Learning from Tiny Tower: Mobile Gaming and the Post-Industrial Society

Ever since Wii came along and swept everyone from me to my seventy year old retired Teamster uncle into the world of gaming, I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that video games have become a tool by which our future robot overlords are retraining us to perform various tasks after the big takeover.[1] Big Brain Academy, in particular, reminded me of those later scenes in 1984, when the Party had smashed every bone in Winston’s hands and he had to learn to write again using a big pencil, like a kindergartener. 4423… 3244. Do-re-mi…mi-re-do. Memorize the faces and match the frog to the dog. When a game tells me to take an order on the phone and then tell it back to the game – “calzone, risotto, and a soda, to go please!” – I begin to wonder. Having worked in restaurants before, I can safely say that taking someone’s order on the phone is an experience I would never have expected to repeat for fun. How far are we, really, from learning to change a robot’s diaper?

Mobile gaming introduces a whole new wrinkle to this dystopian scenario, and oddly enough games like Angry Birds and Tiny Tower bring with them an agenda that is much more ideological and allegorical than physical. I say oddly because these apps appear to be cheap, fleeting, and even disposable – who would have thought a 99 cent game that’s all about throwing birds at pigs would have been the blockbuster cultural production of the last year or so, not a movie that cost $100 million to make and $12 to see? Yet these games have a message and they’re on a mission. If the Wii is teaching us the cognitive and tactile skills to function better within a human-computer interface, then games like Tiny Tower are providing a complete social, ethical, and emotional blueprint for how a future cybernetic market society will work.

Welcome to the reeducation camp. Cost of admission is free, but you can upgrade to a better bunker for 99 cents.

I was first introduced to Tiny Tower earlier today, and I feel comfortable writing a neo-Marxist exegesis of it after a few hours. I resisted the iPhone for a long time – longer than I resisted the iPod but not as long as I held off getting any kind of cell phone in my younger, stronger, more idealistic days. Getting the iPhone opened the door to apps, which has finally led to mobile gaming. I have always despised Scrabble and yet I find myself screaming at the friend sitting next to me for scoring a preposterous number of points with the equally preposterous word “Jee.”

In any case, Tiny Tower is its own strange little world, like any good game. The game consists of building one floor after another of a highrise building, and populating it with stores, restaurants, apartments, and people. The player accumulates money over time from sales and rent to spend building another floor and stocking the stores; one can also use real world money to buy extra money in the game to speed things along (a “hurry” gets things done faster, but at a price), although it’s entirely possible (and wise) to play the game without spending any actual cash. Time is the key element, along with (secondarily) complying with the game’s demands, such as finding various tenants when a package or a guest arrives for them.

Real-life bitizens in their natural habitat

The strangest thing about the game is the role of the player. My friends first explained it to me as “Sim City meets Sim City,” which is true up to a point – the player is the planner/developer/mayor/God who builds a world, although the latitude of choice in Tiny Tower is far more constricted. (One can choose whether to put a retail outlet or dining establishment on a floor, but they don’t decide whether it’s a coffee shop or a women’s clothing store.) The player is the owner of everything; the Tiny Tower is a giant mill village without the mill, where the potential tenants show up, move in, and get a job in one of the restaurants or shops in the tower. My first tenant, G. Simmons (if I were a landlord, I think I would want some pretty good references before I let Gene Simmons move into my property), was rapidly hired in the coffeeshop right above the “Plainlake Apartments” that occupied my first floor. Talk about selling your soul to the company store.

And what a company store it is. Who lives in this 21st century, mobile, e-mill village, and what do they do there? What does the economy of Tiny Tower look like? There are only five options for a new floor – retail, food, service, entertainment, and creative. This is a fine image of the post-industrial information economy. There are photo studios, comedy clubs, coffee shops, apartments – in other words, we have a handful of industries that cater to people’s needs for shopping, dining, and other services, plus the all-important “creative class” of artists, graphic designers, musicians, and the like. It is a video game vision of the live-work-play environment that New Urbanist intellectuals have championed and developers have marketed to arty bohos and Trader Joe-jos since the 1990s.

Tiny Tower approaches this new economy of service and entertainment in some strange ways. A few of the classifications raise eyebrows; for instance, a “soda brewery” clearly appears to be a family-friendly version of a microbrewery, with little vats and kegs. One would expect a brewery to be categorized as food or service or even manufacturing, but it is “creative.” So is a photo studio. Meanwhile, a comedy club is “recreation.” In any case, the overall picture is one of a dense urban landscape of hip consumerism: sushi bars, glass studios, arcades, bookstores, and the all-important foundational element, the coffeeshop. The comedy club sells “LOLs,” “LMAOs” and “ROFLs,” and the tower's residents post about the minutiae of their little lives on a social network called Bitbook. “Someone stole my rug,” resident Clayton Wood said earlier today.[2] “It really tied the room together.” One “bitizen” offers bagpipe, tuba and drum lessons while another tries to generate interest in starting a band by announcing his skill with the accordion. The bitizens are defined both by their work and what they consume.  The player gets extra points for matching a worker to his or her "dream job," and the word bubbles above the bitizens' heads are always filled with the products they want to buy.

