Anxiety grows amid the crabgrass.
Seven weeks before the first presidential election in which most votes probably will be cast in the suburbs, American suburbanites are edgier than the borders of their lawns.
They are not miserable. They are not poor, although many are poorer than they were just a few years ago. Most of them have not given up the hope that got them their own homes, on their own plots of ground, to begin with.
But almost half a century after suburbanization began not simply to revolutionize American life but to embody the dream of the mass middle-class, belief in that dream has been shaken.
In the heart of the middle-income, middle-of-the road, middle-ground between city and countryside, between wealth and poverty, millions wonder whether that middle-class status they worked so hard to attain will last long enough for their children to inherit it, or even long enough for them to enjoy it in retirement.
”I`m just not sure that my kids will have the same opportunities that were there for me,” said Mark Cayce, a manager for an electric utility company who lives in Flower Mound, Texas. ”I think it`s going to be a lot tougher. I`m just not as optimistic.”
And if not optimistic in Flower Mound, then where? Flower Mound, thanks to its proximity to Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport, is booming. In 1980 there were 4,000 residents. Now there are about 20,000.
They are heirs, whether they know it or not, to the vision William Levitt had when he threw up those little Cape Cods on Long Island and in Pennsylvania right after World War II-the vision that with full employment, available land and easy credit, almost everyone in America could own his or her own home in a nice community.
Since then, suburbia has become to the late 20th Century what the independent farm was to the 19th, the industrial job to the early 20th. It became the preferred way for the average person to live. It became the defining American myth, embodying the hope and optimism of the people.
So if Mark Cayce is typical, and interviews around the country suggest he is, that optimism is fading. And if the optimism is fading, then so is faith in the country`s major post-war accomplishment-the creation of the mass middle class in which all who worked hard and developed some skill could attain a steadily improving standard of living for themselves and a better life for their children.
That was the lure of suburbia. Not wealth, or beauty or even personal fulfillment. And certainly not excitement; even many suburbanites agree with the social critics who point out that suburbs tend to be dull.
But suburbia wasn`t supposed to be perfect. It was just supposed to be better. ”I moved here, first of all, because it was affordable,” said Fay Fisch of East Windsor, N.J., a suburb off the New Jersey Turnpike not far from Princeton. ”I wanted to make a better life for me and my children.”
In her old neighborhood in Brooklyn, she said, the children ”couldn`t even go out and ride a bike.” In East Windsor they can, and breathe cleaner air and walk more safely on the streets, all at a lower cost.
But now her three-bedroom townhouse is worth no more than when she bought it seven years ago, perhaps less, and as local businesses and governments continue to lay off people, its value may go down even more. Fisch still loves her townhouse and where it is. She`s fine as long as her husband keeps his computer technician job, but she worries about that, and she doubts conditions will improve any time soon.
Perhaps for the first time, suburbia has become a place to get out of as much as to enter. In Moreno Valley, Calif., 60 miles southeast of Los Angeles, many people want to sell their homes and leave the state. In East Windsor, some older people think of heading to Florida.
Some of this is just the inevitable change in life situations-after their kids have grown older, people need warmer weather more than they need a big house with a yard-but some of it reflects the fact that suburbia is being visited by the same problems from which it was supposedly a refuge-crime, crowding, traffic jams, dirty air, rising prices.
Suburbia is for families, but with so many families needing two earners to stay in their homes, with so many workers driving farther each way, family life becomes hectic.
”The irony is that you`re winding up with (de facto) single-parent households because one parent has to be moving around to take care of everything, and that certainly wasn`t the point of moving out here,” said Larry Venus, editor of the Moreno Valley Times.
These cracks in suburbia`s structure have an obvious and immediate political impact. People like Mark Cayce-a person with a well-paid job, homeowner, spouse and parent-could be counted on until recently to be optimistic and to vote Republican, at least for president.
With his optimism gone, his Republicanism is uncertain. ”I don`t think there is a good choice” for president this year, Cayce said.
From New Jersey to California, in interviews in five suburbs and the suburban-style city of Ft. Collins, Colo., Tribune reporters found a great many people like Cayce. They are people who are not doing badly themselves, but they are not at all sure that they will be doing as well a few years hence, and they are worried about whether their children ever will enjoy the split-level comfort they established.
These are not the fancy suburbs-Larchmont, Grosse Point, Lake Forest-that the wealthy began to inhabit even before the post-World War II suburban explosion. Nor are they the poor suburbs such as Hempstead, N.Y., or Robbins, Ill.
