The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs by Benjamin Herold

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs by Benjamin Herold https://amzn.to/3S8GOAl Through the stories of five American families, a masterful and timely exploration of how hope, history, and racial denial collide in the suburbs and their schools Outside Atlanta, a middle-class Black family faces off with a school system seemingly bent on punishing their teenage son. North of Dallas, a conservative white family relocates to an affluent suburban enclave, but can’t escape the changes sweeping the country. On Chicago’s North Shore, a multiracial mom joins an ultraprogressive challenge to the town’s liberal status quo. In Compton, California, whose suburban roots are now barely recognizable, undocumented Hispanic parents place their gifted son’s future in the hands of educators at a remarkable elementary school. And outside Pittsburgh, a Black mother moves to the same street where author Benjamin Herold grew up, then confronts the destructive legacy left behind by white families like his. Disillusioned braids these human stories together with penetrating local and national history to reveal a vicious cycle undermining the dreams upon which American suburbia was built. For generations, upwardly mobile white families have extracted opportunity from the nation’s heavily subsidized suburbs, then moved on before the bills for maintenance and repair came due, leaving the mostly Black and Brown families who followed to clean up the ensuing mess. But now, sweeping demographic shifts and the dawning realization that endless expansion is no longer feasible are disrupting this pattern, forcing everyday families to confront a truth their communities were designed to avoid: The suburban lifestyle dream is a Ponzi scheme whose unraveling threatens us all. How do we come to terms with this troubled history? How do we build a future in which all children can thrive? Drawing upon his decorated career as an education journalist, Herold explores these pressing debates with expertise and perspective. Then, alongside Bethany Smith—the mother from his old neighborhood, who contributes a powerful epilogue to the book—he offers a hopeful path toward renewal. The result is nothing short of a journalistic masterpiece. About the author Benjamin Herold explores America’s beautiful and busted public education system. His award-winning beat reporting, feature writing, and investigative exposés have appeared in Education Week, PBS NewsHour, NPR, the Hechinger Report, Huffington Post, and the Public School Notebook. Herold has a master’s degree in urban education from Temple University in Philadelphia, where he lives with his family.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go. When the Iron Lady sings it, that's when you know it's official. I did it for 15 years and sung that bit, and I'm done doing it.

So the Iron Lady does it, and everyone's happy about it. Welcome to the show, my family and friends. As always, for 15 going on 16 years, we've been bringing you the most smartest, most brilliant people. The CEOs, the billionaires, the Pulitzer Prize winners, if I can learn to say that, the authors, the astronauts, you name it. People who've done great things in life and learned from them. And what they do is they bring you and dispense upon you the amazing amount of knowledge that they have dealt over their lifetimes. And we get to enjoy it for free. But the only thing we ask about the free part is,

can you refer the show to your friends, neighbors, or relatives, damn it, already? And I know those of you have, so we certainly appreciate you guys as well. But in the meantime, please go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, subscribe to the LinkedIn newsletter, the big LinkedIn 130,000 group over there. Chris Voss, one of the tickety-tockety, chrisfossfacebook.com, and all those great places we are on the shows. We have an amazing author on the show today.

I'm excited to talk about his book because it really delves into what's going on in America. Benjamin Harrow joins us on the show today. He is the author of the newest book that's coming out January 23rd, 2024, three days before my birthday. So there you go. He must have wrote it for my birthday. That's fine.

Whatever it is there. The book is entitled Disillusioned, Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs. And it's going to be quite an insight into what's going on in our world and in our universe, our government, I suppose, in the backwoods of America or the frontwoods of America. Is there a frontwoods of America? Maybe there is. Benjamin Harreld explores America's beautiful and busted public education system. His award-winning beat reporting, feature writing, and investigative exposés have appeared in Education Week, PBS NewsHour, NPR, and the Public School Notebook.

Harold has a master's degree in urban education from Temple University in Philadelphia, where he lives with his family and has worked as a waiter, researcher, documentary filmmaker, and training specialist for rape crisis and domestic violence prevention organizations. Welcome to the show, Benjamin. How are you? I'm doing great, Chris. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you very much for coming.

