The American Dream was once something all Americans wished to achieve, but the country has changed a lot since this fundamental idea came into place. The End of the Suburbs by Leigh Gallagher is a book assessing the idea of the once sought American Dream, coming to an end. The stereotypical family living in a two floor house with a white picket fence is what came to mind when mentioning this idea. Now it is something completely different, inner city homes or apartments are the new trend that everyone wants to be a part of. The book does not necessarily assess the government side of the spectrum, but more of the economy of the United States. Suburbs are a unique concept almost exclusive to this country, but soon the idea may even become extinct …show more content…
The housing market was believed to be affected the most and took a turn for the worst. The values of homes plummeted, mortgages collapse and people were paying double what they were before, and house building almost stopped entirely because it was a lost market at the time. Nobody was going to invest in a failing market, and no money was being put toward areas that needed it most. This was a kickoff to the trend we are seeing now. City homes and apartments were not affected as much, they have less of a risk. Analysts suspected that this was bound to happen soon anyway. Suburbanization trends began to occur before the Second World War and had continuously increased since. That trend continued until the early 2000’s and has almost reversed since and there are many reasons for this …show more content…
Home owning is still a dream for me despite the trends. The way the author presents the information is very easy to understand and makes sense. While she advocates for the loss of the suburbs, she does give an idea as to where the American house market is going. Giving the readers insight into the future of such a huge market is one of the major reasons that this book is so successful. The failure of the suburbs is already upon us, there really is no stopping it. Talking about where the country is heading was a redeeming quality to the book and was not really expected considering up until then it was all about failure of the past. It is very hard to disagree with Gallagher when these are facts and trends gathered by national censuses. It makes a lot of sense as to why the suburbs are failing. Our society is moving on and changing. We are moving on to bigger and better things as we have always done in the past, and this time we are leaving this idea
After the end of World War II, the United States went through many changes. Most of the changes were for the better, but some had an adverse effect on certain population centers. Many programs, agencies and policies were created to transform American society and government. One of the greatest transformations to American society was the mass migration of families from the inner cities to the suburbs. This was thought to make for a better quality of life and a stronger nuclear family.
Keli Goff declares in her article, The American Dream is Dead and Good Riddance, that the original American Dream is no longer on the minds of most Americans. She insists that most Americans no longer pursue the ideology of a nice house, educated children, and decent car that once fueled the ambitions of generations that have come and gone. A large number of people live alone in the U.S today with no children. With that being said, it’s statistically spoken that the dream is dying even though most of those loners want to direct their dream in the direction of a partner and children. Goff proceeds to ridicule the home ownership portion of the dream by pointing to a mortgage “meltdown” that came from the pursuit of home ownership by those who
Several works we have read thus far have criticized the prosperity of American suburbia. Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, and an excerpt from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem "A Coney Island of the Mind" all pass judgement on the denizens of the middle-class and the materialism in which they surround themselves. However, each work does not make the same analysis, as the stories are told from different viewpoints.
A common definition of a suburb is a community in an outlying section of a city or, more commonly, a nearby, politically separate municipality with social and economic ties to the central city. In the 20th cent., particularly in the United States, population growth in urban areas has spilled increasingly outside the city limits and concentrated there, resulting in large metropolitan areas where the populations of the suburbs taken together exceed that of the central city. As growth of the suburbs continues, cost of labor for common suburban housing
There are various varying emotions and perspectives in association with this subject of suburbanization and women’s role, and this causes inconvenience to answer the above question. It is key however to survey and have a comprehension of this thought of suburbanization before dealing with the proposed question. I will go in detailed explanation of suburbanization for a better understanding of women’s role in it.
Through the course of change in the world- either through prosperity, capitalism or greed- people have lost focus with the real meaning of 'the American dream'. It is no longer the gamely aspirations of living life to the fullest, providing a better life for yourself and or others; instead, a pursuit for those materialistic aspects in life.
