Author: American Suburbs Have Become a Ponzi Scheme

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: So, next to the U.S. suburbs, where many white Americans, including our next guest, grew up. Once it was the quintessential image of American life. These neighborhoods now reveal a systemic racial disparity with new black and brown residents struggling to deal with the declining conditions left by white occupants who had moved on and up. In his new book “Disillusioned”, education reporter Benjamin Herold looks at five suburbs across the country. And he now joins Michel Martin to discuss what families are experiencing in these communities.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Benjamin Herold, thank you so much for talking with us.

BENJAMIN HEROLD, AUTHOR, “DISILLUSIONED”: So glad to be here.

MARTIN: You’re an education reporter. So, what made you take a look at the suburbs? What made you think of it?

HEROLD: You know, we have — as Americans, have invested so many of our hopes, our dreams, our visions of the future in suburbia, and a lot of that really revolves around the public schools. It’s this idea of it’s still the place where we feel like we can go not only for the good life for ourselves, but to give our children a better future. That’s a really powerful thing. And that really is centered around. public schools. And so, that was the opening window into going into the five communities that I focus on in the book.

MARTIN: What was the question you were trying to answer?

HEROLD: It kind of comes back to my origin story. So, I had grown up in a suburb east of Pittsburgh called Penn Hills. And I grew up there in the ’80s and early ’90s. And it was a place that worked very well for my middle-class white family, largely in the public schools. I got a lot of opportunities. And, you know, in some ways, it’s not hard to trace my career as a journalist back to my experience in the public schools in Penn Hills. When I was in third grade, for example, I was the kind of kid who used to, you know, get bored and I would draw on my desk. And my teacher, instead of punishing me, she brought in her typewriter from home and said, Ben, when you get bored, you work on this typewriter. And so, I actually started a class newspaper up to date with room 38. And so, that was my first journalism job. And you can kind of see how things progressed from there. But when I left in 1994, I really didn’t look back. I thought the real world was happening somewhere else. And I spent much of my career as an education journalist covering big cities and rural areas. And then in 2015 and ’16, all of these headlines started coming out of Penn Hills. Somehow this community and school system that had worked so well for my white family had somehow run up a $172 million debt. They were laying off teachers. They were slashing programs and services. Property taxes were going up, and home values were stagnating. So, you could really see how this dream was eroding almost in real-time, and it was overlaid with this demographic shift. So, the Penn Hills public schools were 72 percent white when I graduated. By the time all of this bad news started happening, it was six — the school system was 63 percent black. And so, it really made me realize, oh, wait. All of these opportunities and benefits that my family and me personally received a generation ago were really being paid for by the families who live there now. And I was very curious if that was something that was happening just in my hometown or if it was happening elsewhere. And what I learned is this a cycle that’s common in suburban areas all over the country.

MARTIN: One of the people that you quote in the book and also people writing about the book have basically likened this to a Ponzi scheme, right? Where it’s like a shell game, where, you know, somebody has to be the sucker. Somebody’s going to get taken. So, tell me why you say that. And then we’ll dig into a little further.

HEROLD: That’s right. And I think the two things to remember about the way that America became a suburban nation, and this really, we’re talking about the post-World War II period, when many of these communities, like my hometown, grew up almost overnight. So, you had former farmlands and coal mines and limestone kilns, all of a sudden being converted into subdivisions and residential neighborhoods. And so, what you saw was all of this infrastructure, roads, streets, sewers, public schools, being built almost overnight, a lot of it very heavily subsidized by state, local, and federal government. And so, what that resulted in for those first generations of families in the suburbs, who were largely white, because many of these communities were by design and statute racially restrictive, was this tremendously generous social contract where we get cheap mortgage loans, massive tax breaks, new infrastructure, public schools we can make in our own image, all of these benefits that come and are made possible both because of the subsidies on the front end and because we’re pushing the true costs of renewing and repairing and maintaining those off into the future. And that’s where the Ponzi scheme aspect comes in. Ponzi scheme basically means, I’m going to get money now from someone else who’s going to get stuck with the bag — holding the bag later. And that’s how a lot of these suburban communities have worked. So, in Penn Hills, for example, this small, you know, town outside of Pittsburgh where I grew up, you know, if you look now, the families who are living in that community now and using the public school system now, including Bethany Smith, who’s a mother that I met who bought the house three doors down from my childhood home in 2018, are essentially not only getting that same benefit and deal — you know, this generous social contract that my family received, but in many ways are on the hook for paying for those opportunities we already extracted. And that shows up in sewage bills. It shows up in property tax rates. It shows up in a higher cost of living for lower services and benefits.

