Book Review: Disillusioned

Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs by Benjamin Herold was not the book I was expecting when I first picked it up. I was expected a book that tracked my own disillusionment with the suburbs. Instead, what we got were five stories of suburbs in transition from prosperous white neighborhoods to poor neighborhoods of color. This book pus personal stories to the data discussed in The Color of Law.

While reading this book, at first I found it difficult to accept the book for what it is, rather than be disappointed by in not being what I had expected it to be. I had been looking for a book that delves deep into how car dependency hurts us, our families, and our communities. Many books dance around these topics, like Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, Palaces for the People, and especially Happy City. However, I have yet to read a book that fully captures my own experiences.

When I was in my early 20s, newly married, my then-wife and I were looking for a house to start a family. We looked at some new condos in downtown Anaheim right across the street from a school, in easy walking distance to life’s daily necessities. We had gone to look at the models a few times together, and as we were more seriously considering buying one, we brought our parents to check them out one Saturday. The next week, a student at the neighboring school was stabbed.

We immediately ran back to the suburbs where we grew up and were comfortable. We ended up buying an existing condo not far from our childhood homes, where our parents still lived. Our kids go to the same schools we attended and graduated from. Now, 15 years later, I’m stuck here and can’t wait to leave. I too have become disillusioned with the suburbs, just not in the same way the book discusses.

Disillusioned is really about now minority communities have been historically excluded from suburban neighborhoods, and how once they do get a foothold there the prosperity once found move elsewhere. The book tracks five families in five communities, each at a different point of suburban decline. There are families living in the first ring suburbs of Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, and Pittsburgh. Each family moving in search of the American Dream, but finding a once-affluent community declining into poverty.

In many ways, the stories here illustrate the end phase and collapse of the suburban Ponzi scheme. Over the first decades of each community’s existence, the initial residents use up the useful life of the public goods, and when it comes time to reinvest and rebuild, they go off in search of new and pristine places. This leaves new residents with a community in decline and all of the bills to pay to rebuild.

While these are important stories, the problem with Disillusioned is that it doesn’t stand on its own. The personal anecdotes provide good color to the bigger picture of what’s going on in our suburbs, but the book doesn’t provide that bigger picture or the data to support it. At best, Disillusioned works as a companion to books like The Color of Law and Poverty, By America, and even Strong Towns. Without those other texts, Disillusioned is just a set of stories without real context.

If you want a book about how the suburbs have failed minorities, read Color of Law. If you need stories about how individuals have been failed by the suburbs, talk to folks in your community to hear and share their stories.