For most Americans, “Ferguson, Missouri,” is one of those place names—like “Waco” or “Gettysburg”—that conjures not so much a geographic location but a historical event. In recent years, “Ferguson” has been used as shorthand to refer to everything that happened there in the summer of 2014: the killing of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer, the weeks of protests that followed, and the explosion of Black Lives Matter as a national movement. The name is likely to evoke images of violence, poverty, and crumbling infrastructure, burdens that are endured by a mostly Black population.

But Ferguson has another trait that’s easy to overlook: it’s part of suburbia. The town has existed since the nineteenth century, when it was created in partnership with the North Missouri Railroad as an early bedroom community of St. Louis. It expanded during the World War II era, thanks in part to subsidies and mortgage guarantees from the federal government. Up through the 1960s, while exclusionary zoning codes were still in place, Ferguson was white enough that it could have been the setting for Happy Days.

Now, of course, the picture looks very different. The population is more than 70 percent Black and the poverty rate is around 26 percent (well over twice the national average). And Ferguson is shrinking—its population has declined by four percent since the 2020 census.

To say this is emblematic of what’s happened to America’s older suburbs, the ones built up around midcentury, would be a little extreme, especially because Ferguson has had it tougher than most. But it’s not far off the mark. As suburbia has diversified—to a point where it’s now home to 36 percent of the country’s African Americans, compared to 16 percent in 1970—its poverty rates have also shot up, and much of its infrastructure has been left to rot.

Two new books set out to explain these changes in the suburban landscape, each with an eye toward both race and economics. Benjamin Herold’s Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs tells the story through portraits of people of varying races living in different regions of the United States. And Tim Keogh’s In Levittown’s Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb drills deep into the social history of Long Island from the 1940s to the ’70s.

Both authors find themselves grappling with different versions of the same question: Why haven’t the newcomers to suburbia, especially families of color, experienced the affluence that previous generations found there?

Herold, a white journalist and longtime contributor to Education Week, now lives in Philadelphia. But he grew up outside of Pittsburgh, in the suburb of Penn Hills, a community that has experienced many of the same trends as Ferguson. Herold started his reporting there in January 2020. He had a big question on his mind: “How are the abundant opportunities my family extracted from Penn Hills a generation earlier linked to the cratering fortunes of the families who live there now?”

His research led him to the work of Charles Marohn, a former municipal engineer who founded the nonprofit Strong Towns. For well over a decade, Marohn has been arguing that suburban development in the United States amounts to a kind of Ponzi scheme. Between the 1940s and the ’60s, when suburbia as we know it was created, the federal government shouldered much of the cost to build roads, sewers, plumbing, schools, and town halls in what had previously been open fields and pastures.

However, municipal governments were essentially on their own for the costs of maintaining all this infrastructure—and thanks to the inefficient, low-density designs of suburban communities, those costs were immense. At the same time, low property taxes were a big part of the draw for the families that developers hoped to attract, and town leaders didn’t want to interfere with that formula. The result is that over the long term, municipalities haven’t brought in enough revenue to pay for upkeep. As infrastructure has worn out—the life cycle tends to be only twenty to twenty-five years—these towns have been forced to take on more and more debt.

Herold introduces an element that’s missing from Marohn’s analysis: race. As he points out, white families were almost the exclusive beneficiaries of the federal largesse that created postwar suburbia. As those suburbs have aged, and the bills have come due, many white families have simply decamped for newer suburbs—moving “one ring farther out” from the city centers, as he puts it—where developers have borne most of the cost of brand new infrastructure. Meanwhile, families of color, upon arriving in those older suburban towns, have often found the roads and school buildings crumbling and the municipal budgets highly leveraged.

Herold has hit on an important chapter in the history of structural racism, one that has gone mostly overlooked. In one sense, it is the sequel to the housing discrimination of the postwar era, a development that has become more widely recognized over the past decade, thanks to the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Rothstein, among others. But it’s precisely because the story is so urgent that Disillusioned is something of a letdown, failing to deliver on its own ambitions and instead revealing why book-length narrative journalism is hard to do well.

Herold’s structure is simple. He tells the stories of five families living in five different locales. There’s a single Black mother and her son in Penn Hills, near Pittsburgh; a multiracial Black mother and her son in Evanston, outside Chicago; a Black family of five outside Atlanta; an undocumented Mexican couple and their two children in Compton, Los Angeles County; and an affluent, Trump-supporting white family outside Dallas. Herold spent extensive time in each of their homes and communities.

