The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966-1999

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Review With a great deal of sadness, NPR host Ray Suarez chronicles the effects of the American migration from cities to suburbs in the second half of the 20th century. He visited a number of cities--including Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Miami, and Washington--to find out what went wrong. The Old Neighborhood makes its case with an effective mix of data and quotes from interviews with community organizers, government officials, people who stayed in the cities, and those who left. One of the best things about the book--no doubt a product of Suarez's radio background--is its tendency for extended quotes, where the voices of his interview subjects more fully emerge. Suarez passes blame around freely for what happened to the cities and their neighborhoods, citing the loss of inner-city manufacturing jobs, crime, the decline of urban schools, and the increased availability of the automobile and development of highway systems. But mostly he blames America's inability to deal with race, asserting that whites simply don't want to live with blacks and will continue to move out further and further to prevent that from happening. (Suarez has little to say, however, about the tendency of middle- class blacks to flee the city as well.) Although crime was down and job creation up in cities in the '90s, Suarez tends to focus on the negative. He did not, for example, interview people who moved back to the cities because their children finished school and they tired of long, bumper-to-bumper commutes and the lack of cultural offerings in the suburbs. And while many of the people he did talk to say they miss the close-knit community of their downtown neighborhoods, almost all say they are happy they left and were able to give their children a better life. Still, The Old Neighborhood remains an extremely readable clarion call for the importance of city life, obviously written from the heart. --Linda Killian Read more From Publishers Weekly In a lively guided tour of America's once mighty, now imperiled urban neighborhoods, Suarez, host of NPR's Talk of the Nation, searches for clues to "the great suburban migration" of the past 30 years. Using his formidable skills as a radio producer, Suarez seeks out the person in the street as he steers through the desolate inner-city neighborhoods of Chicago, by a new housing development in Cleveland or past a derelict public schoolyard in Washington, D.C. Amid ample evidence of the larger, structural issues fueling "white flight" (redlining mortgage banks, plummeting property values, crumbling public schools), his interviews with longtime urban residents add specificity and character to the great urban debate. Senior citizens proudly resist the violence flaring up around them, while black kids elsewhere describe their suffocating lack of opportunity. Suarez dutifully cites experts on urbanism, but their broad statements don't shed much light on the issue. What the book reveals, it reveals through anecdote, not analysis. Suarez seems determined to probe a simple lack of honesty he finds in many Americans' retreat to the 'burbs. Even as we tell ourselves we're moving to escape crime or find better schools for our children, he writes, we're "consuming our way into little customized worlds, as individual as a thumbprint, yet as interchangeable as shoes in a shoe store." Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more See all Editorial Reviews

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Product Details:

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (May 10, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684834022
• ISBN-13: 23
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces

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