Life in Suburbia essays

Life in Suburbia essays After World War II the concept of life in America began a new. The process of suburbanization began in cities all across the nation. Today the cities of yesteryear are gone and life as we knew it ended. However, people do not want it to end. They still want the American Dream; the house in the suburbs, the good job, the wife, car and 2.4 kids playing in the yard. These people have been the driving force in the division of socioeconomic status, and the division of race in the suburbs. They accomplish this through local governments and the decisions made through them. Though what has been created, by all of this over the years, isn't necessarily bad, but it has hurt the country in ways that we did not expect. When soldiers returned from the war they were greeted with open arms and a new booming economy. It was this booming economy, of service-oriented jobs, that allowed the middle class of people the opportunity to move away from their jobs and separate their work from their home. Also during that time we were still, as a country, practicing racial segregation, which is part of the reason for the racial inequalities in the suburbs today. These new communities, of mostly white nuclear families, were now in need of a council to make the decisions that needed to be made for their area. They didn't want the city to make these decisions for them since they were so far away. Also since most people worked in the city, they wanted to continue with the dream of keeping home and work separate. Therefore they banded together as neighborhoods and communities to make the decisions that affected that area on a daily basis. The benefit of this was that now they had almost total autonomy from the poor and the lower class they so quickly left behind in the city. This is where the socioeconomic division began. The people of the suburbs loved their lives. They lived around the people of the same socioeconomic status and w ...