This kind of narrative strategy has worked well before. It’s the same one used in at least two landmark works of nonfiction: J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, published in 1985, which deals with desegregation and busing in Boston, and Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, from 2010. But in Herold’s case, the flaws lie with his execution.

One reason is that each individual story—and by extension, the book overall—lacks narrative tension. Far too little actually happens. Take the story arc of the Robinsons, the fairly affluent Black family living near Atlanta. They buy a huge, brand-new home in Gwinnett County; their son has behavioral problems at school, and the parents believe (with good reason) that he’s being treated harshly because of implicit bias on the teachers’ part; the mother, a management consultant, has tense meetings with teachers and administrators, which end with the disciplinary measures being curtailed; ultimately, the mother daydreams about moving somewhere else, but settles for remodeling their home instead.

Remarkably, most of the other case studies have even less plot. In fact, Bethany Smith, the woman living in Penn Hills, repeatedly tells Herold that she and her son are doing fine, and that she doesn’t need the journalist barraging her with information about the grim state of the local school system’s budget and infrastructure. Meanwhile, hardly anything changes in Smith’s situation throughout most of the book. This makes quite a contrast with The Warmth of Other Suns, wherein each of the main characters uproot their lives in the South and start anew in Harlem, Chicago, or Los Angeles.

That Disillusioned stretches on for 415 pages—many of them devoted to observing classrooms and parent-teacher conferences in schools—points to another problem with the book: Herold seems to have trouble deciding what it’s really about. He’s clearly more interested in education policy than in suburban development as such. And this may explain why most of the people Herold follows don’t actually fit the framework of his questions about broader trends in suburbia. Arguably none of them are faced with “cratering fortunes.” In three of the five cases, the families in question and the communities they live in seem to be on solid financial footing. Their problems are more interpersonal: for instance, their daughter isn’t being admitted to her school’s gifted program, or the teachers at their son’s school don’t want to read White Fragility.

But arguably the book’s biggest weakness is that Herold fails to interpret the voluminous material he’s gathered in his reporting. He never delivers a convincing answer to the question he poses at the beginning, about how the advantages he and his family once found in suburbia are connected to the challenges these families of color now face. He writes in the introduction that the stories of the book’s five families “reveal something larger” about “why our postwar American dreams are faltering, and about the new dreams trying to rise up in their place.” But he never comes out and says what that something is. Again and again, he shies away from teasing out the meaning and making broad arguments about the events he has described. He seems to hope the material will speak for itself.

This is a common tendency for reporters, and an understandable one. Our newsrooms don’t train us to engage in broad historical analysis, and when we do cast ourselves in the role of historians, some of us fail miserably. But on other occasions, journalists have managed to act as both reporters and historians at once, availing themselves of the best tools of each tradition: think of Robert Caro, Stephen Kinzer, or Rachel L. Swarns, to name a few.

Admittedly, this is a lot to ask for, but it’s also what a book like Disillusioned demands—and, unfortunately, Herold has not risen to the task. In fact, he hews so closely to his individual case studies that he scarcely provides national statistics, for instance, on suburban poverty rates, or construction of new suburbs, or changes in federal funding levels. Whatever lessons are here to be gleaned, each reader will have to extract them for herself.

In contrast to Disillusioned, Tim Keogh’s In Levittown’s Shadow has a tight scope. It focuses on the suburbs of Long Island during the three decades after World War II. It’s also a work of scholarship, not narrative journalism. But that doesn’t mean it’s dry or unclear; in its analysis of the origins of the fabled prosperity of postwar American suburbs, it’s powerfully illuminating.

Keogh calls attention to two popular assumptions about postwar suburbia that he wants to challenge (though not dismiss). The first is that they were tidy, affluent, and almost exclusively white. The second is that their wealth came from federal programs—not only mortgage guarantees and subsidies, but also defense contracts for suburban manufacturing plants—or from the booming economy.

To the first assumption, Keogh’s rejoinder is that there were always poor people of color in suburbia. As he points out, someone had to work the low-wage jobs that white homeowners didn’t want. Those other suburbanites have simply been written out of the story, he suggests, in part because they often lived in substandard housing and weren’t well accounted for. His second argument is related: their cheap labor was an important but overlooked part of how white suburbanites achieved such high levels of material comfort.

