The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966-1999

In a lively guided tour of America's once mighty, now imperiled urban neighborhoods, Suarez, host of NPR's Talk of the Nation, searches for clues to ""the great suburban migration"" of the past 30 years. Using his formidable skills as a radio producer, Suarez seeks out the person in the street as he steers through the desolate inner-city neighborhoods of Chicago, by a new housing development in Cleveland or past a derelict public schoolyard in Washington, D.C. Amid ample evidence of the larger, structural issues fueling ""white flight"" (redlining mortgage banks, plummeting property values, crumbling public schools), his interviews with longtime urban residents add specificity and character to the great urban debate. Senior citizens proudly resist the violence flaring up around them, while black kids elsewhere describe their suffocating lack of opportunity. Suarez dutifully cites experts on urbanism, but their broad statements don't shed much light on the issue. What the book reveals, it reveals through anecdote, not analysis. Suarez seems determined to probe a simple lack of honesty he finds in many Americans' retreat to the 'burbs. Even as we tell ourselves we're moving to escape crime or find better schools for our children, he writes, we're ""consuming our way into little customized worlds, as individual as a thumbprint, yet as interchangeable as shoes in a shoe store."" (May)