The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966-1999 [Hardcover]

Ray Suarez (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 10, 1999

"Life in the city, for the millions who lived it, was once something less than the sum of their lifestyle choices: they woke up, they ate, they shoveled coal, loved, hated, prayed, mated, reproduced, died. For most, the home was not a display object but a place to keep the few things they had managed to hold on to from the surpluses produced by their labor. Their material life was made of the things they didn't have to eat, wear, or burn right this minute. A concertina maybe? A family Bible? A hunting rifle?"

This life in "the old neighborhood," so lyrically captured by Ray Suarez, was once lived by a huge number of Americans. One in seven of us can directly connect our lineage through just one city, Brooklyn. In 1950, except for Los Angeles, the top ten American cities were all in the Northeast or Midwest, and all had populations over 800,000. Since then, especially since the mid-60s, a way of life has simply vanished.

Ray Suarez, veteran interviewer and host of NPR's "Talk of the Nation®," is a child of Brooklyn who has long been fascinated with the stories behind the largest of our once-great cities. He has talked to longtime residents, recent arrivals, and recent departures; community organizers, priests, cops, and politicians; and scholars who have studied neighborhoods, demographic trends, and social networks. The result is a rich tapestry of voices and history. The Old Neighborhood captures a crucial chapter in the experience of postwar America. It is a book not just for first- and second-generation Americans, but for anyone who remembers the prewar cities or wonders how we could have gotten to where we are. It is a book about "old neighborhoods" that were once cherished, and are now lost.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

With a great deal of sadness, NPR host Ray Suarez chronicles the effects of the American migration from cities to suburbs in the second half of the 20th century. He visited a number of cities--including Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Miami, and Washington--to find out what went wrong. The Old Neighborhood makes its case with an effective mix of data and quotes from interviews with community organizers, government officials, people who stayed in the cities, and those who left. One of the best things about the book--no doubt a product of Suarez's radio background--is its tendency for extended quotes, where the voices of his interview subjects more fully emerge.

Suarez passes blame around freely for what happened to the cities and their neighborhoods, citing the loss of inner-city manufacturing jobs, crime, the decline of urban schools, and the increased availability of the automobile and development of highway systems. But mostly he blames America's inability to deal with race, asserting that whites simply don't want to live with blacks and will continue to move out further and further to prevent that from happening. (Suarez has little to say, however, about the tendency of middle-class blacks to flee the city as well.)

Although crime was down and job creation up in cities in the '90s, Suarez tends to focus on the negative. He did not, for example, interview people who moved back to the cities because their children finished school and they tired of long, bumper-to-bumper commutes and the lack of cultural offerings in the suburbs. And while many of the people he did talk to say they miss the close-knit community of their downtown neighborhoods, almost all say they are happy they left and were able to give their children a better life. Still, The Old Neighborhood remains an extremely readable clarion call for the importance of city life, obviously written from the heart. --Linda Killian

From Publishers Weekly

In a lively guided tour of America's once mighty, now imperiled urban neighborhoods, Suarez, host of NPR's Talk of the Nation, searches for clues to "the great suburban migration" of the past 30 years. Using his formidable skills as a radio producer, Suarez seeks out the person in the street as he steers through the desolate inner-city neighborhoods of Chicago, by a new housing development in Cleveland or past a derelict public schoolyard in Washington, D.C. Amid ample evidence of the larger, structural issues fueling "white flight" (redlining mortgage banks, plummeting property values, crumbling public schools), his interviews with longtime urban residents add specificity and character to the great urban debate. Senior citizens proudly resist the violence flaring up around them, while black kids elsewhere describe their suffocating lack of opportunity. Suarez dutifully cites experts on urbanism, but their broad statements don't shed much light on the issue. What the book reveals, it reveals through anecdote, not analysis. Suarez seems determined to probe a simple lack of honesty he finds in many Americans' retreat to the 'burbs. Even as we tell ourselves we're moving to escape crime or find better schools for our children, he writes, we're "consuming our way into little customized worlds, as individual as a thumbprint, yet as interchangeable as shoes in a shoe store."
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1ST edition (May 10, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684834022
• ISBN-13: 978-0684834023
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #746,388 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sidesteps key issue of African American crime and racism, September 20, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966-1999 (Hardcover)

