The year is 1945. Soldiers are spilling off the
docks in droves. Fresh from a war across the sea, they’re about to continue another war at home
that had been raging for over 200 years. American pride is all the rage, and so are construction
projects peppering the outskirts of cities. With their cul de sacs, cars, white picket fences,
and white faces the suburbs have arrived in full force. Post-WWII, Americans were fleeing from
the cities and into the advertised bliss of the suburbs, building the physical manifestation of
the American Dream. But these endless rows of single-family homes and perfectly manicured lawns
didn’t just spring out of nowhere. The suburbs are intimately intertwined with the settler-colonial
and racist history of the United States. And the suburban fever of the 1940s and ‘50s is
just one piece of a long history of suburbia. This is the story of those suburbs. The sinister
reason why we have this instead of this, and how that’s turned the suburbs into one of the
most environmentally destructive ways to live. This video was made possible by CuriosityStream
and Nebula. If you don’t know by now I have a ton of content that can’t be found on YouTube over
on the creator-made streaming service Nebula. Like my full video on why direct air capture is
capitalism’s biggest gamble, or a full length video I just made all about carless cities and
neighborhoods, as well as a ton of extended editions of videos! You can see them all on Nebula
by signing up for the CuriosityStream/Nebula Bundle at curiositystream.com/occ or
using the link in the description below. Settler Colonial Roots of Suburbia
Long before there were soldiers coming home from World War II, there was this. In order
to understand the roots and motivations behind suburbia, we have to go way back. Back
to a time when the United States didn’t even exist yet. When the world looked a lot
smaller, and over three hundred years younger. It’s 1607 and the English have established
their first settlement on North American soil. Claiming Indigenous land for themselves in
the name of trade, the European settlers of the Jamestown colony began to terraform
the Earth in their European capitalist image. Now you might think Jamestown is a weird
place to start a video about modern suburbia, but the parallels between settler-colonialism
and suburbia are deep. Ever since Jamestown, English colonists and then the nascent
United States have invested heavily in the project of settler-colonialism. Whether escaping
persecution in Europe, establishing new markets, or hoping to strike it rich, European American
settlers violently invaded the lands of nations and tribes indigenous to North America and
replaced those lands and cultures with societies, homes, and cultures of their own. Essentially,
early colonists and later on, the United States, stole the land of the people already living on the
North American continent and dramatically reshaped it in order to claim it as their own. This process
has come to be known as settler-colonialism. And the scars of settler-colonialism run straight
through ideas of manifest destiny, westward expansion that coalesced in the Homestead Act
of 1862, which expanded the US’s foothold on the continent by transferring federal land claims in
the American West to thousands of its citizens. In essence, the United States used settlers to make
the right to stolen land seem that much more real. And often those settlers occupying and working
that land moved out west as a means of escape. Fleeing difficult circumstances on the East coast
and establishing their own methods and means of living on the “frontier.” But by 1893, scholar
Fredrick Jackson Turner made the bold claim that the American frontier had closed. To Turner, the
US project of settler-colonialism was finished. While it was true that the United States had
successfully dug its claws into almost every inch of the modern United States, the culture
of using space, of using landscapes to escape crises and to shape the world continued on in
other ways. One of those arenas was the suburbs. While it would be wrong to say that suburbia
grew directly out of settler-colonialism, as scholar Lorenzo Veracini writes, the suburbs
are a re-enactment of settler-colonialism. After striking out westward in the 1800s,
Americans went outward in the 1900s– away from the perceived crises of the cities and
into the supposed havens of the suburbs. The car is a stand-in for the settler wagon, the commute
into the city mirrors the westward journey, and the very styles of homes, “ranch” and “colonial,”
harken back to settler roots. But the suburbs for White Americans, much like frontier for White
Euro-Americans, was, importantly, an opportunity to flee the corrupting values of the cities and
return to a haven that better reflects their own, often conservative, views. Veracini puts it this
way: “Settlers and suburbanites are ‘escapees’, even though they escape different things at
different times (corrupting ‘Old Worlds’ on the one hand, racial mixing, violence, crime,
congestion, gender confusion, and filth on the other), they are also ‘returnees’: they undertake
a movement in space that is meant to bring about a movement in time, a return to a social order
that is perceived as compromised.” In short, suburbia, much like settler-colonialism, has
used movement across the landscape as a way to go back in time to a period when things
were “good,” or when America was “great.” But to understand exactly what suburbanites
were escaping and how that has led to the US having one of the highest per capita emissions
in the world, we need to fast forward to 1935. How Racism Made the Suburbs: 1935 was a great year for some. But for the vast
majority of the world, 1935 was a terrible yearr. Not in the least because that’s when the US
government began the process of redlining neighborhoods. Under government supervision, the
Home Owners Loan Coalition created maps of over 200 US cities outlining neighborhoods in different
colors to denote which areas the government should invest in and which ones it shouldn’t.
