Benjamin Herold with Dahlia Bazzaz

Civics

While public education has become a hot-button topic in headlines, including Seattle Public Schools, there’s an even bigger story that journalist Benjamin Herold wants to tell.

Public schools are a cornerstone of the American suburbs; they are the assumed status symbols for upwardly mobile families. Yet Herold argues that the very infrastructures of America, including schools and housing, are undermining the dreams that American suburbia was built on.

Herold paints portraits of people from his new book, Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs, where he examines the places people live in and the varying degrees of privilege that Americans hold. Outside Atlanta, a middle-class Black family faces off with a school system. North of Dallas, a white family relocates to an affluent suburb but can’t escape the changes sweeping the country. And outside Pittsburgh, a Black mother moves to the same street where Herold grew up, then confronts the destructive legacy left behind. For generations, white families have extracted opportunity from suburbs, then moved on before the bills for maintenance and repair came due, leaving Black and Brown families to clean up. But this endless expansion is no longer feasible. The suburban lifestyle dream, Herold argues, is a Ponzi scheme whose unraveling threatens us all.

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