The End Of The Suburbs Sparknotes

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Some people love living in the suburbs, others would rather live amidst the action in a big city, and some people just are where they are and don't think about it at all. While we used to consider the American Dream as having a traditional family, living in a home with a white picket fence on a cul-de-sac with neighborhood kids riding bikes and playing hide and go seek, the current generation of emerging adults - millennials - see things a little differently.
The End of the Suburbs by Leigh Gallagher is an easy and entertaining read that illustrates the U.S. housing trends from the suburban sprawl to the renewal of urban cities. Gallagher does a great job using history, economics and personal experience to explain how our country has developed and more importantly, what's coming next; and I myself, as a millennial, think that she is spot on.
The End of the Suburbs begins by painting a picture of Media, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, and Gallagher's home town. She describes her childhood memories of Media as "sepia-toned", with …show more content…

Everything took place in the center cities; art, culture, merchants, politicians, and the elite lived amongst it all. Everyone wanted to live in the city, close to where they worked, and eventually, cities like New York became crowded, noisy, and extremely dirty. By 1910, the population of Manhattan reached 2.3 million, beginning the gradual movement away from the overcrowded downtown areas and resulting in pockets of nicer, quieter neighborhoods popping up outside the major cities. Gallagher describes how economic shortcomings such as World War II and the more recent Great Recession, as well as advances of transportation technology, from the street car to the reliance on the automobile, directly enabled new phases of

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