“Disillusioned” Author: American Suburbs Have Become a Ponzi Scheme | Amanpour and Company

Most Americans find it hard to retire comfortably amid economy downtrend. Some have close to nothing going into retirement, my question is, will you pay off mortgage as a near-retiree, or spread money for cashflow, to afford lifestyle after retirement?

A big component was missed here: most suburbs are financed by one-time initial development fees and state/fed incentives. Property/sales taxes are not enough to run the town. Once you stop new developments (you’re now an “older” suburban town) that money stops rolling in, and the deferred maintenance costs continue piling up. That’s the ponzi part of the scheme. Your house might last 75 years, but will your town’s budget keep up that long? Location, location, location indeed.

Inflation. Privitization of infrastructure. - Flat wage growth, the 1%. Have all the dollars.

You have forgotten to mention automobiles in particular and transportion in general. I live in a suburb. It means that in order to do anything I have to walk out of my residence, get into my car, and then drive somewhere. When I visit other countries I enjoy the experience of being able to walk to places where I want to be.

Wish they would build a sidewalk now and then.

As a child of suburbia, one thing that crossed my mind while watching this--the interviewee mentions how his father was disinclined to be active in the community--was that my parents were similar. In my family's case at least, this was a result of the demands of the suburban lifestyle: My parents commuted into D.C. to work every day, and the traffic each way often resulted in workdays that wound up being 12+ hours long. They just didn't have the energy to be involved in the community, and the suburbs generally aren't set up to foster a sense of community to begin with. Add to this the fact that my parents did not grow up in the area and had no lifelong ties to other people there, and the likelihood that they'd be moving out at some point, and it's easy to see how these places will decline due to lack of long-term buy-in.

I don't know if this has that much to do with this topic, but there's a YouTube channel called "Not Just Bikes" that talks about how building our cities around cars is bankrupting us for a variety of reasons such as maintaining roads and using valuable land for parking spaces instead of businesses. If I'm remembering correctly, he's said that cars are needed to make the suburbs work. At the very least, owning a car is an added expense on top of the mortgage payment.

The suburban model was invented by oil and automotive industries predicated that you don’t go anywhere unless you’re driving. Still today there are ‘burbs with no sidewalks.

The author caught my attention when he mentioned where he grew up, since I grew up in a neighboring borough. It was an upper middle class suburban white enclave with a few Chinese American families - usually doctors or engineers. The interview was very enlightening, since I was transferred out of public school to private school, which made me even more removed from what was going on in my neighborhood. We were discriminated against at our local WASP-y country club as the first minority family to be sponsored and eventually accepted.  I never liked going there, after experiencing a racial bullying incident at the swimming pool with my best friends who invited me there. Why did we have to join or go there? African American families were starting to move in during my college years. I've always heard racially stereotypical comments about "there goes the neighborhood and the school system," but I was twice removed - away at private school and then college. To me, they seemed more like generalizations that could be true, but what did I know about property values, as a kid? After moving back home after college, the neighborhood seemed older but still safe, even though people said the local mall had become dangerous. Yet when I walked through there, I didn't feel threatened or unsafe. The store quality seemed to be downgraded into no-name brand labels, so I didn't buy anything. I even tried tracking down elementary school friends, but everybody had scattered - not sure where they all went to.... but I wanted to know what I had missed in public school after the bus merger. After getting married and having a family, I eventually moved out of my fancy condo overlooking the city and up north to suburbia, which most reminded me of the suburb that I grew up in - mostly white again, and a few minorities, relatively new housing, highly ranked public school district, and conveniently located near the mall, the park, easy commute to downtown, etc... I was proud to tell the township school district that I am choosing to send my son to public school, instead of my alma mater private school, because I believe in a quality public school education.  However, a fellow alumna pointed out the perverse irony of the situation: the public school has less diversity than our private school. As I've become more aware of social inequities, I do pay more attention to videos like this to see my childhood through adult lens.  America can be a cruel place to live, especially without a strong support system. And it can be even harsher when one does not fit into the mainstream norm, whether due to race, special needs, or just different philosophies/approaches.  As an example, even at the local shooting ranges, while I can blend in with people from all political stripes, casual shooters get freaked out over my combination of martial arts, knives, and guns when conducting my cross-training drills - even though the tactical gun community views me as normal. So even to this day, I've been refused membership at one outdoor range, because of not being a good cultural/organization fit, and scolded at others for seemingly unsafe practices, even though I haven't technically violated any firearms safety rules, despite having all of the respectable credentials and experiences. People tend to ban what they are afraid of or don't understand regardless. Thank you for interviewing the author - he brought home a lot of lucid insights to help me understand my privileged upbringing, as well as how much harder it is for others to succeed. I've always believed that I stood on the shoulders of giants, but very humbly realize that life could have turned out very differently. While I worked extra hard and studied extra hard, never believing that the playing field was level for minorities, yet so many other factors still helped me over others who did not have some of the same advantages provided by my parents. It's a very sobering thought. Keep up the great work!

