flannel suits” and “Stepford wives.” But people still moved there
in huge numbers.
Why? Safety, or assumed safety—because cities were
increasingly seen as crime infested, poor, and populated by more
“dangerous” minorities. Comfort—one could have a larger
home, with all the new technological amenities, like televisions
and barbecue pits. Ease of life—including the ability to have a
car. Suburbs promised “the good life,” and Americans followed
the call.
During the 1960s, suburbs grew four times faster than cities
due to the “White flight” of White, middle-class residents. (The
history of the American suburb is intimately connected to the
history of Black migration to large Northern cities.) Jobs and
amenities went with them. Downtown stores closed one by one
as gigantic suburban shopping malls opened. Downtown movie
palaces (with one movie playing) closed as gigantic multiplexes
opened next to the shopping malls (12 or more movies playing on peanut-sized
screens). Downtown businesses relocated to “business parks” in the suburbs. Because
the middle classes and the poor rarely saw each other anymore, they often had enor-
mous misconceptions about each other.
Once suburban areas had their own jobs and amenities, they were no longer sim-
ply “bedroom communities,” empty during the day as the workers trekked into the
city for their jobs, but cities in their own right, called “edge cities,” with their own
economic focus (often high tech). Sometimes they are called “beltway cities,” because
they are clustered around the interstate highways that loop around major cities. You
might live in the edge city of Grand Prairie, Texas, and work in Fort Worth, 22 miles
away, though you are actually in a suburb of Dallas, 13 miles away. But it hardly mat-
ters because you depend on the nearby edge cities of Irving and Arlington to shop.
Downtown is just for jury duty.The Sociology of Commuting: Separate and Unequal
In 1900, rich and poor walked to work; in cities, they took streetcars and trolleys.
Then the automobile arrived and quickly engulfed every other mode of transporta-
tion. If you were middle class or working class, you drove your own car; if you were
poor, you took the bus. Only very large, very congested cities still had streetcars or
trolleys (the last of Los Angeles’s famous Red Cars stopped running in 1961), along
with light-rails to transport commuters to and from the suburbs, like the Long Island
Railroad in New York or the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) in San Francisco.
As more and more jobs moved out of the cities into the suburbs, middle-class sub-
urbanites found their commute easier. But poorer people who lived in the suburbs with-
out cars had a problem. The suburbs had new, sleek buses running direct routes many
times a day. City buses were all old and decrepit, and their routes
were “local” (with many stops), with infrequent, inconvenient
hours (often they stopped running at 6:00 p.m.). Even more annoy-
ing, the suburban and city routes didn’t intersect well. They were
set up as distinct systems, and the ones in the suburbs received the
greater amounts of money (Bullard and Johnson, 1997).
A colleague recently told me of this experiment. He asked
the Chicago Metro Transit to plan a trip from a fictitious “job”
at the Oak Mill Mall in the near-north Chicago suburb of Niles
to a fictitious “home” at 3501 S. Lowe Avenue (actually an634 CHAPTER 19SOCIOLOGY OF ENVIRONMENTS: THE NATURAL, PHYSICAL, AND HUMAN WORLDSJWe often think that the
great suburban boom in the
1950s was spurred by the
do-it-yourself nuclear family,
but it actually was supported
by the single largest infusion
of federal funds toward that
end: the GI Bill (which prom-
ised interest-free loans and
educational subsidies for
returning veterans), the inter-
state highway system, massive
roads, and school construction.
Commuting to work exagger-
ates class, race, and gender
inequalities. The average driv-
ing commute in California is
26 minutes per day—it nearly
doubles to 47 minutes if you
take public transportation. n