Even your imaginary friends are obsessed with The Big Lebowski and Justin Bieber

Notably, some among these shopping, gossiping bitizens are “VIPs,” who possess greater financial resources and cultural influence. When they arrive on the scene, they can buy out the entire stock of any store they visit or cause it to have many more customers.  When they attend a shop, suddenly many more bitizens want to go there. They resemble those influential consumers, coveted by marketers and advertisers, who possess the income and prestige to drive trends by their shopping choices. In Tiny Tower, every industry may be created equal, but some consumers are more equal than others.

Beyond sushi, shoes, and music, there are two other industries that are essential to Tiny Tower – obvious even, to the point of being “hidden in plain view.” Construction and real estate can be added to the post-industrial menu of economic options in the game, but with a profound and subtle difference. Construction is absolutely necessary for the game to function, and when each new floor is built a crew of men in orange jumpsuits and hard hats show up to do the work. (Each floor is more expensive than the last, for reasons of cost as well as the fact that the player should have more money from rent and sales to spend as the building rises.) These characters are ubiquitous but silent – they have no needs, no deliveries, no consumption, and they certainly don’t live in the tower. They recall the Doozers in Fraggle Rock, who were always there working but were still separate and alienated from Fraggle society.

More welcome on Tiny Tower than Laugh-In

The other essential industry is real estate – the role of the player, who has all the agency that peripheral yet necessary characters like the construction workers lack. The barristas and artists who pay the rent, work in the businesses, and consume the goods are all pawns of the owner, who is visually absent, not represented by an avatar or icon, yet omnipresent in the form of the person who is playing the game. Not a bad schema for the finance-insurance-real-estate (FIRE) economy of the post-industrial future, right?

Mo money, mo problems

Time, again, is literally money in Tiny Tower, further underlining the importance of finance. By doing good deeds, complying with the game’s demands, and making wise choices about inventory and management, the player can accumulate more money faster, but the game still fundamentally depends on a constant flow of new money to make the process of continual expansion work. No one knows where the money comes from, and it doesn’t matter at all. (Presumably, the stream of cash comes from a mutual fund or rent from other Tiny Towers, in tiny cities in other tiny states. Maybe it is my TIAA-CREF income from investment in Minnesota’s Mall of America.) The point of the game is, of course, accumulation – more floors, more business, more people. There are always more people who show up looking for housing and work. If Tiny Tower has an underlying economic theory, it is one of continual growth – a demand-side policy with a ready supply of easy money, always satisfying new and different needs, but primarily those of residence and leisure. Manufacturing is generally absent, except to the extent that new housing and new space are manufactured; the working class is present only in the form of the old-line “hard hats” who build floors and the new working class of the coffeeshop.

From a media studies perspective, there were things about the game that were hard for me to understand at first. Unlike the Sim line of games, Tiny Tower is far more limited in the player’s freedom to be creative. One does not get to name the characters or the retail establishments, for instance. And in terms of “play,” the dynamic is hard to understand – there are rules and procedures, of course, like any game, but who is one playing with or against? You can see friends’ towers and compare to see what they are getting and how high they’ve built, but there is no direct interaction between towers as far as I can tell. Much of the game seems to be simply pushing buttons and doing what the computer asks you to do—take this person to the third floor, restock the coffeeshop, and so forth. When does nagging end and gaming begin?

There are aspects of Tiny Tower and its peers that are truly innovative, though. For example, mobile games have both more and less “immediacy” (a favorite media studies term) than traditional games, whether one compares them to Solitaire or Trivial Pursuit or Super Mario Bros. They do not require one or two or three people to be together in the same time and space to play a game, and they are of no particular or constant duration. The game is always with you when you have your phone, and can be played on impulse and at one’s convenience, rather like the old, cumbersome practice of playing a chess game from afar and mailing one’s moves to a distant opponent. The games allow and even encourage a light degree of engagement over a long period of time, like the broad web of “thin” or “weak” ties that sociologists and other scholars have discerned in social networking sites. In fact, because the player has to wait for new floors to be built (which can take hours), inventories to be restocked (minutes), and even for new visitors to arrive (seconds), the game almost requires a sporadic, elongated form of play that fits as well into an hour of continued activity as it does into the occasional free moment.

Ironically, I instantly saw Tiny Tower as a mini-capitalist utopia – the high-tech, post-industrial mill village – while my friend Derek saw it as basically communistic. Despite the game’s emphasis on constant consumption and control by the landlord/boss, he has a point. Tiny Tower is a world where everyone who shows up can get an apartment, where everyone can get a job, and a steady flow of resources allow infinite catering to people’s needs – a sort of Soviet tower of babel, reaching to the Heavens, where the boss (substitute “the state”) assigns everyone a job and decides what gets built. The world exists in a bubble where it is impossible to know where the people or the money come from, but it is a world of infinite security and satisfaction, where no one but the construction workers and the occasional delivery person gets their hands all that dirty. (Maybe they live in Shanty Towers or Fawlty Towers – who knows?) Is this the world that the robots will be providing for us? And if it is, will we be the construction workers or the “creatives”? You can be sure we won’t be the landlord.

