South, again mirroring other regions. By the s the South’s and the na-
tion’s populations were suburban-majority. What seems remarkable, think-
ing now of the glacial emergence of regional urbanization, is how briefly
southerners were city people. Now, like other Americans, they are, and more
and more so, suburbanites, with profound consequences, politically and
ecologically.
Flight from city limits to new housing on newly cleared landscapes after
represented more than swelling prosperity and population pressures
on central cities. The federal government subsidized home ownership (as
well as higher education) for veterans in thousands of local environments
that were in rapid flux. In a huge swath of the southern piedmont, for in-
stance, between and , million acres passed from farmers to
other owners. Local and state governments both permitted and subsidized
vast and ongoing transformations, eagerly collaborating with a class that,
one must think, dominated the second half of the twentieth century: de-
velopers. Then Congress and President Dwight Eisenhower initiated the
interstate highway system in . Ostensibly a Cold War national secu-
rity measure—the military must have rapid mobility within the continent
—the interstates became the great enablers of suburbanization. I-, for
example, evolved into a teeming, long-distance corridor of bedroom com-
munities, big-box malls, automobile dealers, gas stations, and interstate
ramps, from Petersburg, Virginia, through Burlington and Charlotte, North
Carolina, and on to Spartanburg, Atlanta, and Montgomery. Atlanta, once
famous for its five rail lines, is now intersected by four numbered inter-
state highways and looped and bypassed by two more. (I- gets one over
to Birmingham pretty quickly, traffic load permitting.) Early in the twenty-
first century, metro Atlanta, meaning the city and its surrounding suburbs,
ranked consistently at the top or near the top of national rankings for worst
auto and truck traffic congestion. Richmond, with two interstates and three
loops, is a more compressed version of the same. Houston, the Sun Belt
champion of sprawl, so far exceeded federal accommodation that its great
encircling so-called bypass is itself encircled by a gigantic toll road that by-
passes the bypass. Farther north in Texas, the roadmap for greater Dallas–
Fort Worth presents the illusion of an asymmetrical pair of gargantuan,
blood-shot eyes. Dallas’s intersected circle is much the larger, with a curi-
ous small circle, the city’s iris, as it were, at the center.
What, meanwhile, became of downtowns and the oldest suburbs, which
had come to be perceived as ‘‘central city’’? Thriving business districts, such
as Dallas’s, are typically abandoned after about six o’clock each workday