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These, like most suburbs, are smack dab in the socioeconomic middle and pretty much in the political and ideological middle also. They are home to better-paid blue-collar workers, to middle managers, to cops, teachers, salesmen and proprietors of small businesses.
Not that suburbia is a monolith. In the first place, America has been suburbanizing since right after World War II, and the places that were settled in the 1950s are not like the ones still filling in today.
For all their similarities, the six areas chosen for this account reflect suburbia`s variety.
East Windsor is older, and so are its residents, and its ethnic make-up-many Jews and Italians-reflects the New York City origins of many of them. Moreno Valley as well as Orland Park, Ill., outside Chicago and St. Charles, Mo., near St. Louis are heavily blue collar, inhabited by families who fled the troubles of the nearby cities.
But whereas Orland Park and St. Charles are almost entirely white, Moreno Valley has substantial black and Hispanic populations. Ft. Collins, with a small Hispanic population, is white collar and professional, more of its residents having moved there not to get away from anything, but to get closer to the mountains.
All six have upper-income neighborhoods, but almost none of them could be called rich. Security, not wealth, always has been the point of suburbia, and it is the apparent disintegration of that security that bedevils suburbanites today.
Not that they thought the world would stay the same. ”I grew up in a June Cleaver family, but that`s not the way it is any more,” said Barbara Holton, a 39-year-old mother of three in Orland Park.
Nor was Holton the only one to use the metaphor of ”Leave It To Beaver” or ”Ozzie and Harriet” to explain that they knew things had changed, that suburban reality may be more like the one on ”Roseanne” than the Cleavers.
That`s because suburbanites are aware that what constitutes ”family values” seems to be in flux. But however much they may regret that flux, they seemed not to connect it to presidential politics.
”Jobs, jobs, jobs, that`s the issue in this community,” said Norman King, the city manager of Moreno Valley. ”A lot of people here have lost jobs and even the ones who haven`t see it in their neighbors, they become concerned it could happen to them.”
Even in prosperous Ft. Collins, where unemployment is less than 4 percent and economic growth remains healthy, this insecurity is evident.
”I have a job,” said Terry Tibbetts, a 47-year-old truck driver. ”I`m doing good, but I look around and I see people with master`s degrees lucky to get a minimum wage job.”
It isn`t that depression has come to the suburbs. On weekends the shops along Main Street in St. Charles are full. On weekday afternoons, the mall parking lots along College Street in Ft. Collins are jammed with cars. And every weekday morning and evening, the highways between Moreno Valley and Los Angeles are bumper-to-bumper with commuters, some of whom wake up at 4 a.m. in order to get to work on time.
But if it is not suffering, suburbia is nervous. Some of it, such as Moreno Valley and St. Charles, where aerospace layoffs have increased the unemployment rate, actually suffers from the weak economy. But most suburbanites say they remain prosperous. They just wonder whether they`re going to be able to say that for long.
In general, suburbanites are not in as much trouble as lower-income people in the inner cities or in small towns that are withering away. But perhaps because they thought they had beaten hard times for good, the psychological impact of their new insecurity may be harder for them than for others.
Suburbia has been the place the blue-collar worker moved to after he`d saved enough to buy his own home, the place where country folks escaped the drudgery of the small farm. The rich and venturesome stayed in the city, moving to the lake shore or the park side, or went farther out than the suburbs to multiacred plots near the golf course or the bridle path.
Suburbia has been the mecca for those with no such pretensions, but with the determination to grab, and hold onto, their own comfortable piece of the action.
Now it seems endangered, a situation that presents suburbanites with an unease that is far deeper than just political.
”I see it in the customers eyes,” said Ann-Margaret Hamari, a waitress at the Silver Eagle Diner on Route 33 in East Windsor. ”They try to save money. They want to go out and have fun. But they are worried about the bills and whether they`re going to have a job the following day. It`s not like it used to be.”
Nor is all the concern selfish.
”My worry is that we`re going to become a second-rate country,” said Ray Muiznieks of St. Charles, a salesman for a kitchen remodeling firm who now earns less than half of what he did a few years ago as a salesman for a swimming pool firm that went out of business.
Most suburbanites are not in that kind of fix. But almost everyone seems to know someone who is. One reason Mark Cayce is no longer optimistic is that his employer is in the process of offering early retirement to more than 4,000 workers, something he said never happened before.