Alex Sayf Cummings

[1] My wife and I were already considering this issue when we bought a Roomba several years back. We felt like we ought to take advantage of the opportunity to make friends and get on good terms with the robots while there was still time.

[2] It’s also hard not to notice that almost all the bitizens have very Anglo names (Gardner, Garrett, Wheeler, Wilson), while the only “ethnic” names are Spanish (Alvarez). No Changs or Patels or Muhammads seem to be living or working in Tiny Tower.


Suggestions for Further Reading

Jigar Shah, "Angry Birds and Our Continued Flailing Attempts at Energy Innovation"

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals

Elizabeth Blackmar, "Of REITS and Rights: Absentee Ownership in the Periphery"

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form

Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, The New Media Reader

Tom Jacobs, "Scholars and the Big Lebowski: Deconstructing the Dude"

SoCal Classic: Early Conservative Opposition to Public Housing

One of the “magical” things about California is the sheer diversity of people and opinions that abound throughout the state. Even its most conservative bastions, like San Diego, have pockets of liberalism. Despite a throbbing right-wing heart beat, San Diego has a vibrant and prominent gay community. With that said, Southern California’s brand of conservatism puts others to shame. Equal parts John Birch Society fever dream and Barry Goldwater eroticism, mid twentieth century Orange County conservatism staunchly opposed liberal corruption and creeping socialist influence, instead promoting free market policies and New Right rhetoric that embraced technological innovation but privileged traditional domesticities. Lisa McGirr’s now landmark Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right captures the mid-century SoCal conservatives at the height of their inner Goldwater. 

That’s not to say LA and San Diego didn’t have their own pitchfork wielding right wingers. Published in 1953, The Rose Hills Report: A Case Study of Public Housing declared its own conservative vision. A joint effort of the Monterey Woods Improvement, Montecito Hills Improvement, and the Huntington Villa Property Owners Associations, the report announced from the outset that “Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Freedom.” Duh. You can imagine where it goes from there. There’s aggrieved property owners, creeping socialism (and “his brother Communism”), “totalitarian” bureaucrats, and, yes, taxes. Certainly, if one is to believe neo noir classics like Denzel Washington’s Devil in a Blue Dress or the Russell Crowe-Guy Pearce vehicle LA Confidential, mid-century Los Angeles oozed sexual intrigue, corruption, and vice. The Rose Hills Report doesn’t quite reach such levels of fictive genius but its authors are definitely writing fiction. 

To read the full report, click here.

Hefner, Hughes, and Rogen: Playboy and the Origins of the 21st Century Hipster

It's no exaggeration to say that having large numbers of single young men and women living independently, while also having enough disposable income to avoid ever messing up their kitchens, is something entirely new in human experience. Yes, at other points in Western history young people have waited well into their 20s to marry, and yes, office girls and bachelor lawyers have been working and finding amusement in cities for more than a century. But their numbers and their money supply were always relatively small. Today's pre-adults are a different matter. They are a major demographic event.

- Kay Hymowitz

On first blush, Kay Hymowitz seems to be talking about the rise of the yuppie and its Brooklyn cousin, the hipster. (Is there a difference anymore?) This pack of pre-adults consists of youngish people, presumably educated, who spend the disposable income they might otherwise drop on diapers or a mortgage to do whatever suits them. In fact, though, she is ranting in the Wall Street Journal about young men who refuse to grow up. Untethered to a wife and children, these strays scrounge around dorm rooms, leaving only to export this way of life to their parents’ homes and eventually their own apartments, all while blithely ignoring demands to grow up. The portrayal of the shiftless young man has only grown more prominent in the grand sweep of recent history, from pitched battles over male irresponsibility on Jerry Springer to the rise of Judd Apatow’s empire. Writers turn a pretty penny dishing advice to frustrated women while Apatow rolls out one blockbuster after another about arrested development, portraying the childlike man as a lovable hero. 

But where did this character come from? When did pop culture begin to promote the childless, free-spirited, self-indulgent adult as a cultural ideal? The dream of remaining young and unsullied by maturity is an old one, running from the lost innocence of creation myths through a long cultural tradition of imps, elves, and hobbits, all the way down to naïve Candide and Peter Pan, the lovable permanent child. But the more recent update is deeply tied to consumerism; its origins are largely male-oriented in nature, but it is far from a purely male phenomenon, despite what pundits in the grip of traditional notions about gender, marriage, and parenthood might suggest. The journey of the yuppie/hipster/slacker begins in Chicago, where Hugh Hefner founded Playboy in 1952. Long before the Playboy Mansion moved male fantasy out to the exurbs, Hefner situated his prototypical sophisticate in a hip urban bachelor pad.

