The Manufactured Myth of Suburbia
Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
There’s a scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit where Judge Doom lays out his plan to dismantle the trolley system and replace it with freeways. It’s intended to be cartoonishly evil, but the idea feels all to familiar. The demise of the streetcar and the rise of the car-centric suburb have long been framed as a conspiracy: businessmen colluding to kill transit, sell tires, and pave the future. Like many myths, there’s a sliver of truth. But the full story is both more mundane and more revealing.
Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier quietly dismantles these comforting narratives. Published in 1985, it remains one of the clearest accounts of how American suburbia was not the outcome of technological inevitability or malicious forces in society, but a product of consumer preference (a desire to find privacy through space) and policy design, shaped by incentives, subsidies, zoning, and a particular vision of the good life. In Jackson’s telling, suburbia wasn’t chosen. It was made.
The book doesn’t deny the cultural appeal of suburbia, with its promise of space, privacy, and control. But Jackson reframes suburbanisation as a systemic shift: a pattern of development sustained less by consumer desire alone than by state intervention. Preferences mattered, but they were enabled, reinforced, and ultimately institutionalised through mortgage guarantees, infrastructure funding, and zoning codes. Federal mortgage insurance, highway funding, tax deductions for homeownership, and racial covenants worked in concert to promote decentralised, automobile-dependent development. What emerged was not a natural evolution of settlement patterns, but a spatial regime designed to privilege private space over shared place.
Jackson is especially strong on transportation. He cuts through the romance of the trolley era and the villainy of the freeway lobby to show how streetcar systems were, from the beginning, speculative ventures. Many were loss leaders for land development, built not to move people but to inflate property values. When expansion ran out and fare hikes were blocked by regulation, these systems became financially untenable. The car didn’t kill the trolley so much as expose its fragility.
This dynamic—where infrastructure serves not as neutral utility but as scaffolding for speculative desire—remains deeply relevant. In The Geography of Desire,1 I explored how transport infrastructure doesn’t just enable movement; it choreographs aspiration. Jackson established this pattern a century ago. The streetcar suburb and the postwar subdivision were both less about efficiency than about engineering demand: constructing a future and then making it feel inevitable.
What Jackson uncovers, ultimately, is a kind of policy-enabled mirage. Americans were told they were choosing freedom and mobility; what they were actually getting was distance, dependency, and disconnection. The built environment became an archive of what the state was willing to subsidise, and what it wasn’t. Rail, density, racial integration, and mixed-use communities were not defeated in open competition. They were priced out of existence.
Some parts of Crabgrass Frontier have aged, though not badly. The book ends with a muted call for more balanced development and a soft critique of suburbia’s social fragmentation. But Jackson stops short of imagining alternatives. His lens is diagnostic, not visionary. That’s its strength and, perhaps, its limit.
Still, nearly 40 years on, Crabgrass Frontier remains indispensable. We live in a world shaped by choices most people never realised were made. Our urban geography is not (just) the expression of individual desire, but of accumulated policy, institutional bias, and historical inertia. Jackson shows how those patterns came to be and, by implication, that they could have been otherwise.
The myths we tell ourselves about cities matter. They determine not just how we remember the past, but how we imagine the future. Jackson doesn’t ask us to rage against the freeway or romanticise the streetcar. He invites us to see the built environment not as backdrop, but as argument. The suburb is not a failure of imagination. It is a triumph of someone else’s.
4/5 Not just the story of the suburbs, but of how desire, cement, and subsidy built America
- Evans-Greenwood, Peter. “The Geography of Desire.” Substack newsletter. The Puzzle and Its Pieces (blog), April 15, 2025. https://thepuzzleanditspieces.substack.com/p/the-geography-of-desire. ↩︎