical plagues and pestilence, especially in summer. The huge number of horses required to move people and goods meant that city streets were paved with horseshit. And there were too many of the “wrong types of people” in the proverbial melting pot. 

Indeed, especially as immigration soared and the Great Migration of southern blacks commenced, the suburban ideal would eventually take on an explicit racist and xenophobic character, too.

So while people had good (and not so good) reasons for wanting out, everything in the culture, from the pulpit to pulp fiction, told them they were not only right, but righteous in thinking so. By the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the cultural inversion was complete: the suburbs were no longer inferior to the city—they had become the new ideal. They were

The precise opposite of the kind of dense human settlement that had characterized the planet for millennia. Formerly, open spaces like the Piazza San Marco in Venice had been scattered behind and between buildings. The open style of the American suburb, in contrast, scattered a few houses in the midst of open spaces.

The American suburb represented a spatial inversion of the city as much as a cultural one.

Industrialization brought new technologies and massive wealth that would allow the Suburban Lifestyle Dream to become a reality for many Americans. Cityfolk flocked first to new streetcar suburbs and then to farther-out communities connected to cities by commuter rail. With houses built close together in walkable neighborhoods, those early suburbs looked more like cities and less like the rural idyll imagined by their boosters, but they satisfied middle-class demand for a compromise between the chaos of the city and the beauty of nature.

The next evolution of the suburb would seek no compromise. The final disconnect between the suburbs and the urban core wouldn’t arrive until after World War II, when the automobile, the interstate, and the government aligned to create the mass-market, mass-produced suburb. It wouldn’t look much like what its 19th-Century champions imagined, and nothing at all like the cities that fed its creation.

What the new interstate suburbs left behind in their exhaust would make “inner city” a byword for urban decadence and decay, as many American cities fell into smoldering ruin—punishment wrought by an avenging god, perhaps.

We’ll talk more about how that happened in coming installments.