Rezoning the Party

The fight for suburban votes this fall has begun to skew traditional party allegiances, especially for urban African-Americans. In Maryland, the Democratic candidates for statewide office hail mostly from suburban Montgomery and Prince George counties, adjacent to Washington, D.C. Even the Dems man for governor, Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, says a local free weekly, The Gazette, "has practically earned frequent-flier miles touting his roots in voter-rich Montgomery." The party has been drawn by more than votes. The wealthy suburbs have more cash, which in the television era has replaced ward-by-ward organization that used to win elections.

For African-Americans, who have been Democratic mainstays for generations, picking a mostly suburban (and mostly white) slate seems like a betrayal. "The Democratic Party, despite all of its claims of being inclusive and liberal, has left its principal group of voters behind," former Prince George’s county executive Wayne K. Curry told the Gazette.

Black Flight in Austin

In the Texas capital, East Austin is losing its character as the center of the city's African-American life. Stepping in to the breach are suburbs. "In the Austin area from 1990 to 2000, the percentage of black suburbanites grew at about twice the rate of growth of white suburbanites," says an article in the American-Statesman. The once-rural Pflugerville saw its African-American population more than double in that time. Black-owned and –oriented businesses are following, from hair salons to nightclubs.

The drain on the quality of life in East Austin sounds very much like the losses suffered by cities when white residents left in the '40s, '50s and '60s—the phenomenon known as "white flight." But though the article suggests that the exodus is due to gentrification spurred by rising housing prices and taxes, it also makes clear that, whatever their culture, Austinites come to the suburbs for the same reasons: better schools and more space.

Burbs, Unite!

For a few years, Robert Puentes of the Brookings Institution has been preaching about the the need for "first suburbs" to work together. Increasingly, it seems, he has a choir. In New Jersey this week, two dozen mayors and other officials from some of the state's older suburbs gathered to discuss their common concerns and plan an formal association. "With growing social needs, reduced outside financial resources, and greater dependence on tax revenues," writes Gene Racz in Central Jersey's Home News Tribune, "older suburbs are struggling to fend for themselves, often competing with one another for limited funds." An association of first suburbs, it is hoped, will allow suburban towns to work together and unify their voice when arguing for changes in the state capitol.

In 2002, Puentes identified 64 counties across the country that contain first suburbs, communities that boomed after World War II, but now face many problems associated with urban decay. They are home to a fifth of the American population.

Suburban Country

Suburbia has sent its spurs deep into Long Island, borne on the high price of housing in the New York area that long predated the recent national boom. But the sprawl has never eradicated Long Island’s rural population: Yankee fans in pickup trucks, Second Amendment supporters (spotted on a van’s wheel cover: "My wife yes, my dog maybe, my gun never"), and rednecks who pronounce it "Lawnguyland."

So it's not so surprising that Long Island could produce a country music star. Mindy Smith, whose sophomore album, "Long Island Shores," arrives next month ahead of critical acclaim, grew up in Nesconset. "Exit 56," she tells New York magazine, identifying herself as solidly mid-Island by naming her exit on the Long Island Expressway. But Smith’s upbringing sounds like she arose from cotton fields, not potato country—she sang weekends at the Nesconset Church of Christ, where her father was the minister—and her "sweetly aching soprano, says the (suburban) music blogger Andy Whitman, "reminds me of Emmylou before she lost her purity because of age and cigarettes."

Tammany Across the Potomac

"McLean is the new Georgetown," The New Republic pronounces in a tone befitting the voiceover from "The DaVinci Code." The political mag's cover story this week (itself only available to registered users) calls the Washington, D.C. suburb "home of America's ruling class"—meaning, mostly, that top Republican Senators, White House aides and lobbyists live "in a leafy suburb among landmarks that neatly represent the modern GOP era: the McClean Bible Church ... the Saudi ambassador's personal compound ... and CIA headquarters."

Despite the heavy breathing, the article amounts to a workaday skewering of the real-estate boom, complete with shocking prices, lavish architectural details and fireplaces in master baths. The magazine puts no less of a figure than Jimmy Carter's national security director, 78-year-old Zbigniew Brzezinski, to work complaining about McMansions. Another resident calls the Bible Church "the Wal-Mart of churches."

A good line, but The New Republic also wants to imply that the suburban environment is somehow especially conducive to Republican political excesses and influence peddling. McLean's rise, however, hardly seems the stuff of conspiracy, given the GOP's strong suburban base (a point the article notes only in a throwaway dependent clause). The Republican revolution began in iconically suburban Orange County, Calif., and peaked in the triumph of Newt Gingrich, who represented the suburbs north of Atlanta. Not only are the Republicans politically suburb-oriented, they tend to live there; why would they suddenly take up city living?

If the Democrats retake the House this fall—a feat they'll only pull off if they win some key suburban races—we'll be watching to see if Georgetown is re-established as the nation's power precinct.

Look, Up in the Sky, It's SuperCommuter!

Super-commutes are becoming more common as suburbs are flung farther from the city core, and the price of a home within reasonable distance of town keeps heading upward. But most super-commutes still only involve trains and automobiles. This piece in the Los Angeles Times concerns a trauma nurse who works 16-hour shifts in the Bay Area and commutes by plane (to the tune of 350 miles and $400 a month) to her home--her dream home, needless to say--in suburban Las Vegas.

A different kind of commuting--call it kindercommuting--is cropping up in Seattle. A Seattle Times article today profiles families who send their city kids to close-in suburbs for high school to avoid the overcrowding and violence that some Seattle schools suffer. The piece estimates that as many as 1,000 Seattle students are skipping town, including two dozen or so who commute by ferry to Vashon Island (above). The suburban schools get to be choosy--kids who are discipline problems are not accepted--and each transfer represents a vote of confidence in the education the suburban schools are providing. The transfers are not moneymakers for the receiving districts, however. For every out-of-towner,the suburban schools get only the state funds attached to a student, not the local levy.

"Weeds" Creator Discovers Suburban Ecstasy

Could television be falling a little for the suburbs? The Baltimore Sun's Stephen Kiehl thinks he notices an appreciation for suburbia cropping up in the second season of "Weeds," Showtime's dark comedy about a suburban widow who turns to drug dealing to keep her family afloat. He even gets the show's creator, Jenji Kohan, to admit to a little suburb-envy when she's on location. "They're clean and they're safe and the gardens are very well-manicured," says Kohan, who lives in L.A. Given the antiseptic surroundings, people in the suburbs have to work harder to make life interesting, Kohan goes on to say, "and they do." (And not only by dealing pot, one assumes.)

While Kohan's admission is a kick in itself (up there with a "Weeds" writer's news last year that he'd never inhaled), it's not the warming trend Kiehl has in mind. What Kiehl detects in the new "Weeds" episodes is a sense of community imposed on suburbanites by their neighbors. In the suburbs, in other words, you don't pick your friends, but are forced to befriend your neighbors.