suburb

Merriam-Webster defines a suburb as “an outlying part of a city or town.” These residential areas that, in the United States, grew significantly after World War II have been heralded as the embodiment of the American Dream as well as criticized as soulless bastions of homogeneity. However they are defined, they are home to a majority of Americans, sporting bucolic names including Westchester county, New York; Oak Park, Illinois; and Highland Park, Texas.

Early history

Brooklyn Heights is considered by some historians to be the first American suburb, thanks to the 1814 debut of a ferry that took passengers across the East River into Manhattan. At the time, Brooklyn was its own town (it did not become part of New York City until 1898), and the steam-powered ferry enabled Brooklynites to commute to work in Manhattan. There were other early suburbs in the 19th century, including Inman Park, two miles east of downtown Atlanta, and Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh—both aided by trolley cars.

Postwar explosion

After World War II, in part to accommodate returning service members, new federal laws made homeownership more affordable, and new highways made access to urban centers more manageable. The result was a suburban boom that coincided with the baby boom. The suburban surge also coincided with growing consumerism. As Syracuse University pop culture professor Robert Thompson told CNN in 2011, the suburb “was touted as the perfect way to package American life in the utopian era that we expected the end of World War II to bring us. We’re in the Space Age. Television comes out. Air conditioning and dishwashers and all of this stuff. The suburbs stood for the place where this perfect kind of life was going to be lived.”

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Levittown, in Nassau county on Long Island, New York, about 30 miles east of Manhattan, debuted in 1947 as a prototypical planned community and is perhaps America’s most famous suburb. It was the brainchild of William Levitt, of the home construction business Levitt and Sons, who wanted to apply the mass-production skills he had learned in the Navy for military housing and adopt them for civilian purposes. The company bought seven square miles of Long Island farmland and furiously built houses—more than 17,000 between 1947 and 1951, at a pace of roughly nine houses a day. Built with Henry Ford-like efficiency from a 26-step process, Levittown houses came in five colors and several elevations. Levitt and Sons included a television set with every purchase of the $8,000 houses. (That’s about $110,000 in 2026.) Levitt and Sons would go on to build similar communities in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and other states.

With the federal government insuring loans on 95 percent of the value of low-cost houses at the time, homebuyers had to put down only 5 percent—and that was waived for veterans. “Thus an ex-G.I. could buy a Levitt house with no down payment and installments of only $56 a month,” Time explained in a 1950 cover story on Levittown, which the magazine described as having “an almost antiseptic air.” The dream, however, was not available to all Americans. Like some other suburbs at the time, restrictive covenants kept minorities out.

In fact, along with the desire for a backyard and a white picket fence, another motivation for some homeowners was white flight from cities—a trend that actually began in the earliest decades of the 20th century, according to researchers from the University of Pittsburgh.

Changing demographics

The image of the lily-white suburbs of the mid-20th century is a dated one in the 21st. Analysis of 2020 U.S. Census data by William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, found that most suburbs saw a decline in white populations in the 2010s. Frey found that suburbs were actually more racially diverse than the United States as a whole. “The classic image of the post-World War II American metropolis—a polyglot city surrounded by mostly white suburbs—has gradually shifted as racial and ethnic minorities grew in size and dispersed into the suburbs,” he wrote.

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In fact, the reasons for the diversification of the suburbs have their roots in what led to their creation in the first place: R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, a sociology professor at New York University, told The New York Times in 2021 that people of color increasingly are leaving cities for the suburbs because of the high cost of city living and to have access to safer communities and better schools.

What is a suburb?

Because there is no formal definition of a suburb, it is often in the eyes of the homeowner or renter. The 2017 American Housing Survey found that 52 percent of American households consider themselves suburban—easily eclipsing those who answered urban (27 percent) and rural (21 percent). According to a 2018 Pew Research Center study, about 175 million Americans live in suburban counties compared with 98 million in urban counties and 46 million in the country’s rural counties. Further complicating the picture is that residents say that some parts of cities feel suburban—about half of Phoenix households called their neighborhood suburban. And some people who live outside city limits consider their communities urban.

In pop culture

Suburbs—and their residents—have been featured in countless books, movies, and TV shows, sometimes in unflattering terms. In 1928 writer H.L. Mencken described “the despondent air of New Yorkers coming up from the ferries to work.” Manhattanites derisively refer to people coming in from Long Island or New Jersey as the “bridge-and-tunnel crowd,” a term that New Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen leaned into at a 2009 concert at Madison Square Garden that featured Long Island’s Billy Joel. “Are you ready for the bridge-and-tunnel summit meeting right here, right now?” Springsteen asked. “Because Long Island is about to meet New Jersey on the neutral ground of New York City!”

Suburbs have been the setting for TV shows including Leave It to Beaver (1957–63), Father Knows Best (1954–60), The Brady Bunch (1969–74), The Wonder Years (1988–93), and the Apple TV+ show Your Friends & Neighbors (2025– ). Movies including Ordinary People (1980), American Beauty (1999), and Revolutionary Road (2008) have critiqued suburban life, as did a string of movies from John Hughes, including The Breakfast Club (1985), Sixteen Candles (1984), Pretty in Pink (1986), and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986).

The 1982 song “Subdivisions” by Canadian rock group Rush paints a dark picture of suburban life:

Any escape might help to smooth
The unattractive truth
But the suburbs have no charms to soothe
The restless dreams of youth