As Keogh explains, roughly a third of Black Long Islanders in this era were migrants from other regions, mostly the Jim Crow South, and the education they’d received in segregated Southern schools tended to be inferior. Even those who had received good educations faced rampant discrimination in the job market, thanks in part to federal employment agencies. Vast numbers of suburban African Americans found themselves in precarious, low-wage jobs that weren’t covered by the labor protections of the New Deal.

And they were integral to the local economy: “Defense workers hired babysitters, cleaners, and landscapers to care for their kids, lawn, and kitchens while both spouses worked,” Keogh notes. He goes on:

Their modest wages bought them a single-family house, made possible by federal mortgage insurance and low-wage laborers reducing construction costs. The textile mill down the road subsidized their school tax base, but the mill owner only moved there because he could still profit from low-wage labor. Suburban consumers could shop at the unending strip malls since minimum wages kept food, clothing, and merchandise prices affordable.

It comes as no surprise that Keogh’s dissertation adviser was Judith Stein, a prominent U.S. historian who died in 2017. In her books on economic policy, labor, and race in the twentieth century, Stein engaged in the kind of “ruthless critique of everything existing” that Karl Marx had advocated for.

Keogh’s work similarly upends conventional wisdom: as he notes in his epilogue, liberals often blamed suburbia for the problems of inner cities. By this logic, “redistributing people to the suburbs, or resources from the suburbs,” he writes, “could rectify inequality.” But as he shows, the suburbs were never the fundamental problem. In themselves, they don’t actually create wealth or poverty. In Keogh’s reading, external forces do that—above all, federal policy, which bestows subsidies on some people and leaves others in conditions so precarious they’re willing to work for any wage, however low.

With this in mind, it’s worth revisiting the question Herold posed at the beginning of Disillusioned: How are the opportunities that white families “extracted from Penn Hills” and other places like it connected to the poverty that exists there now? Keogh’s analysis reveals that such framing is misguided. Those opportunities were not “extracted” from the suburbs, per se. If suburban newcomers are stuck in poverty, it’s not principally because previous residents didn’t pay enough property taxes, or because they have since moved elsewhere. A bigger factor is that capital has moved. Arguably the biggest driver of poverty in Ferguson is that the town’s largest employers—including Chrysler, Ford, and McDonnell Douglas plants—shuttered in the 1990s and 2000s. Those waves of offshoring cost thousands of jobs. (It’s also true that many people who were already poor moved to Ferguson recently, and the businesses that remain pay shockingly low taxes.)

Looming in the background of the entire discussion of the suburbs, social justice, and racial inequity is the question of whether it’s individual white families or public policy that’s to blame for our current problems. While Herold does pay attention to policy, he places great emphasis on hearts and minds. He writes in his preface that the cause of the “disillusionment” haunting suburbia is a “mindset” that made white families feel comfortable leaving places like Ferguson and seeking opportunities elsewhere.

Herold also notes in a late chapter that he learned a great deal from the writings of a diversity consultant named Lillian Roybal Rose—in particular, her argument that, in Herold’s words, “white people must come to emotional grips with how whiteness, white racism, and white racial ignorance has affected us before we can make meaningful contributions to larger fights for a more just world.” It’s telling that this assertion comes from a consultant, rather than a historian. On an empirical level, it’s false. Did Lyndon Johnson have to come to emotional grips with “how whiteness had affected him” before he signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act? Probably not.

On the other hand, if the main culprit of suburban poverty and decay is bad public policy, then the solution will have to look very different from a mere shift in mindset. As Keogh writes in his conclusion, the federal government, with its power to run deficits and print money, is uniquely positioned to boost funding for local schools. He also calls for more “elderly care, after-school activities, parks, playgrounds, water quality, and runoff projects,” paired with job guarantees that would provide living wages for suburbanites of all races.

Perhaps this is less emotionally satisfying than the alternative. There’s something seductive about the idea that solutions to social ills must begin with personal self-improvement rather than politics—especially when our current politics are so sclerotic. But Keogh’s remedy is ultimately a more hopeful one, because it calls for concrete action and policies that, at least intermittently, have been enacted before in American life. That doesn’t mean prejudice and bigotry will go away automatically—clearly more work needs to be done to combat those forces, too. But discrimination in employment, housing markets, and school districts always operates in the context of political economy. If we want to make our suburbs and our cities more equitable, inclusive, integrated, and better maintained, then politics, not self-examination, holds the key.

Disillusioned
Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs
Benjamin Herold
Penguin Press
$32 | 496 pp.

In Levittown’s Shadow
Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb
Tim Keogh
University of Chicago Press
$26 | 328 pp.