The Metropole Bookshelf is an opportunity for authors of forthcoming or recently published books to let the UHA community know about their new work in the field.

By Becky Nicolaides

The seed for my book The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2024) was planted years ago when I was teaching a course at UC San Diego called “The History of Urban Community.” It was an introductory class in the urban studies program, which I helped develop.  

I distinctly remember getting to the postwar period in writing my lectures and pivoting to the suburbs. This class gave me a great opportunity to ponder the question: What happened to “community” when suburbanization really began taking off? I quickly noticed a strange conundrum. During the 1950s and 1960s, social commentators observed that community was vibrant and alive, even hyperactive in the eyes of some.

I was especially taken by William H. Whyte’s fine-grained portrait of suburban life in his book Organization Man (1956), where he outlined incredibly tight neighborhoods in Park Forest, Illinois, where everyone was in everyone else’s business. Now Whyte had a larger agenda in this book, a warning against the loss of individuality in postwar America. So suburbs like Park Forest, which he called the “dormitory” of the organization man, seemed to reveal these troubling tendencies in everyday life.

And yet, what he described, despite himself, was a “social atmosphere of striking vigor”—interconnected neighbors who babysat each other’s children, socialized regularly, and were truly intertwined in everyday life. And people were involved. It was a “hotbed of Participation,” where people joined clubs and groups, filling community rooms for meetings nearly every night of the week. And the suburban built environment helped facilitate all of this, according to Whyte—from the house courts to the single-family homes, where the layout of dwellings helped dictate these intense patterns of socialization. The portrait was so striking that political scientist Robert Putnam picked up on it decades later to illustrate his “before-and-after” argument—community had been so vibrant in this era, then went downhill from there into bowling alone.

The next wave of experts looking at the suburbs after 1970 found something completely different—a social disconnect, alienation, privatism, fear, obsessions with security. Those tight neighborhoods were gone, replaced by isolated neighbors who barely knew each other. In just one generation, community had essentially disintegrated. Works by M. P. Baumgartner, Mike Davis, Setha Low, and others emphasized this trope.

What fascinated me about this pendulum swing is that suburbia was often implicated in these radically different social outcomes. Suburban design was thought to foster community connectedness in the early years. Then by the 1970s and 1980s, this same built environment was blamed for deep social alienation. The privatism of the single-family home, the distance between neighbors—somehow this had morphed from promoting social cohesion to destroying it. It was usually whites leading the way, but by the 1970s they weren’t necessarily hiding from neighbors who scared them, but rather from a threatening “city” (and urban crises) that pushed them deeply into their suburban shell of protection. This was a pendulum swing that seemed wild and curious to me. And it raised all sorts of questions.

For one, I wondered if this really was an accurate representation at all. Did strong community really die out, or was this yet another example of the “community declension” trope that seems to recur over and over again throughout American history? (See Tom Bender’s classic, Community and Social Change in America, one of my favorite reads from grad school.) Or was something else altogether going on?

These were the initial questions that spurred this book. I originally called it On the Ground in Suburbia, and my early vision was to explore these questions of community change in suburbia and to probe what was going on over this entire timespan—from the 1950s to the 2000s. I got my first major grant by framing the study in this way. And then, everything started to change.

By this time, I’d left my tenured post at UCSD and ventured forth as an independent scholar and consultant based in Los Angeles, my hometown (that’s another story altogether).

Because I chose to explore these questions using LA as my site of study, suburban diversity soon began taking center stage. It’s not that I abandoned the “community” question—indeed, the question “what happened to social and civic engagement in the suburbs over this period?” remained with me throughout. It’s just that the question got longer—it became “what happened to social and civic engagement when the suburbs really began to diversify?” That put a whole new spin on things.

I knew that suburbs have historically been diverse. My first book, My Blue Heaven, was all about class diversity in suburbia, and two editions of The Suburb Reader, which I coedited with my longtime collaborator and friend Andy Wiese, only drove that point home. Andy, who I’ve known since we were students of Ken Jackson at Columbia University, had written an extraordinary book, Places of Their Own, on the history of Black American suburbanization which so eloquently laid out the “African American suburban ideal.” So I was imbued with an awareness of suburban diversity from the get-go.

But in this new project on LA, diversity began looming over everything. I always like to start my work by gathering data, to give myself an empirical base of understanding about what is going on—over time and across space. It was one thing to do this for one suburb, South Gate, in My Blue Heaven, but it was a whole other thing to do for all of LA County. But I felt I had to do it, otherwise I would just be vaguely talking about “suburban diversity” without really understanding the dimensions and extent of it.

That first grant I received (from the Haynes Foundation) allowed me to do this. I hired a small team of students to begin compiling US Census data. I came up with my wish list of variables to trace out over time: race, ethnicity, nativity, class markers (occupation, education levels, income levels), family composition (the number of people single, married, or divorced), age, working women (allowing me to see the inverse of “stay-at-home moms”), and housing data (the number of single-family homes, housing tenure, and housing tenure by race). These were the metrics that I felt could help me understand what was truly going on in LA’s suburbs over time.

My team did a terrific job creating the scaffolding of this dataset. They compiled 53 variables on all 86 municipalities in LA County, covering each decennial year from 1950 to 2000. Later, we added 2010.*

This data became an incredibly powerful tool for me while writing the book, helping me see the extent of change in LA’s suburbs, the areas of stasis, and the spatial dimensions to all of this.  (The book’s companion website at OUP will include supplemental tables, charts, and several maps.)  The data also helped me put LA in national perspective. I kept turning to the work of demographer William Frey to help with that, comparing LA to the national trends that Frey was documenting. LA, it turns out, was way ahead of the curve when it came to suburban diversification. No surprise there. It also made me realize (and argue in the book) that what I was documenting historically in LA may well be a bellwether for the nation.