MARTIN: I want to mention that the names of people you wrote about are actually pseudonyms except for Bethany Smith who wound up writing the epilogue to the book. Where did the idea of the suburbs come from to begin with? Just the idea of the suburbs in America, like where did that come from and how did it become something to sort of aspire to?

HEROLD: That’s a great question. And I think part of what is so important for us to remember when we look at the challenges that suburbia is facing now is that, you know, how they kind of got built. And not just the — you know, the infrastructure and the policy behind it, but the vision and the dream. And so, there’s — you know, there’s always been this mythology that the suburbs are the place where we can go to escape our problems, to escape the past, to escape our racial sins as a nation, to escape the people that we want to leave behind, that we don’t want to share resources with, that we don’t want to share tax dollars with, that we don’t want to share schools and neighborhoods with. And it’s fundamentally racialized from the beginning. The idea from the federal government was essentially subsidizing through cheap mortgage loans, through developer guarantees, many of which required segregation, you know, essentially setting up these communities to, by design, be racially and economically exclusive. And so, there’s always been this mismatch between the vision and the reality that’s inflected by race and class.

MARTIN: You kind of described this as kind of a pernicious idea from the beginning, but was it though? I mean, was it really so terrible that people came back from fighting wars overseas and wanted some space? Did it really start out as a kind of a Racial escape project?

HEROLD: Yes, I think is a short answer.

MARTIN: Really? Yes. Basically, yes, is what you’re saying.

HEROLD: I think that’s part of the problem.

MARTIN: Yes.

HEROLD: And that the impulses that you’re describing to want, you know, a new home with a nice yard, on a quiet street, with good public schools and nice amenities, but that’s a very common desire. And when it becomes available, like, it makes perfect sense. It’s a very rational decision that we want that lifestyle. There’s a reason tens and tens of millions of people reorganize their lives to — you know, to fight their way into those communities. The problem from the beginning, as it has always been, as you described, this kind of racial escape project. And so, what we’re seeing now is that we’re kind of running up against the limits of that. And so, part of this dynamic that I described in suburbia is, you know, we think a lot about white flight out of cities into suburbs in the formation, and that’s very true. But what we’ve missed as a nation is that we’re seeing white flight out of older suburbs as well.

MARTIN: Your argument is that the bill is coming due. Why is that?

HEROLD: I think it’s two factors. So, one is to — you know, we, I think, lose sight sometimes of how vast this suburbanization project was. Like, there were thousands and thousands of communities that were really built up almost overnight in the — you know, in the time period right after World War II. And this was something all over the country. And it was because there was federal investment in policy to spur it. But part of what we have to remember is that those communities were, again, designed for one group of people at one stage of life with one general set of kind of dreams and ambitions, and it worked very well for them at first. But as those communities age, all of that infrastructure needs repair at the same time. So, we see roads, sewers, streets, schools, the siding on your house, the roof your house, all of these things start to need repair at the same time. And what we’ve done as a nation is we’ve incentivized people to just leave rather than to stick and improve and grow. So, you know, part of what happens again is these communities, you know, kind of everything gets old at once and we kind of have to fix them at once. But it is, in part, because they were really designed for, you know, young white families and a very particular kind of family, nuclear families, like that is very baked into both the design and the kind of social fabric of communities. And that — you know, as that changes, as that evolves, as different families, different family structures come in, the community often really struggled to respond to that. And you can see it in, you know, the housing stock, but you can also see it in these day-to-day interactions that end up producing a lot of this disillusionment that I really found when I talked to parents.

