Missing the Root of the Problem

...By adhering wistfully to our belief that the small town (and its questionable suburban analogue) aid in the creation of civic responsibility, we have succeeded in blinding ourselves to the fact that most of the battles for economic progress and social justice have been fought in the large, heterogeneous urban centers where citizens have been forced to come to grips with the competing claims of their neighbors...

...Or could it be defined by the absence of heavy industry and the presence of light manufacturing along with complexes for white-collar pursuits...

...Perhaps because he is himself enamored of today's suburban dream, Kaplan not only uncritically accepts its viability for future generations but neglects to rigorously examine the basic concept, let alone explore any alternatives...

...The suburbs as we now know them are an artifact of industrialization in the United States...

...contributor, New York Times Book Review No one familiar with the nature of politics at the small-town or suburban level will be surprised by Samuel Kaplan's description of the corruption, confusion and conflict that have transformed at least one aspect of the American dream into a potential (if not actual) nightmare...

...What, after all, is a suburb...

...Interestingly, too, Kaplan's case studies offer considerable evidence that citizen participation in politics is more directly related to the quality of political organization than to living arrangements...

...The owners of estates in North Hills, Long Island, for example, managed to rezone their municipality in accordance with Federal guidelines so as to insure, not the best quality of life for all residents, but rather the greatest possible profits for the town's trustees...

...Specific accounts of suburban resistance to economic and racial integration also demonstrate the persistence of local power and its ability to counter State and Federal attempts to provide housing for the poor, the elderly and other minority groups...

...The detailed dissections of particular cases, though, are revealing...

...Formerly an urban affairs reporter for the New York Times, and currently director of the New York City Educational Construction Fund, Kaplan uses his own home town—Port Jefferson, Long Island —as a template for analyzing the problems found in such communities throughout the country...

...The failure to confront these and other questions leads the author to repeat tired cliches about the suburb as a necessary alternative to the city...

...Although The Dream Deferred succeeds in detailing what is happening, it ultimately disappoints by insisting on maintaining the myth that is the cause of the breakdown...

...Reviewed by Gloria Levitas Department of Anthropology, Queens College...

...More exciting possibilities involve new settlement forms that could prove less prone to producing boredom and alienation among the young and old than have the suburbs...

...Is it merely a collection of private homes separated from the workplace...

...these are not accidental consequences of surburbia...

...Having secured his private estate, the suburbanite is less likely to be touched by the concerns of those he has left behind in the cities, or to be moved by social pressures to altruistic actions that might threaten his domain...

...His diagnosis of suburban life is familiar: unfocused regional growth, uncoordinated public services, economic and racial discrimination, poor schools, diminished open space, political malfeasance, increasing pollution, roadside blight and traffic jams, crime—and, to cope with all this, a precipitous growth in land costs as well as taxes...

...Indeed, as the cost of land and houses has gone up, his defensive maneuvers have tended to multiply accordingly...

...Despite Kaplan's accuracy in describing its effects, however, he seems surprisingly insensitive to the possibility that the source of the malady he is describing may lie primarily in the very fabric of his subject...

...New technology and contracting resources are rendering them increasingly dysfunctional...

...Balkanization" and the duplication of services that it implies, greed and land speculation, insensitivity to the problems of others...