How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

by P.E. Moskowitz

Since they began being planned on a massive scale in the early 1930s, suburbs have always been envisioned as a way to fundamentally alter the way Americans interact with each other. They were never just about space. They were about reinvigorating the economy, yes, but they were also about more than that. The suburbs were a way to reinforce a specific way of life more favorable to the country’s ruling class. Engels had warned that mass homeownership would have the effect of “chaining workers” to the factories in which they work, therefore lessening the chance they could rebel against factory owners. Engels was a communist, but plenty of capitalists admitted that was the intent of the creation of the suburbs as well. One railroad baron in the nineteenth century said he was happy when workers owned their homes because they “therefore cannot afford to strike.” Perhaps the man most synonymous with the suburbs, William J. Levitt, who built the 50,000 houses in the all-white suburb of Levittown on Long Island, felt much the same way. “No man who owns his house and lot can be a Communist,” he said in 1948. “He has too much to do.”