Firstly, the American Dream was a vision that varied for everyone, for some it might been having a house in the country, enjoying the fresh air and organic products. On the other hand there was always someone who wanted to live in the middle of the city, and enjoyed it's liveliness. Yet, even though they had different points of view both type of people knew the hardships that they had to face. They knew all too well that they had to be dedicated and they had to put in all of their time. They had nothing to
It started with a governmental incentive of getting America out of the Great Depression. Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) was “signed into law by FDR, designed to serve urban needs” (Jackson, 196). This law protected homeownership, not only that, “it introduced, perfected, and proved in practice the feasibility of the long-term, self-amortizing mortgage with uniform payments spread over the whole life of the debt” (Jackson, 196). Because of this new law, it was cheaper to buy a house than rent. Then came the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) that encouraged citizens to reside in new residential developments and/or areas with FHA-approved features, like Levittown. Mass-produced cars and cheap gasoline made the option of moving to a suburban area more of a reality for many families because now they can think to live such a lifestyle. With cars, come commuters who needs accessible roads to drive to and from work, to go grocery shopping, etc. which mean that the government need to pave roads for such commute to happen. “The urban expressways led to lower marginal transport costs and greatly stimulated deconcentration,” (Jackson, 191). As Jackson expressed, “The appeal of low-density living over time and across regional, class, and ethnic lines was so powerful that some observers came to regard it as natural and inevitable,” (190). Urban areas were becoming too crowded, too heterogeneous, more and more crimes were breaking out everyday; this is not an ideal living condition for a lot of people so moving to a bigger, more spread out area is a great contestant. Therefore, some of the key factors that explains the growth of the suburbs are housing policy (FHA & HOLC), mass-produced houses, mass-produced cars, cheap fuel, and government funding
The American Dream is one of the central ideals of our country, and it has been one of the most “American” aspects of our society since its founding until today. The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton, and Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, particularly focus how impossible it is to achieve and what the effects of not achieving The American Dream are. As one of the oldest philosophies of our country, the general idea of The American Dream has stayed mostly the same, but some of the finer points of has gone through change in the 400 years since the pilgrims landed. Overall, the message of the American Dream has been making something out of nothing, and making a better life for you and your descendents. The modern American Dream was based on the idea of buying a house being the achievement of The American Dream. This movement largely came from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which was an economic jump start in the Great Depression. Part of the New Deal included a 1934 housing bill called The National Housing Act, which encouraged the building and ownership of homes. Even though Of Mice and Men takes place around this time (during the Great Depression) while The Outsiders takes place much later in the same century, both books center around this dream.
Years ago, the United States of America was the prime example of prosperity and opportunity. In recent years, in the worst recession since the Great Depression, unemployment and interest rates have skyrocketed. The “American Dream” is an idea that was once a commonly accepted ideology in this country. It has since become only a fallacy. The “American Dream” is no longer an attainable idea, only a fantasy. The “American Dream” is not a true dream that will ever be equally attainable by everyone.
In “The End of Suburbia”, the main purpose of the documentary is to explain the oil crisis as we are nearing the oil peak, and had reach the maximum oil supply in the world. That suburbs will likely fail because of this crisis. The documentary the main point they are trying to state, is that people in America cannot continue living the way, they do in Suburbs. The cost of maintaining that life style, is extremely expensive and not energy efficient, using far too much oil to be considered maintainable.
After World War II, the United States of America became a much wealthier nation. As America gained wealth and the populations in urban cities and transportation technology increased, many Americans spread out, away from the urban cities, to fulfill the common dream of having a piece of land to call their own. The landscape constructed became known as the suburbs, exclusive residential areas within commuting distance of a city. The popularity and success of the suburban landscape caused suburbs to sprawl across the United States, from the east coast to the west coast and along the borders between Canada and Mexico. By the 1990s, many suburbs surrounding major urban cities developed into being more than merely exclusive residential areas. The new kind of area developed out of suburbia, the post-suburban environment, has the characteristics of the suburbs and the characteristics of the central city, or what postmodern political geographer and urban planner, Edward Soja calls, ‘the city turned inside out' (Foster 1). The post-suburban environment, is “a fundamentally decentralized spatial arrangement in which a variety of commercial, recreational, shopping, arts, residential, and religious activities are conducted in different places and are linked primarily by private automobile transportation” (Kling 1). The multifaceted aspects of the post-suburban environment make it an attractive and dynamic space with opportunities of employment. Topanga Canyon, near Los Angeles, California, is such an example of a suburb space that's developed into a dynamic post-suburban space. Since the post-suburban space of Topanga Canyon is dynamic and filled with employment opportunities, it's attractive to Mexican immigrants who wish to have a better l...
On the first day of class, the characteristics that I wished to one day maybe live in were: a suburb that is friendly, has above average education, good road maintenance, and a lot of parks or preserves around it. Now that I have more knowledge on what to expect in the near future, I have a superior vision on what I would like my future neighborhood to be. After taking and contemplating on this class, personally, I would love to live in an inner ring suburb neighborhood that would prevent urban sprawl, including gentrification problems. Although it is important to realize that there might be more crime in inner ring suburbs, I can argue that there are other prominent problems to worry about. I would choose to stay in a neighborhood similar to
Gentrification does not follow traditional urban growth theory, which predicts ?the decline of inner city areas as monied classes move to the metropolitan fringe.? The traditional economic model of real estate says that wealthy people can choose their housing from the total city market (Schwirian 96). Once these people decide to live in the suburbs, the lower social classes move into the old homes of the upper class, essentially handing housing down the socioeconomic ladder. Gentrification is actually a reversal of this process. For a variety of reasons, many inner city areas are becoming more attractive to the wealthy, and they are selecting their housing in those areas (Schwirian 96). The problem is that now when the wealthy take over poor homes and renovate them, the poor cannot afford the housing that the wealthy have abandoned. Many researchers have argued whether gentrification has truly created problems in cities. I will analyze the arguments for and against gentrification by exploring the subject from both sides.
In the fifties, the 'age of suburbia', the American Dream was epitomized by the ability to own a home, live in safety and in a community of like minded souls. The great exodus from the cities to the suburbs defined the American idea of the good life'.