Suburbia and the American Dream refers to the mass movement of Americans into newly built residential suburbs after the Second World War, roughly 1945 to 1970, when federal home loans, cheap cars, and assembly-line construction put a single-family house with a yard within reach of millions of working families. It became the physical form of the American Dream. It was also, by the design of the same government programs, a machine of racial exclusion that shut Black families out of the wealth it created.
The house with the lawn and the car in the driveway became the picture of American success, and the federal government helped tens of millions of families buy one. But the same government wrote the rules for who could belong. Its mortgage maps marked Black neighborhoods in red ink and refused to insure loans inside them. The postwar suburb was built as a dream and, by deliberate design, as a wall.