The New Suburbia
The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945
Oxford University Press, January 2024
Latest News:
The New Suburbia has three new digital companions:
The New Suburbia’s companion website at Oxford University Press is live! You’ll find a huge amount of fascinating data, including downloadable tables on LA towns. They’re all referenced in the book’s endnotes.
A visual depiction of suburban change in the Story Map “Suburbanization in Los Angeles County: Tracing suburbia’s transformation from homogeneous to diverse, 1950–2010.” I produced this with Jakub Žejdlík, of Palacky University, Czech Republic. It’s based on my book’s data and insights.
Coming soon: The “Los Angeles County Demographic Data Project, 1950-2010,” on the USC Digital Library Website. This is my entire LA County dataset collected during work on The New Suburbia. We’re in the final stages of readying the data, methodology, and sources notes, then it will roll out from March to May 2024. Thanks to the NEH for support of this project.
About The New Suburbia:
America’s suburbs have been transforming. The conventional story of suburbs as bastions of white, middle-class homeowners no longer describes the suburbs of America’s cities. Today they house a more typical cross-section of the nation—rich, poor, Black American, Latino, Asian, immigrant, the unhoused, the lavishly housed, and everyone in between. Stories of everyday suburban life, in the process, have taken on new inflections.
Nowhere are these changes more vivid than in Los Angeles. In this suburban metropolis and global powerhouse, lily white suburbs have virtually disappeared, and over two-thirds of the County’s suburbs have become majority minority. Examining this vanguard of change from the postwar to the present, The New Suburbia follows the Asian Americans, Black Americans, and Latinos who moved into white neighborhoods that once barred them. They bought homes, enrolled their children in schools, and began navigating suburban life. They faced a choice: would they remake the suburbs, or would the suburbs remake them? In places like Pasadena, San Marino, South Gate, and Lakewood, suburbanites faced the challenges of living together in difference. Historian Becky Nicolaides explores a range of community experiences, from internal resegregation to suburban poverty, an embrace of law-and-order culture to police brutality, friendly neighbors to social withdrawal. In some communities, diverse residents continued longstanding habits of exclusion and perpetuated metropolitan inequality. In others, they embraced more inclusive, multicultural suburban ideals. Through it all, the common denominators of suburbia remained—low-slung landscapes of single-family homes and families seeking the good life.
An authoritative work based on a half-century of quantitative data and unpublished oral histories and interviews, The New Suburbia explores vital landscapes where the American dream has endured, even as the dreamers have changed.
Book Launch
Vroman’s Bookstore, Pasadena
January 26, 2024
Praise for The New Suburbia:
“The New Suburbia is a revelation. Becky Nicolaides’s detailed historical research shows how the suburbs have morphed and changed over the past century. They no longer conform to the outdated image of largely white, generic ‘Leave It to Beaver’ communities of the 1950s and 1960—if they ever did—but comprise a mosaic of communities—large and small, rich and poor, home to a wide range of racial and ethnic diversity. The suburbs are pivotal places in our society, where our elections are decided and a majority of Americans live.”—Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class
“Becky Nicolaides offers a sprawling, detailed, and nuanced history that complicates our notion of what the suburb was, what it is now, and what it will be in the future. Deftly incorporating race, class, and space, she uses Los Angeles County as a case study to reveal the variety of suburban formations, the ways in which suburbia has changed over time, and the way in which suburbia changes the consciousness and values of its (increasingly multicultural) residents. While I thought I knew this story—growing up in La Puente and Whittier, earlier Latino suburbs, I lived this story—I learned so much. This is a landmark volume that will be essential to our emerging understanding of the complexity of America’s metro regions.”—Manuel Pastor, co-author of South Central Dreams
“The New Suburbia is a riveting and essential read for anyone interested in Los Angeles and urban and suburban landscapes. Nicolaides accomplishes a remarkably discerning assessment of how to see and understand the diversity of US suburbs today through vividly drawn stories of politics and social life in four very different LA suburbs.”—Wendy Cheng, author of The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California
“Over the last few decades, the color of suburbia has changed, especially in metropolitan Los Angeles, the subject of Becky Nicolaides’s field-defining book. Through rigorous, on the ground research, Nicolaides shows how newcomers remade formerly white-majority suburbs and how suburban governments have struggled to adapt. The New Suburbia is an essential starting point for understanding the challenges and opportunities of an increasingly diverse America.”—Thomas J. Sugrue, New York University