In Moreno Valley, Nancy Amaya fears that her administrative job at city hall will be cut because of California`s budget woes, and her husband, Lorenzo, considers himself lucky to be employed as a computer specialist.
”A lot of my friends who worked in aerospace, they got laid off and they can`t get a job anywhere,” she said.
”We`re doing fine,” said a Ft. Collins teacher, who did not want her name used as she stood outside her spacious home. ”But I`m worried about the education of the children, about health-care costs, about whether there are going to be jobs.” She is among those who worry about her own children, one of whom is having a hard time finding work.
All this anxiety has obvious political repercussions this election season. It threatens George Bush`s re-election. But it also threatens Bill Clinton`s appeal. In part because many of them distrust government, in part because they seem wary of everything and everyone, suburban voters are reluctant to complete their disappointment with Bush by committing to Clinton. ”I voted for Bush last time, but I`m afraid to take a chance again,”
said Angie Winters, a sales clerk from Orland Park. ”He hasn`t done a thing for the middle class. There is no middle class now-either you have it or you don`t. But I`m afraid of Clinton, too, because he`s giving everything away.” This distrust of government is common, and a bit ironic. To no small extent, suburbia is government-planned and taxpayer-subsidized. Were it not for the interstate highway system, tax-deductible mortgage interest, state and local incentives for industrial parks and office buildings and a host of other governmental perks, suburbia as it is would not exist.
Despite this, many suburbanites cling to the comforting illusion that they made it on their own. One man in Ft. Collins, who did not want his name used, insisted that government had nothing to do with his town`s prosperity even though he works for the government and even as he was complaining about his neighbors who opposed building another dam on the Poudre River.
”This is a desert,” he said. And so it was, before dams to irrigate the farms were built by the government, the same government that later created a land-grant university and ran Interstate Highway 25 right past the city, ensuring its continued growth and prosperity.
Other suburbanites acknowledge their dependence on government, but insist that they deserve the help because they are hard workers.
Kristen Knutson, a 43-year-old registered nurse who commutes from Moreno Valley to Orange County, said, ”I think a lot of people have the attitude-if it helps me, it`s OK; otherwise get rid of it.”
The country as a whole does not quite have a suburban majority yet. But because suburbanites are more likely than either city dwellers or rural folk to be educated, married, home owners and middle- or upper-income, they are also more likely to vote.
So while the population as a whole may be slightly less than half suburban, it is a good bet that more than half of the 100 million or so people who choose the next president will live in suburbs.
Furthermore, 14 states, including six of the Big 10 (California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Florida and New Jersey) already have suburban majorities. So it would be almost impossible for either candidate to compile an Electoral College majority unless he runs well among the kind of people who drive to work from subdivisions, past shopping malls, to industrial and office parks off the interstate.
And it is in suburbia where most of the swing vote lives. There are slightly more Republicans than Democrats in the suburbs, but mostly there are ticket-splitters. The dependable voters in the country are urban Democrats and rural or small-town Republicans.
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Suburbanites tend to pride themselves on political independence. They espouse (even if they do not always have) ”good government,” meaning little or none of the political patronage that has been associated with big-city Democratic organizations.
But they also reject the provincialism of small-town Republicanism. It must have been a suburbanite who first said, ”I vote the man, not the party,” and suburbanites still are making that point, though today it`s ”the person, not the party.”
It was suburban independents who swung the 1988 election to Bush. These were the voters, fairly conservative on economic policy but moderate-to-liberal on social issues, that Bush was talking to when he promised to veto new taxes but also to improve schools and protect the environment.
But perhaps Bush really won their votes less by what he promised than by what he seemed to represent-continued prosperity. With that prosperity in doubt, so are their votes.
Despite their dissatisfactions, millions of suburbanites will vote for Bush. Philip J. Ohlms, a fifth-generation Republican lawyer in St. Charles, said that ”no one here is excited about George Bush.” But most Republicans will still vote for him.
There isn`t that much enthusiasm about Clinton, either. There is curiosity, hope and a willingness to learn more about him, but little enthusiasm so far.
With his moderate views on welfare and other government spending, his soft-spoken Southern mannner and his generally unthreatening demeanor, Clinton just might ignite some enthusiaism in the suburbs.
But it won`t be easy, and not just because of the Democratic candidate`s own weaknesses.
People who are learning that the place they worked to get to isn`t all that great are not likely to let themselves get too enthusiastic about anything. There are only so many disappointments they can take all at once.