Congratulations on the new book. Give us any dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? If you go to benjaminherald.com, you can find out about both me and the new book that's coming out and at BenjaminBHerald on X. There you go. So give us an upfront 30,000 overview in your words of what the book entails. Sure. You know, Chris, we as Americans have invested so much hope and

ambition in so many of our dreams in suburbia. And the suburbs are where we go, where we want to give our children a better life. And that's a really powerful thing. But I spent the past several years in suburban communities outside of Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh. And I got to know five very different families living in those places. And what I found out was that the hopes and dreams that had brought those family to the suburbs are now crumbling beneath their feet. And this disillusionment that they're feeling as a result, it's fueling a lot of the angst and the conflicts we're seeing. It's up at suburban school board meetings all around the country. And I'm sure you'veing a lot of the angst and the conflicts we're seeing. It's up at suburban school board meetings all around the country. And, you know, I'm sure you've seen a lot of

the headlines about the conflicts that are raging across suburbia. And so, you know, the challenge is the problem that we face as a country is that these families are right. We were sold a bill of goods. We have all of these hopes and expectations about the suburbs being a gateway to the American dream and opportunity and the good life. But the reality is that's true for an increasingly small number of people. And the fact is that suburbia is a Ponzi scheme. And as that Ponzi scheme falls apart, we're all in big trouble. I love it. Suburbia is a Ponzi scheme. So tell us what's going on with this. Is crypto taking over suburbia? No, I'm just kidding. You never know. But the motivation for me to start the book was actually my own experience. So I grew up in a suburb outside of Pittsburgh. It's called Penn Hills. It's an inner ring suburb.

And my white family, when we moved there in the late 70s, and I grew up in the 80s and 90s, we had a great experience. And the public schools were really an engine of opportunity for me. Like you can really very easily trace the path from my suburban upbringing to the middle-class life I was able to build. But when I went back to Penn Hills and I started to get to know the families who are using the public schools there now, I learned a couple of things. So one, the demographics have changed dramatically. We still tend to think of the suburbs as this kind of all white, leave it to beaver, wonder year space. But in reality, suburbs have diversified tremendously. And inside suburban public schools, non-white kids are already in the majority. And so in Penn Hills, what we saw is as that transition happened, the bottom kind of fell out of the community because

all of the costs of delivering opportunity for my family back in the 70s and 80s got pushed off on the future generations. And that future generation that's paying the cost now is primarily African-American. And why did that cost get pushed off? Were we investing in wars and some of the other things we're doing? I think in many ways, Chris, it even goes deeper than that. It's kind of the central covenant of suburbia. There was this illusion that we could have abundant services and great infrastructure and low taxes, and that this could last indefinitely. And the reality is that lasts for a couple of generations as the suburb grows really quickly. The surge and new growth

allows that dynamic to kind of take roots, even though it's never sustainable. But we get so attached to it that we want what we want and we don't want to pay for it. And then what we've seen time and time again all over the country is that as the cost starts coming due, as the infrastructure starts aging, the schools start getting old, the roads need to repair, sidewalks need to be fixed, those kinds of things. Instead of paying for it, the families who were there originally move out. We move to a newer community where we can start the whole cycle over, and someone else follows us in. And they come in expecting to get the same generous social contract

that families like mine enjoy. And what they discover is that they're kind of stuck with a tab for that. So they're kind of left with the bonds and all the financing and, hey, someone's got to pay for this. And I imagine, go ahead. I would say, so in Penn Hills, for example, my hometown, what initially drew me back there was that the school system, which is relatively small, like most suburban school systems, it's a few thousand kids. hundred and seventy two million dollar debt. And that was causing them to cut staff. It was causing them to slash services. Property taxes were going up. And so all of that rippled out into the community. So all of a sudden you had families who had gone there thinking they're going to build generational wealth and the homes they've purchased, the values are now stagnant. Their taxes are going through the roof and the services are declining. So it's really a bum deal

once if you're not part of that first couple generations. And I really thought of the long lasting stretch of municipal bonds and who inherits them when gentrification, is that the right word? When an area, is it gentrification? What is it called when an area, it goes through, it reaches that point where it starts to change as, like you say, the families leave and the makeup of it changes, but the homes are older, the neighborhood's older, you know, and like you said, it needs more repair, but, you know, it goes through that kind of thing where eventually, you know, the yuppies move in and change it and improve it again or something, I don't know. It seems like, you know, the cyclical nature of that. It's definitely a cycle for sure.

And what we're seeing is kind of the gentrification is often happening in the cities. So in the 60s, 70s, 80s, what we saw is this kind of mass exodus of upwardly mobile white families out of urban areas to the suburbs. That's certainly the case with my family. But now what we're actually seeing is the reverse of that. So we're seeing upwardly mobile white families moving back into cities and gentrifying urban neighborhoods and black and brown families moving out into the suburbs where homes are more affordable, where the cost of living is often lower, those kinds of things. And so the cycle kind of goes back and forth, but for a lot of families, what they end up experiencing is this kind of chasing the dream, but never quite being able to find it and realize it.

Is that part of the victimization of that cyclical cycle of gentrification? Because I can kind of see how that might play in. You know, people move into an older neighborhood because maybe it's cheaper. The homes have been there for 20 or 30 years maybe and then they can't take advantage of those poor things that eventually somebody else comes along who's richer and more well-to-do and takes advantage of those people being stuck in that middle part i don't know is that yeah i mean a lot of the central dynamic in the that i look at in the book is kind of what happens when the people who are able to move out of an aging suburb move out and then someone else moves in.

