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We advocate for a model of development that allows our cities, towns and neighborhoods to grow financially strong and resilient.
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Monday Mar 18, 2024
Monday Mar 18, 2024
Benjamin Herold, author of Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs, joins host Chuck Marohn on this week’s episode of the Strong Towns Podcast. Disillusioned tells the story of five families from Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Pittsburg, all of whom moved to the suburbs in search of the American dream…but instead, they’re experiencing the decline of the suburbs, rather than the benefits that were initially sold to them.
Comments (7)
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The change in the complexion of suburbia is a huge part of why we can’t get the support to reinvest in it, just like we stopped supporting universities once the civil rights laws meant that “those people” would get access to money invested in public schools. Within a generation, university systems that had always been free or nearly so were suddenly heavily dependent on tuition and required access to family money or loans. Just another way to maintain the hierarchy while pretending neutrality
Sunday Mar 24, 2024
(Cont) saw “Black Wall St” as a “threat.” And in America, we say that anyone who feels “threatened” gets to defend themselves. But a threat is not why they rioted and murdered hundreds. The whites did it because the whole culture of huge swaths of America is based on white supremacy + capitalism and Black Wall St, while no threat to whites in any sense other than to their psychic payoff of whiteness, exposed the nonsense of white supremacy.
Sunday Mar 24, 2024
Your discussion of the terror bombing and murders that leveled Tulsa’s “Black Wall St” is telling — you said that you liked to focus the most on how those folks who started with nothing were able to be so successful in building wealth . . . So much so that, as you put it, “they became a threat to their neighbors” But that’s the tell - because it’s a societal “stand your ground” justification, saying that the whites (who had just been GIVEN all the land in Oklahoma a few decades before) —
Sunday Mar 24, 2024
But, as Faulkner said, the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even the past. Plenty of school districts in Maryland and Virginia SHUT DOWN entirely for years and pumped all their public money in seg academies, and it was precisely in those years that the government was lavishing the money to get the Ponzi Scheme going, and it was during those years that all those white folks were able to use their GI bill money to buy in for essentially $0 down, while their fellow black soldiers and sailors got nothing
Sunday Mar 24, 2024
Well, anyway. Having grown up white and lived in two very different settings — North Dallas (not far from Plano) and then suburban Prince Georges County, Maryland just as it was becoming perhaps the leading majority-minority county in the US, I have a view of things much closer to Harold’s. The argument I kept hearing you try to make is “This doesn’t have to do with race, the Growth Ponzi Scheme is immiserating poor whites everywhere today” — which is accurate to a point . . .
Sunday Mar 24, 2024
Oooops, don’t hit “return” I guess
Sunday Mar 24, 2024
Thanks for having Ben Herold on to discuss “Disillusioned.” I finished the book today and will be thinking about it for a long time — I could tell you were struggling with what you call a “heavy race lens” but I think you are not nearly as far apart as you think.
Sunday Mar 24, 2024
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