As a black man who grew up in Gwinnett county Georgia in the 90s. The boy that was "documented to death" resonates so much

To give further context, the suburbs were literally engineered and marketed as an escape into isolation from the city and its "problems". Through FHA loans and the Montgomery GI Bill, the federal government injected billions of dollars into creating the suburbs. They represent the most costly and inefficient way to house people with respect to land use, infrastructure (roads, sewage, utilities, maintenance and upkeep). Those inefficiencies multiply over time and make suburbs unsustainable economically. So it does make sense that they are essentially throw-away disposable communities.

This interview is extremely insightful to me. Once again we are reminded of the discriminatory practices that keep people of color and low to middle class people down. We have a human nature problem here, I'm not sure how to solve it. Thank you Mr. Herold for doing the hard work and bring this to our attention.

It wasn't just that non-Yts couldn't get a loan, it was ALSO that non-Yt (esecially Blk) vets couldn't get access to the GI Bill benefits. Those benefits were only for Yt ppl, so that shouldn't be forgotten. It left a lot of Blk veterans struggling while they saw their Yt counterparts moving up the social ladder.

Saw this happen before my eyes over the last 40 years in the south suburbs of Chicago. Many black people who move to the suburbs are being sold a "bill of goods." It's often tantamount to paying top dollar for a used vehicle that has 300,000 miles on it.

Bully, aggressive, threatening: who wants to be around them?!

Thank you, Michel Martin, for this conversation. And thanks to Mr. Herold for his work.

I enjoy Michel’s interviews the most. She’s engaged and asks the right questions.

i love that y'all challenge your interviewees, even when you agree. great work!

Almost all the wealth accumulated by the boomer generation was the result of cheap energy which because of the damage done to the environment, is not so cheap in the long run. Now, the long run is here and we either turn to more expensive, less convenient renewable energy or we continue to destroy the planet and pay the higher cost of constantly repairing the damage done to homes, infrastructure, agriculture, human healthy, savage temperature extremes, super-storms, hundreds of millions of climate refugees fleeing lands near the equator become unihabitable--everything, everything will skyrocket in price. The party's over. The younger generation of all races will suffer--but so will the oldest generation, as they find what they thought were their small fortunes evaporate in rising costs and medical bills. Only the super rich--who tricked you into trickle down economics and the "cheap" stuff through globalization (did you really think stuff made in China would be cheap forever? As counries like China industrialized, they began to compete with Americans for natural resources thereby driving up prices; and their billionaires buy American real estate as a way to store their wealth because America has rule of law so their wealth cannot be confiscated by a dictator or an undemocratic government)--will remain somewhat wealthy.

A great example of this is Jackson, Mississippi. As white flight took hold and they moved to northern suburbs (it’s still happening) black families now moving to the older suburbs as white families build newer suburbs. It’s fascinating. The infrastructure in Jackson crumbled literally. The water problems etc…