And the challenge is that the families who are moving in to these older communities, suburban communities, who often tend to be black, brown, lower income, they're on the hook not just for the additional expenses that they face, but they're in effect paying for all the opportunities that those wealthier families already got there. Wow. And do they inherit any value, though, from any of it? Or is it all blighted? Part of, you know, I think what the challenge that I hope to reveal with the book is this is a hard pattern to see. And it's hard for a couple of reasons. One is because it plays out very slowly. So it kind of unfolds across generations.

And it also unfolds across space. It kind of ripples across a metropolitan area over time. So that's one challenge. And then the second challenge is we have a lot of myths about suburbia. You know, we tend to see a place as a suburb only when it's new, only when it's predominantly white, only when it's predominantly middle and upper middle class. When that changes, we stop thinking about it as a suburb altogether. And that's a problem.

And one of the places that I spent a lot of time with and got to know in the book is Compton, California, which, you know, in my lifetime has predominantly been synonymous with kind of urban blight. But Compton actually has this really rich suburban history. It was an all-white, you know, bedroom community of Los Angeles up through the early 50s. The Bush family actually lived there. But we kind of forget all of that history after things start to change demographically and economically. There you go.

And has it had a come-around resurgent yet or maybe not? I'm sorry? Compton, has it had a resurgence yet? That was one of the really eye-opening things for me about the book is Compton actually ends up being the place of hope because, you know, the bottom of there really fell out in the 70s and 80s. And it went through a really difficult stretch that lasted for a couple of decades, mostly or, you know, most centrally in its public school system, which was taken over by the state and nearly bankrupt for years and lots of violence and poor performance. But I spent a lot of time in an elementary school called Jefferson Elementary. And Chris, it's an amazing school. And it's, you know, the family that I follow there was undocumented Hispanic parents who kind of had gotten marooned in Compton in some ways, but their children were getting a great education, a great opportunity. And really

with this idea of reinventing the suburban social contract so that it's not just for white families, middle-class families, upwardly mobile families, but it's not just for white families, middle-class families, upwardly mobile families, but it's inclusive for all. Yeah. And then I imagine, you know, when a neighborhood is kind of done, it's 20 or 30 years and the original families move out, you know, the roads need to get repaved. You know, there's more repair to an older, I mean, if you want to just envision it as a car, there's more repair to an older car than there is to a newer car. So, you know, I mentioned the Costco up and everything else.

Let me ask you this, playing, I guess, devil's advocate, is this possibly just a natural cycle to the ins and outs of what we started with Levittown? Or is there something more sinister here at work? I think I might argue that it's both, Chris. I think that it is kind of the natural cycle of having built these communities that were intentionally and by design and often legally racially exclusive for their first, you know, generation or two. The bill for that is going to come due at some point. And what we're seeing is the bill for that is going to come due at some point. And what we're seeing is the bill for that exclusionary policies are coming due now. And you mentioned the analogy of kind of the aging car, and that's a great analogy.

And what I'd argue is it's actually part of the challenge that a lot of older suburbs face is it's not just one aging car that has to be fixed. It's all the aging cars at once because these communities were in many ways built almost overnight. So you had all of those roads and sewers and schools and infrastructure go up in five, ten years. That means it's all going to need repairs at the same time, too.

So you can't kind of gradually budget and maintain it. And when the bill comes due, it comes due in a big way. There you go. In fact, I was just seeing something about how the Biden administration is working on, I think it's a 10 or $30 billion bill to basically re-pipe America because of, you know, the, the, the lead and crap that we have in our systems. And, you know, we have, we have some severe infrastructure problems in this country. Is that tied into it? Our infrastructure problems, you know, we have bridges falling and, you know, lions and tigers and bears roaming the streets, having sex with each other, you know, is that part tied into

this whole broad scale we're having on a national thing? It is. And we, again, we tend to think of infrastructure as an urban or a rural issue, but a lot of suburbs are now 70, 80, 90, 100 years old. And again, like a lot of that repair coming due at once. And so in Compton, for example, you know, what you see is with in the wake of COVID and the federal infrastructure relief that came there, Compton and its school district got hundreds of millions of dollars and were able to do wonderful things with those money, with that money. But when I talked to the superintendent and said, hey, you know, is this kind of sign of a rebirth? We're actually kind of investing in fixing these issues. He said, yeah, you know, let's not get carried away because if you step

back and look just for the school system in Compton, which is not a large community, just the school system there, he pegged the total price tag of infrastructure need there at $3 billion. Wow. Wow. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was just reading the article about what the Biden administration is proposing to re-pipe America. And I mean, you see it and you understand it when you see what's going on just with their water functionally. You look at places like, what was it, Michigan that had the huge fallout of, I don't know, what sort of idiot municipal people are going there. I think some of them are going to jail and find that we're overseeing the city. But, you know, across our nation, you know, a lot of the infrastructure that we laid down is crumbling. And I guess that all plays into it.

