A Culture of Exclusion

Racism played a significant role in the design of early suburbs.

I was born and raised in Menomonee Falls, a small village of 40,000 bordering Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I was fortunate to have lived a relatively safe and stable childhood: although we never had much money, we were able to get by in a cheap, dead-end neighborhood with an elementary school right across the street. And yet, as I grew up, I noticed a bitter reality just under the surface of my home.

Menomonee Falls is a 93% white, largely middle class community that borders the northwest side of Milwaukee, a majority black neighborhood that has some of the lowest incomes in the country. And indeed, many of my friends that I made in my 60% white, racially mixed school district had a childhood radically different from mine. Many of them made laborious commutes from the north side of Milwaukee to our school, lived on streets far too dangerous to play in, lost many friends and family to homicide, and lived with only one parent. While they had a unique opportunity to get educated at my high school–one of the better high schools in Wisconsin, for much of their lives they have had to jump much higher hurdles than I had to get to the same place. 

As I grew older, I began to ask myself the question: How can it be that two communities separated by just one highway–Interstate 41–be that different? This question inevitably became the central motivation of this project.

The Milwaukee metropolitan area suffers from a unique and potent blend of redlining, income inequality, and de facto segregation. Redlining, the process by which Northern cities denied housing loans in predominantly black residential areas and encouraged whites to move away, has been occurring in Milwaukee for over ninety years (and continues to this day). The legacy of redlining is obvious in the following maps, the first showing the classification of Milwaukee neighborhoods by their “residential security” and the second showing the spatial distribution of different races in Milwaukee.

Redlining in Milwaukee in the late 1930s

The similarities are striking, but not surprising: Milwaukee is America’s most segregated city, so much so that ¾ of Milwaukee’s black residents would have to move to make the city racially integrated by even the most basic standards. This culture has made Wisconsin year after year the worst state to live in for black people, with over ⅛ of working age black men in prison and the lowest rates of home ownership among black people in America.

For anyone who lives in the Milwaukee area and understands the racial dynamics, however, this should come as no surprise. In fact, the very towns and cities we live in were designed to keep the second figure static. And what is the underlying feature behind Milwaukee’s abhorrent segregation? Zoning.

Racial distribution of Milwaukee and surrounding communities.

Redlining was the design that limited the mobility of racial minorities, but suburban zoning was the feature that let the fruits of redlining continue to rot. In Menomonee Falls, for example, most of the residential developments were designed specifically for whites “escaping” the city as redlining forced black families into the northwest side of Milwaukee. In fact, my grandparents were some of those whites who left for the suburbs, as my mom’s neighborhood became more black from redlining (her high school is currently the worst high school in the state of Wisconsin, with a graduation rate of 42%). By 1970, Waukesha County was 99% white, and Menomonee Falls was just about as much so. While Wisconsin state law prevented explicit discrimination in housing codes, racism was baked into Menomonee Falls’ zoning pie: An overwhelming percentage of its land was dedicated to R1-R6, single-family zoning. This exclusionary zoning may have expanded housing options to the middle class, but at the same time that expansion was only to the middle class. With the requirement of loans (which redlining prevented for minority families) and the already segregated community, poor, predominantly non-white Wisconsinites did not reap any of the benefits of the suburban revolution. Similarly, the lack of affordable or multifamily housing options precluded any mobility for nonwhite residents as well. Lacking any basis in law, this exclusion was a cultural rather than a black letter law phenomenon. And, because the inertia of history sucks, that culture of exclusion continues to this day.

If we considered just the racial aspects of this culture of exclusion, however, I would be telling you only part of the story. Indeed, similarly problematic and similarly contemporary is the suburb’s rigid preservation of the patriarchal and heterosexual worldview–a worldview that, largely due to the suburban way of life, continues to dominate American society. Single-family zoning, by being designed almost exclusively for families, encourages its residents to raise families. This already excludes many people, such as singles, gay and queer people, who do not want to or who are unable to have families. Indeed, suburbs, such as my hometown, are among the most conservative, conformist places in the United States. And the built environment in the suburbs resembles that: in fact, my suburb strongly reminds me of the endless apartment blocks in Beijing that I saw last year (to the point that, when my group mates in China called the apartment blocks dystopian, I could not help but say that the American built environment is no different). This built environment, similar to massive squares in communist countries, encourages conformity (and discourages individualism) by force.

