WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The suburbs of America were the key to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidency win, and he and his 2020 Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, are fighting to vote there for the Nov. 3 election.
The Republican president highlighted his focus with recent remarks about “prominent housewives who welcomed his protection” and a column in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday that warned of a “dystopian vision” of low-income housing.
American suburbs were initially well-defined white enclaves on the outskirts of cities when they rose during the baby boom of World War II. The families living in them were often structured around a single income – the husband – and a single caregiver – the wife.
While it is difficult to characterize a country as diverse as the United States, or even to define what a “suburb” is more, the neighborhoods within commuting distance to a major American city today look very different.
They have become denser, more diverse and less central to nuclear families. About 36% of the U.S. population now lives in a county classified as a suburb under a category developed by William Frey at the Brookings Institution, up from 33% in 2000.
DIVERSITY
Suburban counties tend to be even whiter than the rest of the country, while American cities are diverse.
But the general racial convenience of the important suburban counties is close to that of the country as a whole, based on Frey’s classification.
In the Wall Street Journal column, Trump, along with House Secretary Ben Carson, stated that a majority of Blacks and Hispanics live in suburbs. It did not make clear which counties were included in that tabulation – there is no standard definition.
Under Frey’s rendering, there are 488 suburban counties associated with the 100 largest subways, and blacks in the cities are more than those from 2 to 1 more than those in the suburbs. The ratio for Hispanics is smaller.
In July, Trump said his administration would submit a Barack Obama-era rule requiring communities receiving federal housing assistance to assess racial segregation in housing and offer plans to correct it.
WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN
The proportion of households with children at home is slightly higher in the suburbs than in cities, according to a county classification developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
However, there is an even greater gap between households with children in the suburbs and in small towns or rural areas.
ECONOMIC BIDDING
The share of U.S. suburbs has not grown, at least before the coronavirus struck earlier this year. Knowledge companies have flocked to cities. Manufacturing needs space. Shopping malls and office parks have perhaps seen their best days.
The age after the pandemic can change a lot about how the United States organizes itself, but the benefit in that shift may accrue to smaller places, not cities or suburbs. Since 2000, the GDP share among the suburbs has been stagnant.
Poverty rates increased in the suburbs of the US in the 2000s, climbing 57% in the largest metro areas of the country between 2000 and 2015, Brookings calculated.
HOUSEWIVES
The suburbs are no longer a hub of stay-at-home moms, contrary to the popular image of such communities in the 1950s. Today, many married women work, and less mature women are married.
Trump’s support has eroded in the suburbs because of his handling of his administration of the coronavirus pandemic, in which 170,000 Americans died. Recent Reuters polls show that white suburban Americans are far more concerned about the economy and health care than crime.
Report by Howard Schneider; Edited by Heather Timmons and Peter Cooney
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