Is there a way to fix this? Is there a way to build a sustainable Levittown sort of, you know, carpet suburbia that we're so good at what we're doing so wonderfully? You know, I don't come up with any kind of short-term policy solutions in the book. If I had, I'd be doing something besides writing books. But I will say a couple of things. So one, you know, you mentioned Levittown as an example. And I think that in America, there is no way to build a sustainable, healthy community that is predicated on racial exclusion. And we still do that. We still try over and over and over again, including in some of the newer suburbs that we see around the country, one of which I feature in the book, which is a new ex-urban community outside of Dallas that ran into a lot of financial struggles as a result of its desire to remain exclusive.

So that would be one. But in terms of what we can do, like again, Compton, I think, is a real place of hope. But what we need to be able to do as a country is recognize those places where we're seeing this kind of new model of suburbia taking root, where it might not be white picket fences and everything's neat and tidy. But what we see is opportunity being invested in for a wide swath of the population, including those who are most vulnerable and especially those who were excluded from suburbia by design historically. Let me ask you this. I

almost feel like we have a real, how do you, let me ask you this first. How do you see the current crisis that we're in now where we have not been keeping up building single-family residences? And we have a lot of investors on the show, and a lot of them find that building multifamily is more profitable. And we're turning into what I predicted in 2009 is the great renting of America, where everything is rentable and people don't own anything, which for most Americans, homeownership used to be, maybe it still is, a pathway to a good retirement and some sort of wealth building. What do you see with what you wrote about in the book with what's going on where now it seems like home ownership is really out of the reach of many of Gen Z. It's out of the reach of many people because of how crazy things are going on.

You know, you've got some VC funds that are buying up huge swaths of America causing competition. You know, it's crazy what's going on in the market. You know, I mean, you can have a, you can like, my mom's like, my house is worth a lot of money. But if she sold it, it wouldn't help her much because she'd just end up paying the same amount of money to go live someplace else. It's not really like she'd be cashing out. Right. I think there's no doubt that our housing market is a mess right now.

And in suburbia, I think what we see is a legacy of kind of the opposite of what you're talking about, where we have prioritized single family housing and zoning so heavily, so robustly for so long, where it really kind of warped the market. And it also kind of warped the social dynamic and social fabric of the communities where you didn't have really economically and racially integrated communities. You had these very homogenous communities with intentionally limited supplies of housing. And so what we see in a lot of suburban communities is still ongoing fights to resist multifamily housing. And that ends up being a problem both educationally, but then also in terms of people's ability to find a good home and also to build the kind of wealth you're talking about. And again, as with many things in this country, and particularly this cycle of suburbia that I describe in the book,

it tends to be families of color that get hit hardest. Yeah. You know, the inventory glut that we're in, where we don't have an inventory of single-family residents, has driven the price up, even though they've jacked up the interest rates it hasn't touched prices at all and of course people are kind of sitting on 10-year low interest rates they're not going to give that up and they probably shouldn't but you know i i've even talked about how you know what the whatever presidential administration is in power needs to do is is put out some sort of bonus to get people building single-family residences so that,

you know, there can be some sort of calming of the market. I don't know. I don't know if that's the way to do it. We talked before the show about how when I had Eddie Glaude Jr. on, we talked about how, you know, redlining by banks and even freeways cut between racial lines in our countries and separate us. I can go through my neighborhood. Of course, I live in Utah, which is, I think, 96% white or something insane. And I can't blame black people for not wanting to be here. It's damn ass cold.

But it's a pretty unique state anyway, so I wouldn't advise anybody to move here. But you can tell I like Utah at this point, huh? It's cold, damn it. That's what I'm saying. But, you know, it seems like as much as the government has tried to put their thumb on the scale, you know, fighting bank redlining and stuff, it still hasn't been able to resolve the issues of racial separations. Is there any good model to try and overcome that? I mean, I think the first thing that, you know, task for us as a nation is to recognize

the extent of the history that we're talking about, because the government in some cases, in some instances is trying to address this legacy now, but it's its own legacy. Like the history of redlining was the federal government redlining and, you know, narrowing communities and limiting investment opportunities for certain populations. And so, you know, in some ways, part of the challenge is government isn't particularly good at undoing its own mistakes and messes. And in terms of models, you know, I think, again, there's not a clear and easy way out of this because these, you know, thousands of communities around the country were built on this same shaky foundation. And many of them were built in the same 30,

