The growing diversity in America's suburbs

The “suburbs” have become a hot constituency in recent years. But has the term enveloped the full range of their residents?

“In the last two decades in particular, the number of people of color, immigrant folks, low income folks have increased in suburban spaces,” R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, a professor of sociology at NYU, says.

“So now the conversation of ‘Do you appeal to the suburban voters?’ is even more important because … in reality it actually means a very diverse sector.”

Today, On Point: The growing diversity in America’s suburbs.

Guests

R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, associate professor in the sociology of education program at New York University. (@DumiLM)

Also Featured

Suja Amir, mom in Henrico County, VA.

Revida Rahman, mom in Brentwood, TN.

Julie Collins, organizer with Red, Wine & Blue, a national network of multiracial suburban women mobilizing to counter disruptive groups in schools.

Interview Highlights

On when the suburbs became a key constituency in politics

R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy: “The suburbs, for better or for worse, in many people’s imaginations right now, are pretty hot. And we saw with the last election cycle, whether it was the gubernatorial election in Virginia or the presidential election, that people are calling out to the suburbs and saying, We need to court suburban voters. And that appeal to suburban voters has an earlier route, probably closer to the 1970s and ’80s. When we think about what happened with major metropolitan cities in the 1960s and 1970s, you had the concentration of poverty within cities.

“Those who had the economic means tended to move outside of the city into suburban areas, and there was also the movement of jobs away from the cities, to the suburbs or to other countries. And what happened was the idea of the American dream really crystallized along the suburban frontier. So in that way, by the time you get to the 1960s and ’70s, you have politicians explicitly saying, I know I have to capture the vote inside of Boston, as well as the vote outside of Boston.

“And the appeal to the suburban voters coming out of the 1970s and ’80s, even through the 1990s, was often an appeal targeted directly at where they thought middle income and above white residents were. So there’s a longer history of an appeal to a suburban voter. But more recently, this appeal to the suburban voter gets complicated, in part based on who’s there now and what an individual politician may be signaling when they say they want to get the suburban voter.”

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.