Publications
The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945
Oxford University Press, January 2024
America’s suburbs have transformed. No longer bastions of the white middle-class, the suburbs have become home to a more typical cross-section of the nation—rich, poor, Black American, Latino, Asian, immigrant, the unhoused, the lavishly housed, and everyone in between. The New Suburbia tells the story of this dramatic transformation in Los Angeles, at the vanguard of change. It follows the Asian Americans, Black Americans, and Latinos who moved into white suburbs that once barred them. They bought homes, enrolled their children in schools, and began navigating everyday life. They faced a choice: would they remake the suburbs, or would the suburbs remake them?
My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965
University of Chicago Press, 2002
In the 1920s, thousands of white migrants settled in the Los Angeles suburb of South Gate. Six miles from downtown and adjacent to Watts, South Gate and its neighboring communities served as L.A.'s Detroit, an industrial belt for mass production of cars, tires, steel, and other durable goods. Blue-collar workers built the suburb literally from the ground up, using sweat equity rather than cash to construct their own homes.
As Becky M. Nicolaides shows in My Blue Heaven, this ethic of self-reliance and homeownership formed the core of South Gate's identity. With post-World War II economic prosperity, the community's emphasis shifted from building homes to protecting them as residents tried to maintain their standard of living against outside threats—including the growing civil rights movement—through grassroots conservative politics based on an ideal of white homeowner rights. As the citizens of South Gate struggled to defend their segregated American Dream of suburban community, they fanned the flames of racial inequality that erupted in the 1965 Watts riots.
Praise
“Becky M. Nicolaides's magnificent book ... demonstrates that white working-class suburban values, cultivated over nearly half a century of community building, played as important a role in the urban crisis as the more common explanations of destructive federal policy and elite suburban exclusivity.” — Nicolas Bloom, American Historical Review
“It is state-of-the-art urban history that examines the interactions between polical choices and the everyday experience of place... My Blue Heaven is a model monograph that raises the bar for the rest of us engaged in telling the history of American cities.” — Carl Abbott, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Awards
2004 AHA-PCB Book Award; 2004 Donald Pleuger Award, Historical Society of Southern California; 2003 finalist, W. Turrentine Jackson Award, Western History Association
The Suburb Reader documents the rise of North American suburbanization from the 1700s to today. It explores suburbia's rise from many angles: design, economics, gender, popular culture, race, politics, sustainability, the environment, social justice, and planning. From William Levitt to Ralph Waldo Emerson to Curious George, The Suburb Reader presents a lively cast of characters who've helped build suburbia and establish its hold on the American imagination. The book has over 200 primary sources, illustrations, and critical essays.
The Suburb Reader, 1st & 2nd Editions
Edited by Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese (Routledge 2006, 2016)
Praise
“This fabulous collection brings together richly textured documents and classic scholarly essays to illuminate how the United States became a suburban nation. Ideally suited for students, scholars, and general readers, the book includes multiple views of the suburbs―pro and con―and delves deeply into issues of race, class, gender, and politics. The Suburb Reader enriches our understanding not only of suburbia, but of America itself.” ―Elaine Tyler May, author of Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
Awards
Named a top ten book of 2007 by Planetizen
Select articles & guest blogs
Op-Ed | “Can’t afford a house in L.A.? Here’s how that happened”
Los Angeles Times, September 28, 2023
“There’s a metric called “housing burden” that lays the situation bare. Over the last 50 years, it tracks the growing, gaping mismatch between income and shelter costs in Los Angeles County.”
Op-Ed | “How to make sure the L.A. River Master Plan fulfills its promise to the Gateway Cities"
With Jon Christensen, Los Angeles Times, February 21, 2021
"It’s crucial to ensure that those who live in these cities have a voice in what will happen to them. The Gateway Cities have made it through our region’s toughest history over the last 50 years. They deserve a community-driven plan to benefit from its revival."
“Design Assimilation in Suburbia: Asian Americans, Built Landscapes, and Suburban Advantage in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley since 1970”
With James Zarsadiaz, Journal of Urban History (2017)
Why do some immigrant suburbs look All-American - without an ethnic trace in sight? We explore the history of these suburbs, answering how and why they came to be.
2015 Arnold Hirsch Prize of the Urban History Association
2018 Bishir Prize of the Vernacular Architecture Forum
“Suburbanization in the United States after 1945”
With Andy Wiese, Online Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (2017)
Everything you always wanted to know about American suburbia. A far-ranging, cutting-edge look at the history of American suburbs over the past 70 years. A lot packed in this one.
“Map Room: Stay-at-Home Moms in Los Angeles County, 1950-2000”
With maps by Jennifer Mapes, California History, vol. 93, no. 3 (Fall 2016), 2-8
"After 1970, the picture shifted dramatically. The richest and the poorest towns now had the highest proportion of stay-at-home moms, creating an unexpected common ground in the everyday life of these radically polarized towns."
Op-Ed | “Suburban Disequilibrium”
With Andrew Wiese, New York Times, Sunday Opinion section, April 7, 2013
"Today’s suburbs provide a map not just to the different worlds of the rich and the poor, which have always been with us, but to the increase in inequality between economic and social classes."
“Living Black in Lakewood: Rewriting the history and future of an iconic suburb’”
OUP Blog, January 17, 2024
“The Chase family of Lakewood illustrates how far we’ve come from the days of Ozzie and Harriet in the 1950s. The Chase’s story of living Black in white suburbia was both predictable and unexpected, and it shows how suburbia—which now houses over half of all Americans—is becoming a place of profoundly varied experiences.”
“Becky Nicolaides And ‘The New Suburbia’”
The Metropole Bookshelf, January 9, 2024
“The seed for my book The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2024) was planted years ago when I was teaching a course at UC San Diego called “The History of Urban Community.” It was an introductory class in the urban studies program, which I helped develop.”
“Walking while white: The day the cops accosted my 13-year-old son for walking his neighborhood"
SuburbanMe blog (2015)
"The route to the library is along a pretty busy street where drivers typically speed. And there’s one major intersection to cross...He’s a bright kid, very responsible. About an hour after he left, the phone rings. It’s my son on his cel phone. He says, ‘Mom, can you talk to this police officer? He wants to talk to you.’ Say what?"