At the start of the new book "Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs," author Benjamin Herold returns to the street he grew up on in Penn Hills, once a predominantly-white suburb of Pittsburgh.
It’s there that the veteran education journalist meets Bethany Smith and her young son Jackson, a Black family living three doors down from the house where Herold was raised.
Herold chronicled Smith’s experience moving from her rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Pittsburgh to Penn Hills, where she hoped to find affordable housing and build generational wealth for her family.
“It has changed [to] more black folks, more people of color in this area,” Smith said. “And here we are having to deal with outrageous sewage bills, messed up roads, schools that don't particularly tend to our children's needs.”
Smith moved to Penn Hills in 2012, before purchasing her home there in 2018. Her timing, however, collided with a financial reckoning at Penn Hills School District, which found itself $172 million in debt in 2019 after years of accounting errors, stagnant taxes and two massive construction projects.
That rupture, Herold argues, was part of a larger “unraveling of America’s suburbs,” eroded by decades of financial malfeasance and mismanagement — the “waste product” of the process by which white families exhausted the suburbs’ abundant opportunities without replenishing local resources for future generations.
Herold examines this pattern through the stories of Smith and four other families living outside of Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles. The New York Times Book Review called it a “cleareyed account of suburban boom and bust.”
“I think that there's a sense in many suburban communities that we're just going to keep growing forever, and we don't have to have a smart plan. We don't have to budget upfront for maintenance and renewal and repair, and there's really not a sense of responsibility to future generations,” Herold said.
That mindset was particularly pronounced, he added, when the Penn Hills school board opted to build two new schools, despite declining enrollment and a $130 million price tag. The state Department of Education finally issued a mandate to the district in January 2019, appointing a financial recovery office and requiring school officials to address their financial deficit through widespread budget cuts.
But the construction, Herold said, was just one of a series of “disastrous decisions”, the consequences of which future generations would face. The book also dives into racial tensions and police violence in 1970s Penn Hills, and the municipality’s 1990s sewer system fiasco, which cost local taxpayers more than $60 million and provoked federal action.
“These communities had really been built on a mindset of extracting opportunity. They worked very well for the first few generations of families who lived there, who tended to be white, upwardly mobile, middle-class families like mine,” Herold said. “But underneath all of the opportunity that families like mine received was the reality that we were pushing the true costs of delivering that opportunity, often to future generations and really not thinking about it.”
Smith, who also wrote the book’s epilogue, has also waded deeper into education policy work since moving to Penn Hills. She is a fellow with Education Voters of Pennsylvania, a nonprofit that advocates for public schools statewide.
Smith said her community is still in need of additional state basic education funding, as well as changes within the school district as far as how teachers “relate to the children, the behavior issues that they're having and the activities, or lack thereof.”
As of the 2022-2023 school year, just 3% of teachers in the Penn Hills School District are Black, compared to 64% of the district’s students.
“What I want for myself, for my family, for my son, probably lines up with what a lot of other folks want for their families as well,” Smith said. “We want our children to be able to be in good schools, we want good jobs, to live in a good community [that’s] clean.”
Herold said that reviving suburban school districts begins with dismantling the picture of bountiful, affluent suburbs that society has held onto for decades.
“We still have all of this imagery in our head and think that's what suburbia is, but the reality is not only have the demographics changed, but the economics have changed as well,” Herold said.
"Disillusioned," published by Penguin Press, was released today.
