Discourse and dystopia, American style

Abstract

This paper examines the recent growth in the popular media of new discourses of decline focused on the American suburb. This new discursive twist, which appropriates language traditionally reserved for inner cities, is rooted in both the city/suburb dialectic, which has long dominated American urbanism, and the empirical realities of the foreclosure crisis and changing geographies of poverty in the American metropolis. Scholars should be concerned about the rise of this new discourse, as it reinforces a dialectic long since outdated, roots decline in a particular geography rather than examining the root causes of the crisis, and has potentially deleterious effects on communities already facing social and economic struggle in the wake of foreclosure. Linked as this discourse is to academic research on the suburbanization of poverty, it gives pause to those scholars who would speak in terms of ‘suburban decline’.

Keywords:

• foreclosure crisis
• dystopianism
• American suburbs
• discourse
• slums

Notes

Real Estate Owned, a class of property generally owned by the lender, typically a bank or government agency or insurer, after an unsuccessful foreclosure auction.

If society as a whole did not see this coming, many academics did. For haunting scholarship which is the proverbial writing on the wall, see, for example, Wyly and Hammel (2004), Immergluck and Smith (2004), Newman and Wyly (2004), Case and Shiller (2003), Squires and Kubrin (2005) and Lanzerotti (2006).

The work of scholars like Carr (2007) and Immergluck and Smith (2006) (amongst many others) and groups like the Center for Responsible Lending sounded the alarm early.

It should be noted that foreclosure and subprime lending had been a problem in communities of color for decades. Early scholarship by scholars including Green and von Furstenberg (1975) and subsequent work including Quercia and Stegman (1992), Lauria and Baxter (1999), Squires (2002, 2003) and Taylor, Silver, and Berenbaum (2004) were part of a large body of scholarship clearly documenting the depths of the subprime problem and its links to race. Not only did the political establishment largely fail to act despite clear and decades-long impacts of ‘predatory lending’ in communities of color, national attention commenced when foreclosures began to impact white and middle-class communities.

Google scholar search conducted 5 October 2010 and verified for duplicates.

Nelson, despite being quoted in numerous articles about ‘suburban slums’, never seems to use the language himself, although analysis of his entire 40-page CV was not possible. Rather, he is generally quoted about his research showing a dramatic overbuilding of large-lot ‘McMansions’ and increases in suburban poverty.

Ironically, the epitome of Baeten's ‘hypochondriac geographies’ is Mike Davis' (2004) Planet of Slums, which comes out one year after Baeten's two articles on the subject.

Ozzie and Harriet was a 1950s and 1960s American sitcom which depicted an idealized American family life.

Nostalgic utopian urbanism is a powerful American trend in itself, epitomized by New Urbanism's ‘neo-traditional design’, which blends semi-urban design features with generally suburban settings.

Foucault's idea of episteme evolved from its original conception in the Order of Things ([1965] 2002) to his brief but powerful reconsideration in Power/Knowledge (Foucault and Gordon 1980), but throughout he is primarily concerned with scientific knowledge and knowledge production connected to systems of power.

CDBG is currently the largest source of federal monies for urban development in cities, and is a successor to the infamous urban renewal programs of the post-war era. Sections 570.208 and 570.480 of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development regulations which govern CDBG under the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act explicitly list ‘activities which aid in the prevention or elimination of slums or blight’ as eligible recipients of CDBG monies (24 CFR Ch. V. § 570.208 (b)) The definition of blight and slums is left to local jurisdictions.

An excellent summary of important sections of redevelopment law as they apply to blight is provided by Public Health Law and Policy at http://www.barhii.org/programs/download/redevelopment_law.pdf

This section is based in part on extensive fieldwork conducted from 2007 to 2010 in Eastern Contra Costa County and the Northern San Joaquin Valley.

Of the 31 articles, 14 concerned California, including most of the pieces by the national outlets—Newsweek, CNN (twice), CBSNews.com, New York Times (twice), MSN Real Estate.

Calabasas-based Countrywide Savings was the largest mortgage lender at the peak of the bubble, issuing 20% of the nation's mortgages; IndyMac Bank of Pasadena was one of the first major casualties of the crisis when it became the third largest bank failure in US history (it is now fourth, following the Washington Mutual failure, a failure brought on in part because it gorged itself on Southern California subprime laden banks); Golden West/World Savings of Oakland was the largest originator of adjustable rate mortgages when it was sold to Wachovia, which then had to be taken over by Wells Fargo (Bardhan and Walker 2010).

The idea of a ‘gated ghetto’ was at times heard both pejoratively and ironically to describe gated communities before the crisis to refer to the mentality of those communities rather than the material conditions, but there are no suggestions or use in the pioneering work of Blakely and Snyder (1997) or Low (2001, 2003) on gated communities, nor in any other academic work I am familiar with, of the idea of ‘gated ghettos’ literally meaning poverty in gated communities.

Riverside and San Bernadino Counties.

Based on rank of Combined Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA) for the 2000 US Census. There is a long literature on the region's wealth, from Brechin's (2006) masterful account of the early origins of San Francisco's global power to Saxenian's (1994) seminal account of the rise of Silicon Valley. Buoyed by defense and infrastructure spending from Washington and the state capital and by constant cycles of innovation and the exploitation of natural resources and finance capital, the region has experienced few major economic downturns over the course of the past century.

Based on zillow.com's estimates of current values. Estimates of values based on sales prices from DataQuick—another respected real estate data source—indicate a similar pattern.

Proposition 13 is a 1978 ballot measure which both severely limited property taxes and established a two-thirds majority requirement for virtually all tax increases at both the state and local levels. It has been much studied and much debated. See Coleman (2005) for an excellent primer on California city finance, Barbour (2007) on state–local fiscal conflicts including Proposition 13, and O'Sullivan, Sexton, and Sheffrin (1995) and Schwartz (1997) for just a small portion of the broad literature on the impacts of the proposition.

Formerly known as Section 8, this federally funded and locally administered program provides low-income households with vouchers that subsidize market rents in private residences, and can under certain conditions be used for homeownership.

Source: 2006–2008 American Community Survey (ACS). Lathrop and Patterson are too small for ACS estimates.

For an excellent review of the early suburban poverty literature and its links to the legacy of Herbert Gans and urban sociology as a whole, see Murphy (2007). Murphy's analysis of the thematic variants in the suburban poverty literature has been very influential in my own thinking, and the debt is obvious.

The question of causality, which includes recent work on job sprawl as a driving force (Raphael and Stoll 2010), hinges in part on an understanding of whether suburban poverty is caused by outmigration of the poor from the inner city or the impoverishment of prior suburban residents. Cooke (2010) argues strongly for the latter explanation, but the issue remains largely unresolved.

Leinberger's (2008) concern with the poor construction quality of many new suburban spaces, compared to the bricks and mortar industrial city, represents a real concern in terms of its ability to withstand abandonment. A discussion of Florida is beyond the scope of this paper, but suffice it to say that my major critique is not the idea that creativity and creative people create innovation and economic growth, but that his normative conclusion is to attract these people from the outside as opposed to building an urban environment which taps into and builds local creativity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alex Schafran

Alex Schafran, PhD, is a visiting researcher at the Institut Français de Géopolitique, Université de Paris 8 and an instructor at Sciences Po.