MARTIN: Like why? I mean, why? Because for example, changing that — why would changing demographics necessarily, you know, lead to that? Are these people under resourced compared to the people they left or are they getting less support from the sort of government at large or from the society at large? What’s the difference?

HEROLD: I think the key point is where we kind of locate the problem. And where I do in the book is locate the problem. You know, we see it most clearly in public schools. And I’ll give you an example of a story. So, I — one of the families I got to know and spent several years following along with, they’re named the Robinsons. They’re a middle-class professional black family in the suburbs of Atlanta. And so, you know, we have multiple advanced degrees. Mom’s working on a PhD. Dad’s a former teacher and a network engineer. They’re incredibly invested in their kids’ education. Very much what you’re describing. They bought the nice house, in the nice neighborhood, attached to the nice school, and kind of felt like, OK, we’re buying into this dream. We’re doing what we’re supposed to do. And it kind of worked out OK for a while. Until their oldest son, who’s a black boy named Corey (ph), starts middle school. And then all of a sudden, his physicality, his personality, his way of communicating, his — like the way he interacts with his friends, all of that starts to become a problem in a way that gets starts getting punished very directly. And so, the parents, you know, they’re very involved. They say, OK, we’re going to nip this in the bud. We’re going to go up and talk to the school system, say, we want to be partners with you. We’re in this together to, you know, hold our son accountable for what he’s done wrong. Make sure he can improve, you know, corrected and move on. And so, what happens is when they decide to go to that meeting, the mother and father say — you know, they’re very intentional and strategic. And they said, we’re going to invite also his grandparents, his minister, his coach, his mentor and some of his adult friends. And for them, the idea is, we’re coming here to show you that we’re a good family, that there’s a lot of support for our child, and there’s a lot of resources that we have that you can tap into. And what the school system said is, those people can’t come into the meeting because they’re not your family.

MARTIN: They’re also basically saying, we’re scared of him.

HEROLD: Yes.

MARTIN: That the behavior that reads as normal middle school kid behavior to his family and his extended community reads to this school as threatening, dangerous and to be controlled.

HEROLD: And that’s something that mom starts seeing in his discipline files, those words, bully, aggressive, threatening. And so, what she starts to realize and — you know, both parents start to realize is like, you know, they’re savvy, they’re professional people. And she — you know, they’re in this meeting. And mom says, I see what you’re doing. You’re trying to document my child to death so you can send him out. And I know what you’re doing because I’m in management too. I’ve done it myself. And so, there’s this moment of trying to say, see us for who we are. And like you’re saying, recognize the gifts and the resources that we bring so we can work together. And there’s just this constant mismatch around that. And you see it in these micro interactions and you also see it at a school board level. So, in that county, you know, Gwinnett County outside of Atlanta, was 90 percent white and as recently as 1990. Now, it’s nearly three fourths black, brown, Asian, multiracial, but the change in leadership of that school district changed much, much more slow. And we’re seeing that all across the country.

MARTIN: You know, I’m going back to that anecdote you talked to — you spoke of at the beginning, right, where you said you were drawing on the classroom furniture and the teacher said, don’t draw on the classroom furniture, use my typewriter. And now, I’m thinking about the story that you’re telling me. And I’m wondering if that boy had driven on — drawn on the furniture, what would have happened?

HEROLD: He got write ups for everything, you know, from tapping his pencil too loudly on his desk, that’s a write up. Spending too long in the bathroom, that’s a write up. Slapping a friend in the back of the head on a dare because you’re a 14-year-old boy, that’s a detention. And it starts to escalate. And so, part of what is so alarming and like where the Robinson family in Gwinnett really had this reckoning as parents of like that reflects on the suburban dream we were talking about earlier saying, you know, we’ve organized our whole lives, our educations, our careers, our home, our finances, where we — you know, how we’re raising our children around access to this dream in suburbia in Gwinnett County. And what we’re seeing is it’s — you know, it’s kind of not working. It’s not happening. And so, part of the disillusionment that so many families are feeling, and especially suburban families of color, is that we’ve done everything right and there’s still no good options where we have access to all of these opportunities that should be ours, that the community has promised and where our child is not only safe, but it’s recognized, seen and respected.

