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Summary Of Crabgrass Frontier

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Kenneth Jackson, the author of the book Crabgrass Frontier, provides an extensive overview of the history of and explains the causes to the suburbanization in the United States. He sees such development in the United States as unique due to the extent of cities’ suburban sprawl, the number of commuters, and the proportion of homeowners (190). Jackson explained that because of the inexpensive land, low construction cost, improvement in transportation technology and along with government’s involvement, Americans settle in the crabgrass frontier. However, Jackson describes that “[s]uburbs, then, were socially and economically inferior to cities when wind, muscle, and water were the prime movers of civilization…Even the word suburb suggested inferior …show more content…

The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) introduced long-term mortgage and guaranteed to lenders with low interest rate and extended payment period. The number of Americans who could purchase homes increased and Jackson pointed out how the American way of life transformed, which is to buy a home than to rent. It is said that “today, renters account for one-third of all households, suburbs house far more people than cities, and affordability has supplanted physical deficiency as the primary housing problem (Schwartz 2015, 17).” However, the HOLC and FHA excluded the black population such that the HOLC appraisal and rating system assessed neighborhoods with black inhabitants to be hazardous and the FHA concerned about white-black separation in terms of the investment values (201, 208). FHA helped the building industry to turn against the minority and inner-city housing market and its policies supported the income and racial segregation of suburbia (213). Policies from HOLC and FHA approved of ethnic segregation and created many suburbs that clearly oppose their objective to address the imbalance in the community. Jackson criticizes how these programs “hastened the decay of inner-city neighborhoods by stripping them of much of their middle-class constituency” (206). However, while Jackson helps make sense of the role of the government in the suburban movement, Jackson sees that the process of suburbanization will slow down in the future. As more minorities entered the middle class, the proportion of minorities in the suburb will increase such that the stimulus to “white flight” will drop. In addition, due to limited availability of energy, high cost of land, credit, and

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