While American cities have always had suburbs, it was not until The Roaring '20s when the rise of inexpensive streetcar, automobile, and rail transit services made living out of town and commuting feasible. The modern concept of suburbia didn't take off until after World War II however, when the G.I. Billnote , cheap gas, cheap land, the new Interstate Highway System, and the postwar baby boom created an enormous demand for housing that couldn't be met by the cities alone. As a result, cities began to expand outward rather than upward. Similar factors were in play in a few other countries, most importantly Canada and Australia, both of which also now have very large suburban populations. The quintessential American suburb as we understand it (lots of houses, big lawns, happy laughing white children, etc.) was more or less invented in Chicago around 1950. The first purpose-built suburb with this design was envisioned as a giant park, a huge relaxing playground that people happened to live in. Thus the open, rolling properties with no fences or walls between them.
American suburbia was subject to de facto (and sometimes de jure) segregation in both the North and the South, with real estate agencies often barring their realtors from letting black families see homes in the nicest neighborhoods (a process known as redlining), black veterans often having trouble getting their G.I. Bill benefits, and contracts frequently prohibiting white homeowners from selling their property to black families. While these shady tactics were outlawed in The '60s, by this point the predominant whiteness of suburbia was well-entrenched. By the late '60s, The '70s and beyond, this made it attractive for people upset with the more far-reaching forms of desegregation (especially busing), leading to a phenomenon known as "white flight" in which middle-class white families moved out to the suburbs, taking their tax dollars with them and leaving the cities behind to decay. Eventually, even those who had elected to "stay and fight" for desegregation (including, ironically, much of the nascent black middle and upper classes) saw themselves forced to flee to the suburbs out of economic necessity due to the resulting collapse of the inner cities. This booming suburban voting bloc was a key component in the "Reagan coalition" that rose to power in The '80s.
Since The '90s the suburban trend has mostly retreated, with a plethora of young people, typically college-aged or in their twenties, migrating back into the inner cities, leading to increased gentrification in those areas. A few likely causes of this movement include frustration with the suburban lifestyle, economic opportunity, the lower cost of renting an apartment in the city versus owning a house in the suburbs, the perception that automobile-dependent suburbia is environmentally wasteful, and a desire to "transform" what are viewed as needy communities. One generation later, the first of this wave's kids are starting to send their kids to Inner City Schools. Interestingly, in many metropolitan areas, stagnation of the suburbs tends to be restricted to the inner suburbs, with many of the newer outer suburbs still growing. The reasons are simple- the rich and people with children are chasing space and low taxes, the working class and educated childless are either staying put or moving to cities which have more social services and a nightlife.
Traditional suburbia experienced a last gasp of growth in The Aughts with the rise of the so-called McMansions, but the 2008 housing crisis killed the very notion of it. Soon, scores of formerly bustling suburban areas became literal Ghost Towns. However, some have survived by means of gentrification, becoming "pocket cities" of sorts. In 2020, thanks to concerns ranging from the overheated housing markets in some cities to COVID-19, suburban real-estate markets are hot again. At the same time, the historical whiteness of suburbia drastically diminished in the 2010s with once-excluded black people migrating to the suburbs to escape gentrification and high living costs of the cities.
Note that, in much of Europe, the suburbs have very different connotations, and are often depicted as ghettoes and housing projects where the chronically poor and recent immigrants find themselves in — not unlike how the inner city is depicted in American media. Compare, say, the British trope of the Council Estate, which is, superficially and functionally, similar to suburbia (they're both cheap housing built after the war on the outskirts of the city), but is associated with poverty and crime rather than safety and prosperity. American-style suburbia, with single-family homes occupied by middle-class families, does exist in Europenote , but it's uncommon due to much tougher land use and zoning laws necessitated by Europe's relative lack of space.note These connotations are more in line with how suburbs have traditionally been viewed — "suburbs" translates from Latin as "under-city", or the red-light district. That's the meaning William Shakespeare would have had in mind when, in Measure for Measure, he has Mistress Overdone keeping a bawdy house in the suburbs. Even North American suburbs are prone to the same thing: for example, some suburbs of Toronto, Canada are notorious for gangs and recent shootings, namely around Scarborough and Jane & Finch (named for the two streets forming the intersection)note , and the Chicago suburb of Harvey, Illinois (which itself is similarly unsafe) was home to the Dixie Square Mallnote , as featured in The Blues Brothers.