And the picture our country promulgated was genius in its exclusion: The man works, the woman cooks, cleans and raises the children so that (they are straight) eventually their children will form the same types of families, and so on. This conformist culture was of no benefit to women–especially women trapped in the suburban lifestyle–and certainly not to queer people or racial minorities either. While circumstances certainly are beginning to change as a result of high costs of living, gradual liberalization of the average American towards queerness, and heightened awareness of the plights of the housewife, the suburb’s rigid enforcement of traditional roles leaves little room for deviation.

Though suburban development, redlining, and the nuclear family are all inventions of the past, their design has made them persist well into the present. The initial popularity of the suburbs persisted for decades after the first Levittown. This happened for several reasons: (1) because land was cheaper, the suburbs provided a much cheaper housing alternative than equivalent housing in the cities; (2) suburbs provided safety (both physically and specifically culturally) from city elements (that is, racial diversity, crime, and deviation from a socially accepted norm); (3) suburbs were, for similar reasons as in (2), more welcoming to white, middle class families (often at the expense of minority families of all classes); and (4), their design made them easily replicable. 

All of these reasons (1) reinforced traditional gender and sexual roles and (2) benefited white families at the expense of non-white families. First, the fact that land was cheaper gave unprecedented opportunity to the Americans that could own that land. Yet, because of redlining, black Americans were frequently unable to purchase a house on that same land, even if (theoretically) legally entitled to receiving a loan. As a result, as land values have skyrocketed in the suburbs, the wealth gap between white and black Americans has increased substantially. Redlining also made it such that suburbs were racially homogeneous, which benefited white families who sought cultural conformity–but at the expense of everyone else. That cultural conformity was also self-reinforcing: the expectation that women stay at home or that minorities not be members of the community has also played a substantial role in enforcing rigid cultural norms. The design of suburbs was also a substantial burden, as the design itself–as we have already shown–rigidly enforces conformity.

Nonetheless, for all of these reasons suburbs became so popular that, by 2020, 55% of Americans lived in a suburb. And while they have become significantly more diverse recently, suburbs still lag substantially behind their parent cities. The ubiquitous popularity of the suburbs, combined with out of control housing prices in the cities, makes suburbs the only alternative for most members of the American middle class. As a result, even those who do not want to live in suburbs have no choice but to–particularly those who deviate from the traditional norms enforced there. And, ironically, this suburban trap is a positive feedback loop.

In most urban areas, a central city–and, often, an accompanying business district–is surrounded on all sides by predominantly wealthy, first ring suburbs. These are the suburbs that were built first–many before Levittown–and are often the wealthiest of all suburbs. While they–such as Cambridge, Massachusetts and Wauwatosa, Wisconsin–tend to be as liberal if not more so than their central cities, they are the primary traps for the new redlining: housing affordability and NIMBYism.

As demand continues to increase for urban development, suburban communities choke their central cities by making little progress in urban development. This makes cities almost the sole sources of housing development in the already built up urban areas, depriving cities of additional space and placing the burden squarely on the central city. This phenomenon is evident across political boundaries: In fact, a large majority of the most “not in my backyard” (NIMBY)–an anti-housing development movement in the suburbs designed to arbitrarily inflate housing prices for homeowners’ benefit–cities are in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the most traditionally liberal cities in the United States.

The NIMBY phenomenon is inspired in large part by the perpetual belief that houses are a store of wealth rather than a basic human need. And for even the most anti-racist liberals in the Bay Area, the conflict between their values and their pocketbooks is often won by their pocketbooks. Yet, for all their righteous and well-intentioned beliefs that Black Lives Matter and that LGBTQIA+ people deserve full legal and social protections, many in the Bay Area, Greater Boston and beyond choke the very cities who would benefit most from anti-racist policy, depriving many poorer, disproportionately minority individuals and families from their most important societal need: Housing and community.

The suburban phenomenon is not a left-right, liberal-conservative problem; instead, suburban racism and exclusion is perpetuated on all sides of the aisle, not just by conservative leaning individuals who disagree with BLM, but also liberal individuals who defend BLM in name only but make no effort to rectify their complicity in systemic racism. As the housing crisis begins to boil into a war for which the suburbs are primarily responsible, we must first ask ourselves: If we wish to resolve the unprecedented and growing inequities in our country, is suburban housing really the solution?