Restoring the American Dream

Support for Jefferson’s dream of a lifestyle grew well after the 18th century, but instead of living and working in the countryside, Americans simply wanted a separation of work life and home life. In the mid-1800s, those who did not want to live in great metropolitan areas like Manhattan would live in New York City’s outside boroughs like Queens and Brooklyn and commute into Manhattan for work by ferry. Today, we see a similar concept on the West Coast.  Many live in suburban Marin County and commute by ferry to San Francisco for work. Throughout the 1800s, the first suburbs grew outside the city, and streetcar lines connected homes to the workplace. Americans gradually preferred to keep the growing industry separate. 

Here's a short film, "In the Suburbs" (1957), depicting how our "happy-go-spending" society came to be. We jump into the perspective of the average 1950s young adult pursuing a wonderful American life in the suburbs. 

Perhaps it's easier after watching this to understand that suburban life did have its temporary benefits on an individual's life after all.

The idea of street car suburbs existed in early railroad towns, but at the time, these town planners could only implement a horse car system. However, once the technology was developed, street car commuting became convenient. Trolleys could take citizens from their homes to the industrial areas and the workplace in ten minutes, while walking would take thirty minutes. The system worked because fares were low, and the suburbs attracted people from different socio-economic backgrounds. Street car suburbs were also more sustainable than what we have today. Urbanization also existed along street car lines, especially at station corners. However, soon sprawl began to take effect. Whereas in railroad suburbs urban pockets developed around stations, street car suburbs experienced an outward growth from the urban core. Also, street car suburbs became the fringes of the city and the pioneers of separation between commercial and residential districts because stores were not as close to houses as they were in older parts of the city. In street car suburbs, one would begin to find shops in specific streets instead of dispersed among various streets. Curiously now that the street car has been supplanted by the automobile, we associate street cars with urbanism. Even so, Jacobs would have strongly opposed street car suburbs because they didn’t grow organically or without a plan. Instead, individuals planned and controlled these communities intensively. However, compared to today’s sprawl cities, street car suburbs were pedestrian friendly. 

In the late 19th century, populations were still small, and there wasn’t as large of an influx to the suburbs as there would be years later. Then came the post-war boom, in which families with new American wealth, flocked to the semi-urban suburbs and the true city outskirts to obtain their modern version of Jefferson’s agrarian castle. Housing companies packaged the American Dream in the form of the affordable suburban home, with a small backyard, a driveway, and lots of interior space. Retrospectively, it’s ironic that World War II, which was supposed to bring us together as a nation, led to a gradual lack of community in our invention of the suburban lifestyle. Where we are now is proof of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s and Thomas Jefferson’s dream gone wrong. 

Population growth also contributed to a suburban expansion. With so many people desiring the same lifestyle, owning a house far outside the city and separate from commercial areas became an American norm. When we discovered cheap oil, automobile travel became a norm as well, and communities would be organized according to automobile proportions. Residential and commercial areas grew even farther apart, grocery stores became larger in size because food packaging was also larger, and stores were surrounded by massive parking lots. With congestion dominating the lifestyle, newer clusters of communities developed which no longer really projected the American Dream, and city planners demanded more highway construction with more lanes. At first, the new type of urbanism as shown in Le Corbusier’s Radiant City,  characterized by homes, parks, and roads and “super highways which would create jobs and boost sales in oil and cars” seemed like a great alternative to the industrialization and overcrowding in cities (Kunstler, geography 59).  Modernism, unfortunately, brought with it “corporate gigantism” and “public spaces unworthy of human affection,” which led to our “crisis of the human habitat” (Kunstler, Geography 59). 

It is quite clear that following the urban blight that plagued cities after the industrial revolution and the economic boom following World War II,   Americans warped Jefferson’s interpretation of a family’s claim to the agrarian castle.  Decades later, it was no longer Henry Thoreau’s log cabin in the woods or Jefferson’s plantation in the countryside. Those who wanted Thoreau’s log cabin got a ranch house in Columbine’s suburbs, despite the surrounding Colorado wilderness, and those who wanted the plantation house got the puny, isolated home next to a huge Wal-Mart parking lot in Huntsville. Today, all Americans who want a share of the American Dream can only get the cookie cutter mansion, or worse, the dull, impractical cul de sac home adjacent to a highway or facing the back of a strip mall. Not only has our desire for aesthetics disappeared, but this lifestyle has led us to perhaps “have the finest private realm in the developed world,” however, we see now that “our public realm is brutal” (Duany 41).

Red Book, a 50s magazine for women, advertised the suburban life for young adults who were getting married and moving on to have children as a low key lifestyle in which families could happily be together, host neighborhood gatherings, design their homes as they pleased only to follow a generic American lifestyle which has determined the unsustainability we see today. Unfortunately, those who followed this suburban fad could be eventually criticized as members of a “happy-go-spending” society. When there are only houses in the neighborhood, the mall serves as the sole focal point of societal interaction.

Florida, though it’s hard to believe today, once projected Jefferson’s dream of a nation, as an agricultural state. At first just a frontier, the state became perfect for the land owner to settle. After it had recovered from the Great Depression, Florida once again was a haven for those from the north, with more access to air-conditioning regulating the otherwise unbearable climate and housing becoming so affordable. From World War II onwards, Northeastern Americans and inhabitants of the Rust Belt immigrated into the sunshine state, as a result of the availability of jobs. As the economy developed, Florida quickly became the South’s second most populous state. The increases in population as a result of railroad construction lead to more “suburban-agrarian castle” developments which is now identified as the “Florida land-boom of the 1920s”. Investors from other states quickly sold houses in brand new communities of Miami and Palm Beach. Tycoons Carl Fisher and George Merrick were involved in the transformation of these areas to a city. Henry Flagler, in charge of moving the Florida railroad further south, encouraged developments along the train routes. Heavy tourism pushed for the widespread building of settlements in South Florida. 

The rise in racial tension from the 1920s to the 1940s also contributed to the typical suburban division we see in Florida today. Suburbs allowed for a barrier between whites and blacks, and crevices in neighborhoods of different races or socio-economic backgrounds today hint at this history. Sprawl began to shape the many settlements in South Florida with the 1959 Cuban Revolution, during which Miami was too quickly transformed into a commerce capital for further emigration from the Caribbean. Around the 70s, the explosive growth in areas like Miramar, Coral Springs, and Pembroke Pines also led to an outward sprawl-like growth toward the West. The influx of people didn’t give Miami and its surrounding ‘cities’ much breathing room to develop naturally. Instead, companies like Lennar Corporations have made huge profits off building suburban homes in the form of cul de sac neighborhoods for the millions flocking to Florida who wanted an equal share of the “American Dream”. Today, we still see them pop up overnight, almost like cancer cells for healthy urban development in South Florida.