The playboy of the 1950s was, in part, a reaction to the so-called domestication of the American male. Shoved into a “gray flannel suit” and boxed in a suburban ranch house world of cribs and Bundt cakes, middle class men yearned for a sense of freedom from the prosaic concerns of child-rearing and breadwinning, especially when their bread was won in a sterile corporate office in the city or a suburban office park. Hugh Hefner’s keen insight was to channel the psychic poverty of suburban manhood into a vision of suave, masculine, uninhibited freedom, defined by discerning taste and consumption of the better things in life – sophisticated drinks, jazz, the hip urban bachelor pad. As historian Elizabeth Fraterrigo has argued, the lifestyle promoted in Playboy was a sort of “answer to suburbia.” At the same time as the magazine promoted the pursuit of individual desires and redeemed the city as a place to live amid the rush to the suburbs, it also set up a sort of mirror image of male domesticity. Interior decorating might seem like a feminine domain in the suburbs, but Playboy actually recast the same activity in acceptably masculine terms. The sophisticated bachelor would seek to emulate Hefner by decking out his apartment in the sleek, high-tech, modernist style depicted in the magazine’s pages. Gone were colors, soft edges, floral prints, and in their place one found “a neutral palette and striking textural contrasts from its cork tile floor, to the stone fireplace heath, to an exposed brick wall” – a hallmark of today’s hip “loft” living, and a fine place for “a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex,” as Playboy said in its first issue.

Clearly, Hefner and his writers were laying out the contours of the single or childless life that many educated, affluent people are embracing in the twenty-first century. The possibility of pursuing one’s discerning consumer taste without responsibility to children or a broader community was pioneered as a fantasy for the men who read Playboy, yet it has mutated into a choice available to anyone who wants to live in a city, dine on Burmese-Mexican fusion, and invite a friend or lover over to discuss The Wire over drinks. (Note the exposed brick in the background.) Once the province of men, the ideal of affluent individualism has been at least partly translated into an option open to women through the sitcom alchemy of Seinfeld and Sex and the City.

Yet this Eden of adulthood without domesticity continues to have a peculiarly male dimension to it, which suggests a deeper tie to the original Playboy idea of unfettered selfishness. In a recent diatribe against prolonged adolescence in men, Kay Hymowitz cited Playboy as the proving ground for a “refusal” of responsibility. “The arrival of Playboy in the 1950s seemed like the ultimate protest against male domestication; think of the refusal implied by the magazine's title alone,” Hymowitz recently said in the Wall Street Journal. “In his disregard for domestic life, the playboy was prologue for today's pre-adult male. Unlike the playboy with his jazz and art-filled pad, however, our boy rebel is a creature of the animal house.” The philosopher-quoting, gin-guzzling bachelor of the 1950s had unwittingly fathered the video-game-addicted schlubs who refuse to grow up in movies like Knocked-Up and Pineapple Express.

In search of adulthood

Growing up, it seems, means getting married and having children – along with, presumably, holding down a mortgage and a job. Without this marker of adulthood, the man drifts further from view and only the manchild remains. Curiously, Hymowitz claims that the transition to adulthood was traditionally clearer for women than men, and has only gotten murkier for the guys in recent years. “It’s been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test,” she writes. (Anthropologists would likely quibble with so broad a claim.) “They needed to demonstrate courage, physical maturity, or mastery of the necessary skills.” This argument seems deeply wedded to long-standing claims that men in modern society have had to compensate for the loss of their role as guarantors of physical security (fighting, shooting, performing manual labor) by indulging in a wide array of macho substitutes: playing with guns, buying an SUV, an undue obsession with gadgets and lawncare. Such pop psychological arguments have grown old and stale without losing their ability to hold sway over social critics (as well as the marketers and publishers who have so fiendishly exploited perceptions of male inadequacy).

Asian Ballers, Trailer Trash and Sissy Rap: The Best of SASA

The following are among the most thought-provoking papers from last week's Southern American Studies Association conference at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Stanley Thangaraj, "Competing Masculinities: Sport and Ethnic Minorities in Atlanta,” Department of Sociology, Vanderbilt University


In this intriguing paper, Stanley Thangaraj adds to the growing literature on the importance of leisure space in providing a means for urban and national membership. Focusing on the role of Asian only basketball leagues in and around Atlanta, Georgia, Thangaraj explores the importance of sport in creating alternative masculinities, forging community formation, and providing a means to citizenship for South Asian American men. Pushing back against tropes of perpetual foreignness ascribed to South Asian American born citizens since the Banned Zone immigration Act of 1917, the Thind ruling in 1923 and the resurgence of anti-South Asian racism in the post 9/11 period, basketball leagues provide a site for community formation. Linking Sihks, Pakistanis, and Indians of numerous regions, the Asian Ballers League enabled these groups to express a form of “American” masculinity that negates traditional asexuality and passiveness conflated with South Asian Americans, while participating in a uniquely American activity. Thangaraj accounts for class differences arising from those born after the 1965 Immigration Act and those arriving in the wake of the 1980 Family Reunification Act, with newer South Asian Americans suffering a notable lack of social and economic capital in comparison with their 1965 antecedents. Though such leagues craft a sort of pan-ethnic identity, Thangaraj notes that such developments were not without their pitfalls as Blacks remain outside the traditional purview of such leagues and often racialized when present within them. Thangaraj’s research offers an intricate and fascinating investigation into how South Asian Americans see themselves, their relationship to each other, and their ties to other ethnic groups, notably Latinos and Blacks. A post doctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University, Dr. Thangaraj can be contacted at Stanley.i.thangaraj@vanderbilt.edu.