40-year span. And so just like with an individual community where you see all of that infrastructure needing to get fixed and repaired and kind of the original model needing to be rethought all at the same time, we're kind of seeing that on a national scale too with all of the communities going through that as well. So yeah, I think looking for clear models or fixes, we're not quite there yet. What we need to do first is be able to have an honest reckoning of where we are. And I think that's also part of the problem that we're seeing in suburbia. Once you get inside the schools, a lot of the fights over how we teach and talk about history are really coming in suburban schools first. And what we're seeing is a real resistance to, you know, in some parts of the country,

some communities to being willing to even acknowledge the problem. There you go. You know, you mentioned earlier about how, about how, you know, with, with, what's the thought? Let me ask you this though. It seemed like a lot of the stuff that started in the fights in the schools came from the Proud Boys and the Trump administration, some of the dark segments of that whole thing. My understanding is, too, the Proud Boys made it a point to try and turn the school systems into their new battle. In fact, I think I remember reading extensively about it. Was there more of this problem before that with the battlegrounds at the schools and the school boards before that that we just weren't seeing until the Proud Boys started showing up at things? Or was this all combined into the same sort of political sort of meltdown?

These dynamics are definitely not new. And so if you go back to the, you know, 50s and 60s, when a lot of these communities were developing, we saw a lot of right wing and kind of, in some cases, far right wing activity in suburbia, particularly among white families and parents. So one of the areas that I focus on is North Dallas. And, you know, that was kind of the epicenter in many ways for the John Birch Society, and some of the right wing radio ideologues who were very popular with pretty extreme messages and ideologies back in the 50s and 60s. And what we saw was that went dormant for 20, 30 years, never really fully went away, but it didn't have quite this kind of popularity. But with the election of President Trump and some of the, you know, part of what I argue in the book is that these, what we're seeing is really, really dramatic demographic shifts in suburbia too. So this combination of political, economic, social upheaval, what we saw is a lot

of that same ideology coming back, coming back to life. And so one of the families I got to know, the conservative, very affluent white family that lives in a suburban community far north of Dallas, and they had moved into the community specifically for the public schools. They wanted to be there because they thought that's where they would get the lifestyle that they wanted. And when that didn't happen, they didn't just disenroll their children. They enrolled them in a private online school that was actually run by the John Birch Society, which is still around and which actually saw a resurgence, significant growth in its enrollment during the last few years. There you go. So that's really interesting. As these communities mix, they're coming up against racial tension because they're maybe getting exposed to each other and different races. And it seems like racism is just so it's always kind of been there, racism under the, the, under the veil a little bit.

And then some of these political and economic tensions are drawing them out. Is that a correct analogy? I think that's a pretty fair summary. So another one of the communities that I focus on is Gwinnett County, which is one of the Northeastern suburban counties, counties outside Atlanta. And what we saw there was as recently as 1990,

Gwinnett County was 90% white. And then in the span of really just 25 years, that almost entirely flipped. So the school system there is now almost three-fourths Black, Asian, Hispanic, and multiracial. But the political dynamics and political representation was far slower to catch up. So what you had was a system where you have, you know, 178,000 kids in a school district, three-fourths of whom are non-white, but you had a school board and a superintendent and a leadership cabinet that was almost entirely white and older. And so there was this real kind of cultural and political mismatch. And the way it showed up there, and I think this is true in many communities, is issues around discipline, student discipline often first, and then issues around curriculum and budgets and so forth tend to follow from that. But it's a very common pattern where you see the demographics on the ground of families change, but the political leadership at the local level, particularly on school boards, is often much slower to change.

And then you have these conflicts that arise from that. There you go. And then people are arguing over history. And, you know, it's like one thing I always say on the show, the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. Thereby we go round and round. Yeah. It's interesting. You've seen the fight over, over, you know, what's being taught in schools and things like that. You know, there's the ebb and tide flow of, of you mentioned earlier in the show about how white families are moving back into the cities and stuff.

And, you know, I imagine that's part of the establishment of, you know, what we call the flyover states and the coastal elites, you know, Fox News likes to call it. And then, you know, some of the ebb and tide we've seen lately have been people from California and New York moving to Florida and Texas and probably starting to change the political makeup there, which is kind of interesting how that whole, I don't know, the ebb and tide flow of America. It is. And I think part of what was really eye-opening for me, just getting to know these five different families and five different communities, is there's not just one dream that brings people to the suburbs. There are different dreams. And all three of those dreams have historic roots. So one of those is this desire for an exclusive community where I can be around people who look like me and have the same values as me, same economic status as me, and kind of keep it exclusive. And that's crumbling, partly because of economics, partly because of demographics, partly because of

politics. But there was also these dreams about suburbia that emerged out of the civil rights era, where it was this idea of like, hey, we need to knock down the doors to these exclusive suburban communities so that we can access the public schools, we can access the home markets, have the opportunity to build that wealth, have equal access to opportunity. And we see a lot of black families in the suburbs now saying, hey, wait, you know, this isn't what I signed up for. And even in those older suburban communities, you know, there's a relative handful of them where there has been an intentional and sustained effort at racial integration for some period of time, you know, since the 60s or 70s. Even there, what we're seeing is folks who have pushed and fought and tried to sustain integration for 10, 15, 20 years, they're tired now. Like, it's not working well.

