This study investigates the intersection of suburban political economy and
immigrant and ethnic minority suburbanization in the United States. Suburban areas
in the United States are generally characterized by the absence of significant racial
and class heterogeneity.1
Historically, suburban residential patterns were preserved
and shaped by government-sponsored discriminatory housing loan programs and
exclusionary fiscal zoning policies. Such programs were coupled with private market
practices that promoted widespread biases in the rental, sale, and financing of
suburban properties to non-whites (Danielson 1976; Drier, Mollenkoft and
Swanstrom 2001; Jackson 1984; Massey and Denton 1993). In Crabgrass Frontier:
The Suburbanization of the United States, historian Kenneth Jackson (1985) writes,
“Suburbia symbolizes the fullest, most unadulterated embodiment of contemporary
culture; it is a manifestation of such fundamental characteristics of American society
such as conspicuous consumption, a reliance upon the private automobile, upward
mobility, the separation of the family into nuclear units, the widening division
between work and leisure, and a tendency toward racial and economic exclusiveness”
(4). Yet, the unprecedented post-1980 influx of immigrant and ethnic minority groups
to some suburban jurisdictions may have altered this typecast of suburban life.