 

Matt Miller, “Millennium Sissy: The Gay Male Rappers of New Orleans," Institute of Liberal Arts, Emory University


Though segments of the rap community have long been accused of homophobia and misogyny, new developments in the New Orleans rap scene suggest a means to transcend such problematic constructs. Focusing on the “sissy" rappers' appropriation of New Orleans “Bounce,” Matt Miller cleverly illustrates the openly gay and transgressive nature of new regional rap icons like Katey Red and Big Freedia. Adopting a “Butch Queen” rather than “Drag Queen” persona, Katey Red and others exude pride in their sexuality, dismissing men who engage in similar homosexual acts but deny them publicly. Blunt, joyous, and sexual, sissy rappers embrace the supra localism of New Orleans bounce, celebrating local housing projects, block parties, and other Big Easy idiosyncrasies. Careful not to overplay the freedom such individuals enjoy, Miller points out that in many cases the deeply based place-based identities of these rappers and bounce itself, has enabled them in many ways to transcend homophobia so ingrained in American culture. Moreover, as Miller suggests, they remain perfectly situated to appeal to wider audiences of white middle class audiences, notably “hipsters” and bohemians looking to challenge traditional domesticities and gender roles. Finally, consisting of primarily working class black men, sissy rappers illustrate the powerful influence of grassroots cultural movements that build support through block parties, local clubs, and community events to change broader perceptions. Miller’s work reminds us that agency can start from the most unlikely places and from the most discriminated against groups to create something new, viable, and potentially revolutionary. 


See a clip from Miller's documentary about the bounce music scene, Ya Heard Me, here.

Eve Errickson, "The Mobile Home Park: A One Time Design Revolution Reconsidered as Vernacular Architecture and Artifact of Legal Inconvenience," National Trust for Historic Preservation, Washington DC


Eve Errickson traces the mobile home’s origins as a form of luxury travel to its designation as a low-income shelter for marginalized populations in this insightful presentation. Though adopted from upper class ideas of transportation, the post-war housing crisis led to predictions that the mobile home served as a partial solution to future housing problems. Affordable, mobile, and simple, many believed pre-fabricated mobile homes served as a model for planners and municipalities. Yet, plagued by lack of regulation and often flimsy design models, mobile homes spiked in popularity several times from the 1950s to the 1970s to the 1990s even as their value and social capital continued to decline. Still, they remain a consistent presence among southern communities. Errickson noted that future investigations into why these forms of shelter have been labeled the purview of white trash need to be excavated, as mobile home dwellers remain one of the few social groups that people find acceptable to denigrate publicly. 

Ryan Reft

Getting to the Mountaintop: The Suburban Dreams of African Americans

In January of 2000, Ice Cube released his second movie in the infamous Friday trilogy, Next Friday. The plot loosely revolved around relocating Ice Cube to a suburban environment in order to escape his nemesis Debo, who had just escaped from a Los Angeles correctional facility. Though not as original, funny, or entertaining as its predecessor (New York Times critic Lawrence Van Gelder summarized a few of his objections early in the review, “it is notable chiefly for feeding a stereotype of blacks as shiftless layabouts interested mainly in recreational drugs and irresponsible sex"), Next Friday provided a pop culture visual for a distinct national metropolitan reality, Black suburbanization.

While Kenneth Jackson’s seminal work, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985) was not the first to examine the suburbs, Jackson’s insights crystallized a field of scholarship on suburban history. Jackson detailed the various motivations that drove suburban growth from the understandable – better sanitation, more space -- to the egregious – race and class driven prejudices. Additionally, Jackson clearly documented the federal government’s role in establishing segregated suburban communities. Two years prior, in Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940 – 1960, Arnold Hirsch unveiled Chicago’s dim history regarding segregation, violence, and race based urban renewal. Hirsch shined a light on the machinations of Chicago’s business elites, working class white ethnics, and municipal government. Through urban renewal efforts, local violence, and municipal housing policy, the great Midwestern metropolis successfully created one of the most segregated urban populations in American history. Like Jackson, Hirsch’s observations influenced writers for the next three decades. Each work remains relevant and vital to practitioners of urban history. Would Sugrue have written Origins of the Urban Crisis without Hirsch and Jackson? Doubtful.

