Title: Suburbanization in the United States after 1945 | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History
Headings: Suburbanization in the United States after 1945
Suburbanization in the United States after 1945
Summary
Keywords
1945–1970: Era of Mass-Suburbanization
Postwar Real Estate Development
The City-Suburb Divide: Urban–Suburban Inequality in the Postwar Era
Race, Ethnicity, and Exclusion
Social Life of Postwar Suburbanites
“Culture Wars” over the Postwar Suburbs
Political Life
1970–Present: Growth and Diversification
Land Development and Real Estate
Table 1. The Growth of Metropolitan and Suburban Areas in the United States, 1940–2010
Metropolitanism
Social Diversification
Social Life
Politics across Diverse Suburbia
Reforming Suburbia
Suburban Crisis, Suburban Regeneration
Discussion of the Literature
Primary Sources
Further Reading
Notes

Content: Suburbanization in the United States after 1945 | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History
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Suburbanization in the United States after 1945
Suburbanization in the United States after 1945
Becky Nicolaides
Becky Nicolaides Huntington-USC Institute on California & the West and Center for the Study of Women, UCLA
and Andrew Wiese
Andrew Wiese Department of History, San Diego State University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.64
Published online: 26 April 2017
Summary
Mass migration to suburban areas was a defining feature of American life after 1945. Before World War II, just 13% of Americans lived in suburbs. By 2010, however, suburbia was home to more than half of the U.S. population. The nation’s economy, politics, and society suburbanized in important ways. Suburbia shaped habits of car dependency and commuting, patterns of spending and saving, and experiences with issues as diverse as race and taxes, energy and nature, privacy and community. The owner occupied, single-family home, surrounded by a yard, and set in a neighborhood outside the urban core came to define everyday experience for most American households, and in the world of popular culture and the imagination, suburbia was the setting for the American dream. The nation’s suburbs were an equally critical economic landscape, home to vital high-tech industries, retailing, “logistics,” and office employment. In addition, American politics rested on a suburban majority, and over several decades, suburbia incubated political movements across the partisan spectrum, from grass-roots conservativism, to centrist meritocratic individualism, environmentalism, feminism, and social justice. In short, suburbia was a key setting for postwar American life.