In the opening chapter "WHAT WE LOST" the author sums up the relative soulnessness of suburban vs. urban living in the sentence "The automobile, that ultimate isolator, turned life into a TV show, a mediated set of images seen through the screen of our windshields" (p.20). After having lived for four years in Paris I understand exactly what Mr Suarez is bemoaning when he describes the community and sense of belonging people had in an urban environment, which was lost in the U.S during the "white flight" to the suburbs. In Paris I walked everywhere, knew my neighbours and was surrounded by small businesses, restaurants and cafes, a far cry from the neatly manicured lawns and people empty streets of suburbia, or to use the term coined by Mr Suarez "autosuburbanalia". This is a thought-provoking book that does an excellent job of exploring what was lost in the migration of European Americans and later middle class African Americans to the suburbs, it also contains an excellent analysis of what happened. Where the book failed was it's inability to fully explore the Why part of the equation. Mr Saurez puts the blame for white flight to the suburbs and the subsequent deterioration of inner cities squarely on the shoulders of European American intolerance and racism. The implied thesis of this book is that inner cities deteriorated because integration did not work due to the inability of European Americans to accept their new African American neighbours, in fact towards the end there are several pages devoted to examples of European American racism towards new neighbours of color. Legitimately held fears of African American crime are dismissed in the following manner; "Even if you take into account the statistic that a quarter of all black men are in the criminal justice system - either incarcerated or on parole, or on probation, which is an abnormally high number - that's still three-fourths who are not" (p.77) Mr Saurez paints a pretty damning picture of inner city African Americans despite his best efforts to portray them as innocent victims of economic change, bureaucratic neglect and European American aversion and racism. In fact the author goes one step further and implies that African Americans are justified in their violent attacks on other races: "Interestingly, there were Indians in this drugstore here when I visited just six months ago, now it seems they're gone. You're beginning to see more and more black solidarity, vis-à-vis the Asian and Indian business people, which sometimes spills over into real violence. How does a Kim's Market open, how does it survive in a place like this?"(p.70) Blatant violent racism on the part of African Americans towards other peoples is not condemned by the author, in fact it is referred to uncritically and without shame as an expression of "black solidarity", is it any wonder that non African American's choose to move out to the suburbs? Instead of looking for outside excuses Mr Suarez should show African Americans enough respect to acknowledge that they are responsible for their own destiny and thereby carry the blame for the deterioration and violence of the inner city environment they created and in which they live. Despite my difference of opinion with many of the conclusions in this work I highly recommend it to anyone interested in a stimulating, controversial and educational read.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good story, wrong conclusions, May 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966-1999 (Hardcover)

I am a big fan of Ray Suarez' shows on NPR- but while he tells ain interesting story, it's a very incomplete one. He sees racism as the main factor motivating the move to the suburbs, but the emigration he's talking about long preceeded the riots of the 1960s, and the general climate of fear that accelerated the flight. The destitute, racially polarized inner cities that now help motiovate suburban flight were in large part created by the fiscal policies of the cities themselves.

The biggest factor has always been fiscal policy. The high tax rates of the cities, which were raised even higher as the tax base fled, served to give people a very good reason for leaving. Example: Here in Detroit, city residents pay a 3% income tax in addition to one of the highest property tax rates in the state. That's not uncommon.

Detroit's population has been falling for years, and in recent years the flight has been that of middle-class black residents, who leave for the same reasons as their white predecessors. As the surrounding communities have seen taxes go up with increased property values, flight continues out beyond the old suburbs to the new suburban communities.

Another reason has been the enginnered destruction of the stable neighborhoods in the central cities by government. In Detroit, neighborhoods were razed to create a block of empty land to sell cheaply to GM. In New York and elsewhere, stable neighborhoods were bulldozed by social engineers like Robert Moses to build horrible project housing. These further accelerated the decay of the city and the desire to leave.

No doubt racism has always been a factor, but the actual story has always been more complex that Suarez's simple tale.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I LOVED THIS BOOK, September 25, 2000

By 

Theresa Welsh "The Seeker" (Ferndale, Michigan, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966-1999 (Hardcover)

Do not read this book as a cold analysis of what went wrong in our cities, although you will certainly gain some insight into the causes of urban decline. Saurez speaks with the voice of many of us who love much about cities: walking on city sidewalks and waving to neighbors we actually know as they sit on their porches, enjoying the architecture of older storefronts where unique non-chain shops still flourish, and feeling part of a real community.

Other reviewers say Saurez concentrates too much on racism as a cause of the loss of those communities. I think rather he simply reports what he saw and makes no apology for feeling city life offered so much more than living in the non-places of highways and strip malls and cul-de-sacs with no sidewalks that characterize America's suburbs.

Saurez has written a book that needed to be written.