Yet for all the credit Hirsch, Jackson, Sugrue, and others deserve, in each of these works, despite being central to events, Blacks occupy secondary roles in the narrative. Readers come to know quite well, the feelings, beliefs, and prejudices of whites, but less about Black motivations, understandings, and biases. Moreover, the traditional suburban history narrative often focuses on white resistance to black suburbanization, thus, implying that Blacks remain trapped in declining urban areas and foreign to the suburban world. As San Diego State historian Andrew Wiese points out “historians have done a better job excluding African Americans from the suburbs than even their white suburbanites.” (5)

In order to eliminate this blind spot, the past fifteen years have witnessed increased attention by social scientists and historians to this once accepted line of conventional wisdom. Sociologist Mary Pattillo-McCoy’s Black Pickett Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class (1999) serves as one example. Pattillo-McCoy’s ethnographic study of Chicago’s South Side middle class black community, Groveland pushes back against the pervasive belief that middle class blacks abandoned their economic inferiors by relocating to the suburbs. In Black Picket Fences, Pattillo-McCoy reveals a prosperous Black middle class that struggles to keep their community from tipping point as their spatial proximity to lower income areas places them at permanent risk for the very dangers their white middle class counterparts fear: lower property values, increased crime, and community dissolution. Furthermore, Pattillo-McCoy points out that many Black middle class families have extended relations that have not been able to reach middle class status. Some of these relatives remain in working class and lower income urban neighborhoods, thus, subject to the kind of forces –- drugs, crime, little medical care -- that undermine economic and social mobility. This reality makes Blacks more aware of and sensitive to (emotionally and economically) the possibility of financial decline. Clearly, such circumstances affect how Blacks view middle class status and homeownership, what it means more broadly, and even how homes are valued.

A recent New York Times article provides a clear example of Pattillo-McCoy’s argument. Though Queens remains one of the most diverse and transient of New York’s five boroughs, East Elmhurst Queens has been long established as a primarily urban Black middle class enclave. Bucking the trend of constant movement, journalist Joseph Burger outlines the neighborhood’s unique permanency. Unlike New York’s countless other constantly rotating neighborhood populations, “residents of an East Elmhurst census tract stay in their homes the longest of residents of any of the more than 2,000 census tracts in New York City, according to an examination of recently released data from Census Bureau surveys from 2005 to 2009. The median move-in date for homeowners there is 1974 — more than 36 years ago.” Any New Yorker worth his or her salt know this is rarity in the Big Apple. Located near LaGuardia airport and consisting of “unfussy” two level homes, many of East Elmhurst’s early arrivals were municipal employees – train drivers and park attendants- who in Burger’s words, stitched “together down payments for their first houses — an opportunity that drew them to the neighborhood in the first place.” Though the experience of racial discrimination bonded many in the community together, as Burger illustrates much of the neighborhood promotes a vision that sounds reminiscent of traditional middle class homeowners. Making direct reference to a homeowner identity, Burger writes, “most residents, though, say they are devoted to the neighborhood for the same reasons that any homeowner might cite. They relish the pleasures of a grassy backyard, the quiet of not having neighbors piled on floors above and the views of the Manhattan skyline.” Property values remain important as well. Local resident and Queens Borough President Helen M. Marshall speaking to Burger acknowledged this. Marshall surmised that long time residents “ took their last dollars to buy their house and they want to protect that house and they want their neighbors to do the same.” Solid local schools and an active civic life (numerous political organizations, homeowner associations and the like remain active in East Elmhurst) also serve as important draws. Yet in both Burger and Pattillo-McCoy’s examples, such Black communities remain located within city limits. So what about the suburbs?

Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (2004) by the aforementioned Wiese helps to answer this question. Contrary to popular beliefs, Blacks, like other groups, moved to suburbs even in the early decades of the twentieth century. According to Wiese, during the early decades of Great Migration (1910-1930) hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved North and West with one in six migrants destined for northern cities settled in a suburb. Southern cities further illustrated this tendency as Blacks moved to “fringe” areas that though lacking public utilities, sanitation systems, and the like, provided a rough suburban existence. As the twentieth century progressed so to did Black suburbanization. By the 1960s, 2.5 million African Americans could call themselves suburbanites. This fails to include the “millions of others” Weisse argues that resided in the previously mentioned fringe areas.

Unlike in the postwar period, in the century’s early decades, working class blacks established suburban communities. Wiese divides them into two categories, each reflecting occupational realities: industrial and domestic service suburbs. Occupational differences resulted in sharply gendered suburbanization. Industrial suburbs featured majority male populations while the opposite was true of domestic service communities. This in turn affected leisure, local environment, work, migration, and support/kinship networks. For example, industrial suburbs offered Black women few employment opportunities, thus many, like white ethnics in the nation’s cities, took on lodgers. In contrast, Black men in domestic suburbs struggled to find work. The physical environment differed as well. Domestic service suburbs often located themselves in proximity to leafy affluent white communities while their industrial counterparts frequently featured rougher conditions as factories lacked the benefits of middle and upper class white neighborhoods. Predictably, the type of work breadwinner’s engaged in differed as well. Factory employment dominated industrial enclaves such as Detroit’s River Rouge while domestic service provided economic sustenance in places like Evanston, Illinois.

