Book Review: ‘Disillusioned,’ by Benjamin Herold

DISILLUSIONED: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs, by Benjamin Herold

When Benjamin Herold returned in 2020 to his childhood home, in a hilly bedroom community tucked along the Allegheny River 10 miles from downtown Pittsburgh, he saw a crisis.

Like thousands of other American suburbs, Penn Hills was a shell of its former self. The town was drowning in debt. The aging infrastructure — roads, sewers, sidewalks, schools, most of it built in a mad rush more than a half-century ago, when the vast majority of white city dwellers fled to the suburbs — was in desperate need of repair or replacement. Property taxes on the limited stock of single-family homes couldn’t cover the costs. Besides, the houses had depreciated in value. Many residents chose simply to flee, adding to the decline.

Herold’s book “Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs” is an important, cleareyed account of suburban boom and bust, and the challenges facing the country today. A majority of Americans now live in suburbs. But, as Herold writes, “the magical thinking that fueled suburbia’s growth” — a big home, abundant services, low taxes, plus the fantasy that this was all obtained without government support — was never sustainable.

The suburbs were “a ticking time bomb,” the explosion set to go off after only a few generations. Many of them, built on white exclusivity, avoided town planning as well as diversifying their economies, fearing opening themselves to racial integration. (Voters in suburban Atlanta stopped the city transit system from reaching their borders; a Dallas suburb denounced a comprehensive sustainability plan as a ploy to turn it “into another Harlem.”)

The mostly white residents of these suburbs extracted wealth and other long-term benefits (cheap mortgages, generous tax breaks, a good public education), and then, when the economies faltered, bolted, often to newer, more distant satellite suburbs. “The only way out,” Herold writes, “was to double down, restarting the cycle over somewhere new and hoping not to be the one who got left behind when the music stopped.” A “slash-and-burn suburban growth machine,” he calls it, the country sprawling farther outward from cities as one big Ponzi scheme.

The five families whose stories Herold tells in “Disillusioned” live in suburbs of Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. The multiple rotating narratives can feel disorienting, and the results are uneven. But each suburb’s history is engrossing, and Herold, a journalist who has frequently reported on public education, delivers an up-close, intimate account of life there that resounds with broader meaning. The families also reflect the expanding range of people who now call American suburbs home.

One of the country’s major demographic shifts over the past several decades has been the diversifying of suburbs, both racially and economically. (Suburban poverty is no longer an oxymoron but a commonplace.) Nika Robinson, a Black resident of suburban Atlanta, tells Herold that she seeks “what everyone wants. A good family environment, low crime, opportunities, the stereotypical American dream.” But Black advancement has been met in many cases with another wave of white retreat.

The Beckers, a white couple in Plano, an inner-ring suburb of Dallas with schools that are now minority white, relocate several rings farther out from city limits, to a community whose very name beckons them with its promise: Lovejoy. Lovejoy’s exclusivity is baked into its zoning — every home must be built on an acre lot and have its own private sewage treatment system, which means you need a lot of money to live there.

The ordinances also herald Lovejoy’s sell-by date, since at some point in the near future new revenue can come only from the sort of housing density, commercial development and higher taxes that families moved there to avoid. “If Lovejoy tanks tomorrow,” a resident announces, “don’t think for a second that I wouldn’t move someplace else with a stronger school district.”

More tragically for many Black and Latino families new to the suburbs, they arrive, after being systematically denied entry, only to be greeted by costs that have been passed down — and that have ballooned in the process. The suburbs have proved unwelcoming in other ways, too. Herold focuses on each family’s attempts to navigate schools for their children. It’s a missed opportunity to explore other social institutions, and the different ways suburbs function or fail to. Yet the emphasis on schools is revealing, showing us Black parents contending with teachers who relegate their children to lower-level classes and overly discipline their sons. Herold points out that American suburbs are also where Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Ahmaud Arbery were killed.

One of the book’s subjects, who writes the epilogue, is a Black single mother named Bethany Smith. Priced out of her longtime Pittsburgh neighborhood as it gentrified, she buys a 1,001-square-foot ranch house on the same block in Penn Hills where Herold grew up. There’s a powerful moment when Smith tells Herold she rejects the premise of “Disillusioned” — that she, too, is part of what he calls “the entire arc of American suburbia, from government-subsidized white supremacy to profound Black yearning, a brief fling with multiracial integration to a short period of determined self-delusion.”

Smith isn’t blind to the deterioration around her: the vacant homes, the subpar schools. She knows her water bills are sky high because the local sewage system is a wreck. But she also wants what American suburbs have always promised: the illusion that we can start over somewhere else, outside history, with no collective costs. Why shouldn’t she get to live that dream, too?

“I’m thriving,” she insists.

DISILLUSIONED: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs | By Benjamin Herold | Penguin Press | 483 pp. | $32