Their kids are still dealing with challenges. They're tired of having the fight. And kind of there's a retrenchment happening where we're saying, okay, maybe this isn't an end unto itself. Let's just get in a community or in a neighborhood or in a school where my kids can be safe, where they can be affirmed, and where they can get a good education, whether it's racially mixed or not. So let me ask you this. I mean, that was the thing me and Enigola Jr. talked about on the show for his book on Baldwin. You know, one of the problems in most of our neighborhoods in America, we don't see the other race. You know, we still are highly segmented and separated by race.

And so, you know, we don't mix with each other. We don't mix with each other's culture as much. And because of that, we don't have a good understanding of each other. We don't have a good rapport and empathy with each other in our struggles and lives and some of the things that we deal with. Is this working out better when we mix these neighborhoods with people or is it or is it worse maybe maybe this ideal model that he and i talked about and he he seemed to have maybe that's just not better maybe we're just racial assholes

we just can't get over it i'll respond to that by telling you about evanston illinois which is one of the places where i got to know it's a about Evanston, Illinois, which is one of the places where I got to know. It's a North Shore on Lake Michigan, right north of Chicago. And it's, you know, it's Northwestern University. It's a college town. It's very affluent. It's very progressive, very liberal, long history of racial integration there that started in the public schools. And so for years and years and years, it was kind of held up as kind of a national model of how to do racial integration in a community and a school system without having these kind of fights and riots and so forth. And so I went there and kind of started doing the reporting for this book with this idea of, OK, here we have a model that might have lessons for some of the other suburban communities that are newer to these fights and challenges.

But it was really, really eye opening to me, Chris. And I know you're a pretty optimistic guy, so I don't want to bring you down here. I try, but I mean, no, but give me the real stick. Give me the real. What we saw there was starting around 2016, 2017, there was this sense that, hey, this actually isn't working out. And the mom that I followed,

there was a multiracial mom, black and Hispanic. And her son, she had moved back, it was her hometown and she had moved back there because she wanted her son to have a safe, affirming, racially diverse schooling experience. And it took till middle of first grade before he was called racial slurs on the playground. And she was at a place where she said, you know, I'm not going to just put up with this anymore. And there were lots of other parents like her in the community that said, no, no, no, this is not okay. We're not going to let this just be swept under the rug anymore. And so what ended up proceeding from that was this real kind of political fight between liberals who tended to be a little bit older and whiter and progressives

who tended to be younger and people of color about what the nature of the problem is. And, you know, and the kind of liberal contingent was more likely to say, hey, we just, you know, if we invest in early childhood, if we kind of get everyone, you know, the same resources, you know, we'll be able to kind of work through this. But we just kind of need to tinker around the edges, kind of almost more of like the Obama approach. But what we saw amongst a lot of the progressives was like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not the actual issue. What the issue is, is a systemic problem that we need to root out, you know, root and branch. We need to pull that out from the bottom and really change things dramatically. It's not just kind of a technical policy fix. We need to change hearts and minds

and budgets and all of the above. And so that's a really difficult thing for a community to go through, even a community that wants to, where there's a will for it, like Evanston. And so the tensions and kind of the disappointment that emerged there, that was a real eye-opener for me of like, hey, we might have some bigger problems on our hand than I realized. Would a descriptive word for that be identity? The identity of the community, the identity of the neighborhoods? Yeah, I think that there's, you know, in Evanston as a kind of a prototypical example, there was this kind of illusion that there was one identity that everyone could rally behind.

And in reality, there were lots of different identities and experiences, some of which were visible and some weren't. And because the numbers have changed, because the politics have changed, because the economics have changed, now a lot of other voices that were historically kind of pushed to the margins about what's happening in suburbia are now front and center, and people are having to reckon with that. And maybe they don't want to reckon with that and maybe they don't want to reckon with them because they're you know there's shame there's embarrassment

there's you know i've watched a lot of republican voters i think there's a name for it but i i've seen a lot of them push back on on you know the fact that we're changing as a country to where you know non there's going to be more people that are non-white than there are white. And to hear them espouse that they're going to treat us as badly as we treated them for the last 248 years, whatever, and their fear of repercussions and it's shame and guilt too really but it's kind of a horrible sort of way of trying to resolve an issue by just like we should just keep abusing people because you know if they get power then you know it's it's the fight over power and and all that stuff as well political power and but this it's interesting to me what you talk about with the identity of a

