Blistering book shows how five families grew 'Disillusioned' with the lie of suburbia

In "Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs," education reporter Benjamin Herold lucidly explains how suburbia currently hosts "a collision of competing dreams, each of which seems to be crumbling."

Some politicians, with thinly veiled racism, trumpet notions of suburbs-in-despair — equating demographic changes, which make white families a minority, with collapse. Herold silences that nonsense immediately.

"Disillusioned" presents a blistering indictment of how American suburbs were built on racism and unsustainable development "that functioned like a Ponzi scheme." Herold explains that, "through massive public subsidies, exclusionary local policies, and a nasty habit of pushing the true costs of new infrastructure off onto future generations, our government had essentially paid millions of white families to run away from Black America, then encouraged us to cycle through a series of disposable communities with shelf lives just long enough to extract a little more opportunity before we moved out, stuck someone else with the bill, and restarted the cycle somewhere new."

"Disillusioned" jumps among the suburbs of Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, following one family in each — a wealthy white family; a middle-class Black clan; a family of struggling undocumented immigrants; and two led by single moms, one Black, one multiracial. Much of Herold's reporting centers on their experiences with public schools, long an attraction of suburban life. Schools are "where the country's foundational covenant — everyone is created equal, we all get a fair shot, success is determined by merit — was supposedly strongest." For cities in decline, schools also are where societal cracks really show.

As Bethany Smith, one of Herold's main interviewees, notes, his methods risk ladening interview subjects with the representational weight of their racial and socioeconomic groups. Smith worries she comes off as a "typical Black single mother, struggling and too small-minded to think or contribute to the problems of society that white people created." Herold, though, avoids this pitfall. His portraits of families are nuanced and moving, and he speaks to other parents, school administrators and city officials to widen his lens.

"Disillusioned" excels in documenting the effects racial exclusion and intimidation had on suburban growth, and Herold offers eye-opening details like the fact that Compton, Calif., was once home to George Herbert Walker Bush and his young children. For readers like me, who previously only thought of Compton as a burning epicenter of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Herold reminds us that places don't start out in disrepair. They're shaped by forces that cause decay.

He also makes clear that these forces — "the burning crosses, racial real-estate covenants and gerrymandered school boundaries" that historically kept nonwhite families out — aren't relegated to the past. We see the coded language of people who "thought of themselves as color-blind" but like living where the community has "similar values," and we understand the implications of zoning regulations that prevent apartments from being built.

As Herold jumps between cities and decades, it can be hard to keep track of the exact rulings in different cases regarding desegregation. But the patterns are clear and continuing, cementing the idea that equal rights and opportunity exist only in theory in this country, not in practice.

Vikas Turakhia is an English teacher in Ohio.

Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs

By: Benjamin Herold.

Publisher: Penguin, 496 pages, $32.