Dutifully, Wiese recounts the rise of zoning laws, racial covenants, and other forms of discrimination that arose in response to the Great Migration. Such efforts affected Black and white conceptions of space. For whites, the purchase of a suburban residence carried with it “a concept of space in which racial segregation and white superiority were taken for granted.” However, Wiese also notes the complexity of class issues. Here, Places of Their Own appears reminiscent of Becky Nicolaides’ My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920 – 1965. In My Blue Heaven, Nicolaides explores how class affected the manner in which housing was judged. One fundamental difference between white working class suburbs and their middle or upper class counterparts lay in how homes are valued. As Nicolaides points out, many working class suburbs placed value in the land use or productivity of their home rather than its worth as a commodity in speculative real estate markets. Predominantly wage earning, most of South Gate’s early citizenry constructed their own homesteads while utilizing backyard gardens or domestic industries to make ends meet. Wiese suggests that African Americans held similar though not necessarily identical viewpoints as race did intervene as did regionalism; “Looking at these aspirations more carefully reveals the outlines of a working class suburban vision rooted in settlers’ experiences in the South as well as their expectations for life in urban areas.” (84) None the less, across racial and ethnic lines, working class suburbanites utilized domestic production as a central part of their existence. Moreover, as with white counterparts, many Blacks who moved to suburban areas expressed discontent with city conditions. Additionally, the nostalgia induced by environments reminiscent of southern or rural childhoods proved a powerful draw for Blacks.

Black suburbanization occurred for economic and political reasons. Though some in the black community reached middle class status in the postwar era they could not fully share in the sensibilities and social formations of their white counterparts. Discrimination made Black social mobility, visibly represented by a home in the suburbs, a political act. In this context, not only does Wiese reevaluate African American homeownership but also the role and beliefs of Black real estate agents. This insight matters.

Often, the actions of both white and black real estate brokers accelerated the racial transition of neighborhoods. The traditional narrative follows that once a Black family moves in, agents begin pressuring white families to sell before property values drop further, often at prices that favored the agent. The agent then resells the house to a black family at a higher price. Numerous historians have documented how “blockbusting” as it is known wreaked havoc on race relations contributing to hostilities expressed by working class and white ethnics, who saw Black encroachment as a threat to the investment they had made in their home. The fact that historically working class families have held fewer diversified financial investments meant that any threat to housing values punished these families more than their middle or upper middle class counterparts. Therefore, in the 1940s and 1950s, due in part to this increased economic vulnerability, working class whites resorted to physical, symbolic, and emotional violence. Like others before him, Wiese remains critical of “blockbusting”, but his views on Black real estate brokers mitigate his argument as will be addressed momentarily.

Traditional civil rights era suburban integration narratives feature middle class black families. Wiese acknowledges this development pointing out that “most pioneers were members of an economic and professional elite, well educated and experienced with white institutions and integrated settings.” (Wiese, 13) One of the more insightful aspects of Places of Their Own lay in Wiese’s ability to illustrate the connection between this burgeoning black middle class and its working class antecedents that first established suburban footholds in the prewar period. Crediting Black pioneers for their efforts, Wiese also discusses the importance of the Black Press and Black real estate brokers in creating avenues for Black suburbanization. The press encouraged readers to conflate housing choice with basic civil rights, while reporting redlining, restrictive covenants, and private sector discrimination.

More surprisingly, Wiese explores the role of the Black real estate industry with a complexity not often seen. As discussed, real estate brokers, Black and white, emerge for many writers as, if not immoral characters in suburbanization, amoral entrepreneurs. Wiese urges readers to rethink such formulations or at least to consider them in greater depth. According to Wiese, Black real estate agents openly advertised their efforts to integrate communities. When viewed from this perspective, bringing racial transition to a community served as a “source of special pride in Realists’ efforts to expand the African American housing market.” (Wiese, 133) Black brokers saw “race progress” as a “class responsibility”. Of course, the question follows, how much of this was about racial progress and how much was an advertising ploy? Ultimately, Black brokers balanced two central motivations that need not be mutually exclusive: integration and profit. In fact, judging from the work of Wiese and others, it just so happened that the two could co-exist. Considering the rise of advocacy consumerism from the GAP to Starbucks, those modern observers wanting to condemn Black brokers, blaming them for exploiting white fears and black desperation, might want to pause and think about if buying free trade coffee is all that different. In this context, does the ability to profit or somehow financially benefit undermine the legitimacy of such acts? The odd intertwining of capitalism and advocacy/social justice raises as many question as it answers, however, Wiese’s argument serves as a provocative example of this juxtaposition.