of a neighborhood and i imagine there's a there's a not my backyard sort of thing where people feel that you know fighting over you it kind of explain you kind of explain to me more what's going on in those in those wonderful fights you see on tiktok at the pro that's not the boards that they're kind of entertaining sometimes and in what they're fighting over and now now you maybe realize that it's it's more than just you know fighting over you know whatever it's it's it's really about identity and history and makeup and who we are and who we're not and maybe if you've spent a lifetime believing the lie that we're we're good people and we're racially things, but we don't want to teach that in school, some of the ugly stuff, the whitewashing of history. We have a lot of great historians that have come on the show that have told a lot of great stories from non-white areas that contributed to this country, and they were whitewashed. And so the shame and guilt and

whatever, changing that identity is really hard for people, I guess, to embrace. Yeah. And that actually became a very personal issue for me in the book. So, you know, again, I came back to Penn Hills, this community that had done very well by my white family, and then we had all left and I hadn't really paid much attention to it or thought much about it. But when I came back, it was like, oh, there's this kind of larger mess that's happening in the community. But there was actually these kind of very personal messes that were tied to my own family. Like when my father had moved out of our house, we had left a real mess in the backyard that's actually still there. And so it's how bringing down the property values. And so part

of what I had to reckon with was, hey, this isn't just some abstract thing that's out there in the world talking about other people. I'm talking about me and my family. And so the mom I got to know in Pittsburgh, it's an African-American mom who bought the house three doors down from my childhood home in 2018. And talking with her, it was almost word for word the same hopes that my parents had come to Penn Hills for. She just wanted a community that worked where she didn't have to worry about stuff too much and she could trust that her kid would be put on a path to middle class security. And what she found was that big debt that I told you about and then the mess in my family's backyard. And so she and I had to work through that. So for her, there was a lot of issues around kind of anger and frustration and, you know, the kind of lifelong experience of trying to deal with with white people and with white racism.

But for me, it was also trying to confront some of that in many ways for the first time of saying, hey, this is not just an academic or intellectual thing. There's this person that I care about now who I want the best for her and her son. And the reason that they're not able to access that as easily as they should be is partly because of me and my family. And so how do we work through that together in a way that's not about blaming or shaming, but in a way of saying, how can we open a space for something different? Because if we can't talk about it, and if we can't talk about it across racial lines, then we're certainly not going to find the kind of models you were asking about earlier.

Does this play into the dumbing down of America where, you know, we don't teach civics anymore. We don't teach a lot of things in schools. I always thought it was insidiously an evil agenda. You know, my mom was a teacher for 20, 25 years, and she would call me up and be like, hey, Chris, the Republican legislature in Utah, I mean, if you've been there with Utah, if you're a Democrat, you can't get a leg up here.

And they've doubled the class size again, Chris. They've doubled the class size again. They've cut our budgets again. And this was going on for decades. And you could see it going on around the country too. And now we, I mean, I don't know if you've seen TikTok lately, but we really got some people that don't know what the hell's going on, don't know the history, don't know anything. I mean, if you count all the people who quote me the Constitution, about the the funding for it and the the fall off of funding and and support for it with the taxes and and maybe that's why they were you know i

always thought it was an evil agenda but maybe maybe really what it was is what you talk about where you know the the costs of it have soared over time and and they have to cut back on teachers and schools and class sizes. And so kids suffer and education suffers and people get dumber. And now we're all on TikTok. You know, what you shared there brought to mind, there's a scholar named Heather McGee, and she wrote this amazing book called The Sum of Us. And she uses this analogy that was so powerful, I think, for a lot of people and me included, where she talks about, you know, in this same time period when the suburbanization boom was happening, she talks about swimming pools. And what we saw was just like schools were segregated, swimming pools were segregated for a long time. But as the legal restrictions started coming down and the idea was, OK, now these pools are going to be integrated all of a sudden.

What you saw in a lot of white communities was, say, we'd rather fill that pool with concrete and let no one swim than have us swim together. And that's Heather McGee's work, but it's a great analogy in many ways for suburbia and its schools too, where there's this sense that we were willing to make this massive public investment in suburbia in the form of mortgage loans and guarantees, massive, you know, infrastructure building programs, tax breaks for homeowners and, you know, that flow disproportionately to suburbia. There's billions and billions and billions of dollars over generations. But what we haven't shown a consistent willingness to do as a country is make those investments in communities that are racially and economically diverse. And that's, again, coming back to Compton, part of why I think it's such a powerful model to look at and consider. Because what you saw there, or what I saw there, was an undocumented Hispanic family that it was in many ways kind of like on the margins of their

community. But their son was a bright, brilliant kid who you can't help but enjoy and root for as soon as you spend five minutes for him. And he spent five minutes with him. And he was in a school where they were investing in that heavily, both financially, but also just kind of interpersonally of saying, we believe that not only are you going to be someone who can have a good job, we think you can invent the next iPod. You know, we want to put you in a place where you're not just a consumer of new technology, where you're reinventing society for all of us. And I think that's something that we can all look at and learn from. Yeah, that's the beauty of the melting part of America that people really need to think about when they address immigration. Instead of having closed-door policy that, you know, I mean, I think I heard one time that it takes one or two generations of immigrants when they first come here where they really hit their stride, integrate well, and become incredibly successful and contribute.