Green outlines were the “best” neighborhoods that didn’t have, and this is a direct quote “a
single foreigner or Negro,” while red districts were “Hazardous,” which meant they were majority
Black neighborhoods or what the Homeowner’s Loan Coalition described as an “undesirable
population.” This is the origin of the term “redlining.” Agents from the Homeowners Loan
Coalition would travel around to different districts and draft blatantly racist
assessments about neighborhoods like this one, which marked one neighborhood as
yellow because Black residents of surrounding districts walked through that area's park and
the school for that zone was located in a Black neighborhood. Green neighborhoods were okayed for
mortgages and public funds, while those marked in red were avoided at all cost by mortgage lenders
and government spending. Redlining systematically divested funds from Black neighborhoods and put
them into white neighborhoods. But government sanctioned redlining in the city is just the
tip of the iceberg. Racist white fears of crime, filth, and violence pushed white folks to
flee urban centers and carve out fortresses of Whiteness in the suburbs. Indeed, for many
suburbs in the first half of the 20th century, there were official zoning laws and unofficial
racial housing covenants that restricted white homeowners in the suburbs from selling to
prospective Black homeowners. For White people, the suburb represented a conservative refuge
that valued the nuclear family, that reinforced gender roles of a man at work and a woman in
the home, and that excluded non-white families. But with the passage of the Fair Housing Act in
1968, many of these racist policies were outlawed on paper. Yet, in practice they still thrived.
Overt racism became covert racism as people used coded language and logic to continue to exclude
marginalized people from the suburbs. Instead of saying people of color couldn’t live in their
suburban enclaves, white homeowners of suburban towns like Black Jack in the outskirts of St.
Louis, would say stuff like “The only criterion for entering Black Jack has been the ability to
pay… We are not a racist community. But neither are we for economic integration,” as well as “If
you bring low-income housing out here the same thing will happen that’s happening in St. Louis
City. There will be crime and armed robberies and everything else.” This rhetoric came directly
from the mouth of local officials of Black Jack in the 1970s, who were adamantly opposed to the
construction of a low-income, high-density housing project in the town. Instead of blatantly racist
wording, the townspeople of Black Jack used income as a way to keep poorer non-white folks out of
their neighborhoods. Across the country the tactic of wielding class and wealth as a racist tool of
exclusion pervaded suburban policy. Single-family zoning laws, a lack of public transportation, and
an emphasis on conformity, were all exclusionary tactics. They were all attempts to keep the
perceived violence and crime of people of color in the city out of their suburban enclaves.
And if you think we left that rhetoric behind in the seventies, Trump begs to differ: “They want to
eliminate single-family zoning, bringing who knows into your suburbs." The suburbs are still a
racialized battleground, using space and design as a means of exclusion. And along the way of
achieving this white supremacist safe haven, the suburbs lock in a way of life incompatible with
our environment, our atmosphere, and our planet. Suburbia’s Environmental Destruction: The suburban lifestyle is the antithesis of a
sustainable lifestyle. Think about it. If you’ve ever lived in the suburbs, your life revolves
around cars, large homes, and manicured lawns. All of which require immense amounts of energy,
gas and materials to maintain. According to one research paper, the suburbs require 2 to 2.5
times more energy per person than urban centers, while another recent study estimates that the
emissions of wealthy suburbs can sometimes be 15 times higher than their surrounding neighborhoods.