By the 1960s and 1970s, the growing Black middle class increasingly took on suburbanization as a political statement, yet many of their reasons buying a home in the suburbs mirrored those of whites: better schools, improved social opportunities, and superior housing. Thus, through Oak Park, Illinois’s Wheeler family, black suburbanites of the period acknowledged the importance of place: “The family recognized implicitly that location was linked to inequality, that some areas, all of them reserved for whites, routinely produced the kinds of social success that they envision for their children. Like other middle class families, they wanted access to these advantages.” (242) If the Wheelers chose to move to Oak Park, they represent one form of Black suburbanization in the 1970s. Spillover represents another. Though Wiese examines East Cleveland’s difficulties through the 1970s and 80s, his example encapsulates a modern day suburban dilemma: the “spillover” of inner city residents into inner ring suburbs. “Inner ring suburbanization” occurred in metropolitan regions with smaller city cores such as St. Louis, Washington D.C. or Newark, N.J. Growing incomes, continued migration form the South, and the destruction of urban housing, most often through renewal projects, resulted in Black neighborhoods expanding into suburbs closest to the city core. Recent housing innovations like the Low Income Housing Tax Credit and HOPE VI have accelerated this process as public housing nationwide has been transformed into mixed income housing featuring both affordable homes and those at market rates. While the impact of these policies remains under debate, research has shown that many former public housing residents have moved to inner ring suburbs, though the results as some writers have pointed out remain at best unclear and in some circumstances deleterious.

One of the difficulties with summarizing Black suburbanization remains the unique way in which it manifests itself in each metropolitan region. Wiese delineates between northern and southern variants pointing out that southern Black suburbanization illustrates some clear differences from its partners to the north. For example, from 1940 – 1960, though federal policies, economic changes, infrastructural development, urban renewal and local annexation by municipalities led to a decentralization of cities nationally, this proved especially true in the South. As Wiese notes, the southern Black middle class had long established a suburban existence in the fringe or expanding areas of cities. This meant some existed within city limits and others just outside. However, with annexation many more found themselves a part of the growing municipalities they abutted. Moreover, though we often think of the single family home as the epitome of the suburban lifestyle, multi family housing emerged as a common means for southern Black suburbanization. Exploiting these forms of housing, Blacks “participated to a greater extent in the decentralization of southern cities than in any other region of the country,” writes Wiese. (165) Simultaneously, many African Americans in the region developed clear ambivalence about issues of integration choosing to focus on the pragmatic or “what was possible within the existing racial system.” (165) To many southern Blacks, undermining segregation could be achieved not through integration but rather housing equality, as Wiese explains that this meant “new housing, expanded homeownership, and a residential landscape common to middle class suburbs nationwide -- and they believed they could achieve it on a separate basis.” (166) Wiese’s insight helps to explain the archipelago of racially distinct, Black and white, suburban enclaves surrounding Atlanta and other prominent southern cities.

As Wiese approaches the last decades of the 20th century, he notes a peculiar development. Though poverty rates in Black neighborhoods fluctuated around 50% and crime rates rose while social capital declined, at the same time arose a wealthier and more prominent Black middle class. As of 1998, 33% of Black households exceeded the national median of $35,000. The linked fate that had long bound working class and poor Blacks with their better off peers, though still present, faded. Matthew Lassiter illustrated this tendency in The Silent Majority when he noted the response of middle class blacks to the busing efforts of Charlotte, N.C. Some middle class Blacks have openly protested busing for their children as one resident explained, “if I wanted my children to attend school with kids from the projects, I’d have moved next to one.” (Lassiter, 218)

In on the joke?

Nor has this necessarily led to greater integration. Writing in the March 2008 issue of Urban Affairs Review (Vol. 43/No.4), Mary J. Fischer employs the work of Wiese and others to explore how Black suburbanization has affected integration rates. In “Shifting Geographies: Examining the Role of Suburbanization in Black’s Declining Segregation,” Fischer identifies changes in racial attitudes, growth of a Black middle class, regional population shifts, and rising levels of metropolitan ethnic and racial diversity as the main four factors accounting for declining segregation. Fischer argues that Black suburbanization should be added to this list. While Blacks remain underrepresented in suburban areas, when they do achieve suburban status, these communities often exhibit lower rates of segregation when compared to Blacks living in the inner city. Of course, segregation levels remain significant as Fischer points out, “Blacks who have made the leap to suburban living still experience much higher levels of segregation than do other groups …” (Fischer, 478) As well, among minority groups, Blacks remain at the bottom of the housing hierarchy meaning Asians and Latinos often reside in greater spatial proximity to whites. “Differential patterns of segregation by racial/ethnic group, whereby Blacks are the most segregated from Whites and Asians are the least segregated, provide some evidence that a racial hierarchy is being played out spatially.” (Fischer, 479) Still, as previously noted, even these segregation levels are an improvement over those living in the inner city. Metropolitan areas around Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago, inner cities known for high levels of segregation, have increased black white interactions for black suburbanites “relative to their central city counterparts”. (Fischer, 480) One reason for lower segregation levels in venues like historically race driven Chicago, is that suburban integration levels remain within “Whites’ tolerance limits for minority contact.” (Fischer, 480) Fischer too notes regional variation suggesting that segregation in the West and South exists at levels lower than in their Northern and Eastern counterparts. This juxtaposition means that the answer to reducing segregation in each region depends on differing solutions attuned to local conditions. Moreover, in some metropolitan areas suburbanization, the very process that had attempted to exclude Blacks for decades, provides the greatest hope for homeowner integration.

Ryan Reft