I don't know. I don't know what that has to do with anything. But it's important because, you know, all the greatest ideas and stuff and some of the great innovations can come from anywhere and everyone. There's nobody who's got a finger on the pulse, especially lazy Americans that were born here, myself included, who don't seem to, you know. The one thing I always love about immigrants is they love the hell out of this country. They know what freedoms is about. They know what the value of it. They know the value of living a life where you don't have to worry about, you know, someone killing you all the time or, you know, mobs or whatever, gangs.

And, you know, you can move to some bad areas in America and get that. But, you know, I mean, they lived through some really ugly stuff in South America and everything, a lot of which we created over the last 60, 80 years, something like that. I mean, we talked earlier about this idea of kind of the suburban dream. And I think that's in many ways, you know, it's very tied into the American dream that draws people from all over the world here still. This idea that there's not only can you get ahead if you work hard, but that there's a investment in you. There's a chance to pursue higher education.

There's a chance to get a really world-class K-12 education. But again, I think part of the problem is that we haven't historically been willing to make that investment in everybody. Compton becomes, again, just a super fascinating place to think about that because when Compton was really taking off in the late 30s, early to mid 40s, there were tons of migrants flowing in there at that time as well. They just happened to be white migrants from the Dust Bowl. And at that time, you know, what the government response at both the state and federal level was, was massive investment. We're going to give you mortgages for $200 down. We're going to give you very affordable higher education. There's massive investment in industry in order to, you know, open up plants and defense plants for workers. And so if, you know, I think it begs the

question of like, what would it look like if we were to make those investments in places like compton now yeah i it's and i think didn't it come to get ignored for a long time you know the watts riots and and and the whole area was blighted for i mean i don't know it's it's it's to think, but now that you've addressed it, we can all take a look at it and go, how can we fix this? Is there more stuff the government should be doing somehow? I mean, you already mentioned earlier in the show about how they kind of mucked it up anyway. The worst thing you can hear from the U.S. government is, we're here with the U.S. government is we're here with the U.S. government. We're here to help you. One of the things that I talk about in the book, again, was, you know, COVID ended up providing this really interesting window on all these issues we're discussing. In many ways, it kind of propping up the economy and keeping people and systems going also kind of gave us a look at what the scale of the investment we might need is. So in a place like Penn Hills, they got tens of millions of dollars and were able to address some

of the mistakes that they had made over the years. But again, just like in some of the other communities we discussed, it's like a down payment on the investment that's actually needed. It's by no means the sum of what's needed. There you go. Deeply insightful, man. You've put me back on the rocks of whether or not we can actually live together because we're just assholes for human beings in the end when it comes down to it. But maybe there's hope. I mean, hope springs eternal. I'll try and find some. I'll call in Egon and see what he's up to these days. But, you know, hopefully in your second book, you'll tell us how to fix all this. How does that sound? I hope so.

I would like to know myself. But I appreciate you having me on. And again, I think part of it, you know, being able to have the kind of honest discussions about the history that we often overlook and about the examples of really what the American dream looks like now that we tend not to recognize because it looks different than it used to. I think those are two really good starting points. And I appreciate you having me on to have that conversation. I appreciate you coming on. I mean,

that's what we need to do. We really need to rethink the American dream or renew it or, or what's the thing where people get married after remarried after they've been married for a while? Yeah, you renew our vows. Renew our vows to the American dream. And again, that was something, you know, for me ended up being, you know, one of the real personal journeys of the book was coming to a very different understanding of that for myself about what the suburban dream means and what it looks like for me, not just from my own experience, but getting to know that mom who, you know, bought the house three doors down for my childhood home and saying, hey, if there's a dream that's going to work in modern day America, it has to work for both of us.

There you go. Has to work for everybody. Thank you very much, Ben, for coming on the show. Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs. I'm at benjaminherald.com and at benjaminbherald on X. And again, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure being here. Thank you.

And friends and families, order it up wherever you find books are sold. Disillusioned, Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs. January 23, 2024. And as I always say, the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. So let's learn some stuff, read the book, and figure out how to fix all this. Thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfoss. All those crazy places we are on the net. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safechesschrisfoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Oh, it's a crazy place. We are on the net.

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