In the US this large carbon footprint is deeply tied to the design of suburbia. Sprawling lots of
grass require fuel to mow, enormous homes suck up energy to heat and cool, and all of these homes
are isolated from any shops or places of work, which means you have to drive sometimes multiple
hours a day to your job or to run errands. In the process of isolating themselves from the
city, suburbanites also isolated themselves from everything else, making the trip to the store or
the movies one ladened with emissions. Suburban design is a masterclass in not just exclusion but
pollution. To demonstrate the effect of suburban living on the atmosphere a research group took
the average carbon footprint of thousands of zip codes across the US and visualized that
data as a heat map. With each and every city, their map reveals low carbon footprints in the
urban core and extremely high carbon footprints in the surrounding suburbs. In order to build their
supposed oases from the corruption of the city, suburbanites have left a trail of environmental
destruction in their wake. Or as environmental and urban historian Robert Gioielli writes: “The
American metropolis is a constantly expanding and morphing racial petroscape, where decisions made
to maintain racial inequality and white privilege reinforce carbon intensive forms
of urban development and mobility, while delegitimizing anything that would help
cities move along a more sustainable path.” In short, the suburbs are unsustainable, and
their environmental destruction is supported in part by a refusal to interrogate white privilege
and racial underpinnings that gave rise to them. Building Landscapes for the Planet and People:
The suburbs are steeped in a legacy of settler colonialism and racism that have locked the
United States into one of the highest per capita emissions rates. But it doesn’t have to be
this way. There are so many alternatives across the world, and even within the US. We know that
dense cities are less carbon intensive. They are the exact opposite of the suburban lifestyle.
City dwellers have smaller homes, easier access to mass transit, and can walk or bike to stores
and their jobs. But we can’t just eliminate the suburbs and force everyone into the city, so
what would it look like to transform the suburban landscape? For one it would mean building a lot
more low-income and accessible housing projects like the one that was blocked in Black Jack.
Buildings that could house multiple people and families instead of just one house per family.
It would also mean bringing places of work, play, and stores closer to the home, so people can
walk or bike to them instead of using the car, and finally it means dramatically expanding public
transportation options in a dense net throughout neighborhoods and between suburb and city. This
requires an emphasis on mixed-use zoning laws over single-family zoning, public investment in
transportation, and an overhaul of infrastructure, all of which will require incredible political
pressure. But right now, in the local planning boards of American suburbs, that political
pressure looks like the opposite of what we need. It looks like older white folks pushing back
against any change that may disrupt their views, their yards, or the suburban safe havens. Even for
self-professed environmentalists and progressives, like Susan Kirsch, settler-colonial racism and
entitlement still tints the justification of suburban living. Kirsch lives in Mill Valley,
a suburb of San Francisco, and spearheaded the successful campaign to block California’s
eradication of single-family zoning laws. According to Kirsch, “climate change is one of the
real serious issues that we have to deal with," yet when it comes to transforming her suburban
enclave into one with more environmentally ethical infrastructure, she says “I don't think we need
to be forcing draconian measures.” So while the destruction of the suburbs necessitates
the transformation of antiquated design and policies, it also requires an interrogation
of the racism and settler-colonial culture that reinforces them. Until we wrestle with
the unconscious and conscious bigotry, hatred, and entitlement that spawns from our
culture, the suburban lifestyle will continue to stand in our way of creating environmentally
sound and community-focused ways of living. But are there actual examples of cities or
towns that build around people and planet instead of cars and privilege? The short answer
is yes, but going into detail about how and why these towns and cities work ended up being a long
process and I felt like I needed a whole nother video that wouldn’t be great for the YouTube
algorithm. So, if you’re curious what cities and neighborhoods are leading the way in sustainable
design, I made a full-length companion video on Nebula looking at just that. You can find
that video and a bunch of other content from OCC that’s not on YouTube over on Nebula. If you don’t
know by now, a group of educational creators on YouTube teamed up to create a streaming service
called Nebula that’s is home to tons of ad-free exclusive content like a bunch of extended
videos and interviews from me, as well as original videos from other creators like Not Just
Bikes, who has a Nebula-exclusive video for all you suburb haters out there about how hard
it is to buy milk in suburbia without a car. Nebula allows me and Not Just Bikes to flex our
creative muscles without having to worry about ad revenue or the dreaded YouTube algorithm.
It’s a platform made by creators for creators. Instead of the fluctuations of ad revenue
we get the consistency of your subscription. It provides the creative backing and stability
that’s sometimes hard to find through YouTube. And the best way to get access to Nebula, is to
sign up with our partner CuriosityStream, the largest source of informative documentaries on the
internet. I recommend checking out the documentary series, Naturopolis, which looks at how major
cities like New York and Paris are beginning to blend urban design with natural ecosystems. But
if that’s not your speed, there are thousands of other big budget movies on CuriosityStream like
a host of David Attenborough nature documentaries or even ones imagining what the future will look
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