Frey’s work, in fact, reminds us why all of this matters. As of 2020, fully 54 percent of Americans live in the suburbs. And 45 percent of them are nonwhite. As he phrased it so well, communities once imagined as “far whiter than most of the nation” have come to look like a cross section of America, itself.

As I delved into work on the book, I began grappling with method and approach. As a suburban historian for much of my career, I’ve faced this perennial challenge—do you dive deeply into a single place or pull the lens back for a wide-angle view? I deeply admired Ken Jackson for his ability to tell a sweeping, national history of suburbanization, as he did in Crabgrass Frontier. I think for me, a social historian at heart, I gravitate to the local, deep-dive approach. It gives me a more visceral feel for what is going on in these places.

Ultimately, I decided to do both in this book—start out with the wide-angle view of LA County, then do deep dives into four suburbs: Pasadena, San Marino, South Gate, and Lakewood. I felt myself constantly zooming in and out, trying to learn from the local while also grasping the metropolitan.

I spent a year on each case-study suburb. I mined the written archive in local libraries and historical societies, contending with uneven runs of newspapers and spotty records in many cases. Local histories sometimes ignored residents of color. To correct this historical blind spot, I conducted oral histories to gain some understanding of what it was like—especially for people of color—to live in these suburbs during these years of social change. I conducted over sixty interviews myself and leaned heavily on oral histories done by other scholars (namely Clark Davis, who was the driving force behind the compilation Advocates for Change on Pasadena, and Allison Baker, who conducted dozens of unpublished oral histories for her doctoral dissertation on Lakewood). These interviews offered rich details and emotional insight about the experience of living in LA’s changing suburbs—the hopes and realities, the gains and sacrifices, the joy and anguish.

As I completed each case study—I wrote them in the order they appear in the book—new layers of understanding began to form. And I started thinking comparatively about these places and how they interconnected as part of the metropolitan whole.

When I was working on my chapter on San Marino, an elite, wealthy suburb that transitioned from all-white to Chinese American majority by 2000, I benefitted tremendously from the literature on Asian American suburbanization, which is quite well theorized in works like Wei Li’s Ethnoburb, and works by Min Zhou, Willow Lung-Amam, Wendy Cheng, and Timothy Fong, among others. Two questions this raised for me were: does the “ethnoburb” concept apply to all Asian American suburbs, and does it apply to Latino or other ethnic suburbs? The answer to both, I soon realized, was “no.” It didn’t apply to San Marino, nor did it really apply to Latino suburbs of Southeast LA.

I also found surprising similarities in the histories of wealthy San Marino and working-class South Gate. In both communities, residents wanted to protect the look of “traditional” white suburbia—such as Euro-American architecture, English-only signage, and muted paint colors—as they were experiencing ethnic change. This kind of comparative analysis led to some spin-off work that was cut from the book (which had gotten very long) and will appear in the forthcoming compilation MetropoLatinx, edited by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz (University of Chicago Press). 

From the case studies, I circled back to the level of LA County to discern certain “big picture” patterns, which I detail in the first half of the book. When I gave my first book talk at the LA History & Metro Studies Group in May 2023—months before the book came out—I joked that I probably could have called this book “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.” In the suburbs, everything was happening. All the major social and economic processes of late twentieth-century America—economic restructuring, globalization, immigration, political polarization—were present and playing out across LA’s suburbs. They represented dynamic, fascinating hubs of American life, where new groups were grasping power and political cultures were coming into view. The suburbs had diversified tremendously. Certain long-lived habits of suburbanites, like NIMBYism, exclusion, and neighborhood defense, were emerging in diversifying suburbs. And in other places, multicultural, class-inclusive suburban ideals were taking shape. Diverse suburbia existed along spectrums of social and civic cultures.

The New Suburbia also circles back to my original questions about social and civic engagement. It turns out, community life didn’t die out. But it did change. I explore those trends in the book, showing how the civic cultures forged in diverse suburbs often dictated the boundaries of local belonging and engagement.

America’s suburbs are a work in progress. They are landscapes of mobility, immigration, new solidarities and identities, new divisions, diverse suburban dreaming, and a site of political clout nationally—more so with each election. The New Suburbia describes how we got here. And my hope is that the book may offer food for thought about our suburban future.    

* The entire dataset will be made publicly available on the USC Digital Library website, thanks to funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Target date is spring 2024. The URL will be: https://doi.org/10.25549/lademo-ouc1sto1757543. In addition, I’ve shared my LA data with a geoinformatics team at Palacky University in the Czech Republic, as part of our collaboration on the EU Eramus+ grant project “Urbanism and Suburbanization in the EU Countries and Abroad: Reflection in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts.”  The Czech team is developing a storymap on LA suburbanization 1950-2010, which will be publicly available online in May 2024. 

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Becky M. Nicolaides is a historian and consultant specializing in the history of suburbs, metro areas, and Los Angeles. She is the author of three books on suburban history, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other outlets. She is a Research Affiliate at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and co-founder of the consulting firm History Studio. Becky served on the LA Mayor’s Office Civic Memory Working Group and is a lifelong Angeleno.