MARTIN: It’s so interesting because we don’t — it seems like we don’t even have an infrastructure to talk about it. Like, what is the Housing Department — the Federal Housing Department is housing and urban development? It’s not, you know, housing and everybody development, or housing and suburban development. It’s housing and urban development. So, it’s almost as if we have this sort of notion that the whole question of resource balance, resource allocation, right? What is public? What is private? How should that responsibility or burden be shared? It’s almost as if we only think of that as an urban issue.

HEROLD: The way suburbia was formed, it was really, from the beginning, you know, deeply baked into both the operations and the culture of places to deflect scrutiny, to deflect analysis. We don’t talk about this. They were just this bland, vanilla place where people retreated from the real world of cities and work and all of that. And that is a — it’s deeply rooted and it’s a big problem. That’s part of why we’re so bad at talking about what’s happening in suburbia now. But what I did see when I traveled the country and got to know these five families and spent time in the communities and school districts, is that every suburban community that I went to, there were groups of parents who were working on these issues. And sometimes that might be, hey, we need to get the dress code right at the school, because I’m not going to let my kid get in trouble for wearing braids. In some places it might be, hey, we need a school board that looks like us. In some places it might be, we need to repair the sewer system. But there are citizens and people in suburbia all over the country, especially parents, who are working on this. But you’re right. We don’t have a larger national narrative that allows us to connect the dots and see how my struggle, my work, my fight to improve my community is connected to yours. And that’s really part of what I hope “Disillusioned” will do is shine a light on not only the problems, but the things that people are already doing to address them and help us connect to each other, because we really do have a national shared problem on our hands.

MARTIN: One of the arguments that you see playing out in school boards and in PTA meetings and in these confrontations over books and curricula is a perspective that some people have that their version of history, their version of society is correct. And that is the one that is to be subsidized and supported by shared resources, right? I’m just interested in if your reporting indicates a way out of that binary, what seems to be a binary. And frankly, a sense of entitlement on the part of some that other people — that they don’t believe other people have, right?

HEROLD: Part of what happened for me, when I started doing that reexamination of my own experience, my own family’s involvement in this dynamic we’re talking about, it’s very painful. And I had a very difficult set of conversations with my father, for example. And he told me at one point, you know, kind of explaining the condition that he had left the house in. You know, I just didn’t want — I wasn’t interested in being a good community person. And that was part of how I grew up, and part of what I had to unlearn in order to write the book, and it really showed up most directly in my relationship with Bethany Smith, who’s the African American mom who bought the house three doors down from my home — my childhood home in Pittsburgh in 2018, and found herself all of a sudden confronted not with this generous social contract, but with all of the burdens that had been left behind. And so, when we would talk about this stuff, you know, we would — you know, the relationship evolves over months and we would talk and it became very personal. And at one point, Bethany said exactly what you’re saying to me. She said, I’m very uncomfortable with this, with this idea of you as a white man coming in to tell this story and take it away and tell it for your own purposes. And she was exactly right. It was a repetition of that pattern. And so, once I knew that pattern and what it was, I was able to understand the accuracy of what she was saying and we reconfigured the way we work together. And she actually ended up writing the epilogue to the book in her own voice, and in some ways, you know, kind of putting her own perspective on these dynamics. It was different from mine, but it adds something that is incredibly powerful. And for me, the root of that part of what was so powerful was that I learned to not only see my own experiences in a different way by considering them side by side with others, my own experiences as a white middle-class suburban child by comparing them with others, but also began to understand there are other ways to dream about a community and what it can be, that there are ways to have, you know, a notion of community that is about intergenerational contract, that is about making sure you leave behind something that is good for who is going to follow. And that was something — it’s not how I grew up. And I had to unlearn a lot of what I grew up with and learn something new. And we do that by allowing ourselves to hear these conversations and stories from other people. Not everyone’s willing to do that, but a lot of people are.

MARTIN: Benjamin Herold, thanks so much for talking with us.

HEROLD: Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure to be here.