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Michael Glass, "Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
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Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello everybody and welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm Jenna Pitman, a host for the channel. Today we'll be talking to Michael Glass about his new book, Cracked Foundations, Debt and Inequality in Suburban America. Published by University of Pennsylvania PE Press in 2025. Crack Foundations explores how debt and speculation in the Post World War II era financed the suburban American dream. Michael is a political and urban historian of the 20th century United States with research interests in racism, capitalism and inequality. Michael, welcome to the show.
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D
Thank you, Jenna. I'm thrilled to be here.
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C
Great. It's wonderful to have you. I wonder if we could just kind of begin by you telling us a little bit about yourself and how you came to write Cracked Foundations.
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D
Yes, definitely. So I'm an assistant professor of history at Boston College, and I came to writing this book from a combination of my own personal experiences. I graduated College back in 2008 when the world was melting down. I had a lot of friends who lost jobs that they had secured after graduation and just really watched the panic underway from the meltdown of the housing market and the mortgage industry, and more broadly, the banking sector, and the kind of political fallout of all of this. And so, like many who are now working in the history of capitalism, I think I started just by wanting to learn how these financial systems work. And as a historian trying to trace the history that brought us to kind of this precipice. So before going to graduate school, I also worked for many years as a history teacher at various public high schools in the Bronx, New York, where I also coached the soccer team. And these were really high poverty schools. And I was really struck by the ongoing struggles for adequate resources. My students and I were constantly frustrated by things like broken air conditioners, outdated textbooks, really chronic understaffing at the high schools, people cycling in and out for the soccer team. We didn't have a grounds crew. So I remember when there would be a rainy day and we had a game in the afternoon, I'd run out for my breaks as a teacher and frantically push all the water out of puddles to try to get ready for a game. This contrasted really a lot with my upbringing in a relatively affluent suburb of Colorado. And so I had some really basic questions of why, where did these educational inequalities come from? Then finally, when I started graduate school, doing my PhD and thinking about dissertation topics, the Black Lives Matter movement was really taking off. And a big turning point for me was the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri following the murder of Mike Brown. I was stuck. First of all, how a lot of the initial reporting fell into these tropes, calling Ferguson an urban area with so called inner city challenges. Of course, Ferguson is an independent suburb outside of St. Louis. In fact, when you dig into the history a little bit, Ferguson was once an all white government insured suburb, which raises all kinds of questions about, like what happened. And then the follow up investigations really showed by the Department of Justice that this encounter with Mike Brown was really part of a larger pattern of the Ferguson police department, really, and the Ferguson municipality, municipality more generally becoming reliant on predatory fines and fees to finance their basic operations. And so again, more questions like why? Why is this? What happened in this suburb? Why is this suburb so reliant? On these predatory finance structures. And so I brought all these questions about finance, education and racial inequality that pointed me towards the suburbs and living in New York, looking right next door to Long island, and wanted to have that be the topic of this study.
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C
Thank you for that. Definitely. Very fascinating. And I always think that's probably my favorite question that I ask because you really get a sense of what in this scholar's background has made them so interested in this topic. And there's always something really impactful there. You know, just your background in education and where you grew up and seeing these kind of structural inequalities. And I'm sure that that was, like, very inspiring as you kind of worked through your PhD and all of these questions to be like, that's why xyz or like, that's one of the reasons for XYZ that, you know, you've been thinking about. So, yeah, that's really interesting. So you mentioned a little bit the Long island and Cracked Foundations is a case study for Nassau county, which I am really bad with American geography. I blame it on my. My American public school education. I don't know maps, but I think it might be helpful for our listeners if you kind of explain where Nassau county is, what that area encompasses, and just why it's a very effective subject for this case study approach in Crack Foundations, kind of. What's the methodology and approach with that?
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D
Definitely. So I'm an urban historian, and our methodology almost always is to select case studies because we want to zoom in and really capture the details, to reconstruct life in a particular place. Like, what was it like to live in this city, this suburb, this community in a particular time? But of course, also with our case studies, we want to demonstrate larger issues that matter beyond just that community. And so no place is truly representative of everywhere. Although I argue in the book that Long island comes pretty close for suburban America. So Nassau county is one of two counties on Long island, which is just to the east of Brooklyn, so bordering the nation's largest city, jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. And one reason that that Nassau county is really, I think, a rich place for a case study is that you have different eras and different aspects of suburb urbanization all in one county. So along the North Shore, there are many older elite suburbs that were first developed by Gilded Age tycoons who assembled estates there along the beaches and the rolling hills. Most famously, F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in one of these North Shore communities, Great Neck, which is study in the book, and the kind of aspects he Noticed there in the 1920s were partly the model for the decadent lifestyle he talks about in the Great Gatsby along the south shore of Long Island. The Long island railroad was built there in the 19th century. And along the railroad you have a number of white collar kind of bedroom communities that were built in the 1920s. As long as some kind of middle class resort towns and then through the middle of the county remain mostly agricultural farmland. Into the 1950s until the post World War II suburban boom, where a lot of this farmland was developed into new suburbs. During the 1950s, Nassau county was the fastest growing county in the country. And this is where we have iconic places like Levittown. And so by looking at Nassau county, we can do a kind of comparative analysis of these different eras of suburbanization, different types of suburbs. Now, I should say also the complexity of these different places creates a lot of challenges for the study, especially all the different governments. So Nassau county has about one and a half million people today, Basically the same as it was in 1960, but 56 different school districts, Just an incredible number of school districts. As if that weren't enough, also 64 independent villages, 60 unincorporated hamlets, all governed by three overarching towns. And these different governments, they crisscross and overlap in really complicated ways. For instance, one school district might have five different independent villages within its borders, whereas another place might only have a school district and not be an independent vil so on. And historians have mostly avoided this. You know, I don't mean to call out my friends, my, my urban historian friends, because how are you supposed to manage this as a historical study? One approach that many urban historians have taken is to choose one server as a case study and try to make tell a story about making it representative. Another approach is maybe to look at the federal policies that are influencing all suburbs. But what both of these approaches really miss is the profound differences between places that are right next to each other. And I think this is really imperative today given how American suburbs have become more diverse and more unequal. Today there's more poverty in suburbs than cities. More black Americans, more Latinos, more Asian Americans live in suburbs and cities. The standard path for immigrants today is often to move directly to a suburb, not to the cities, disrupting our basic notions of what immigration looks like. In the book, I examine around a dozen different case studies from Nassau county that I chose to represent these different types of suburbs and reflect that diversity. That may meant I had to go do research in a lot of different places, going to different local libraries, seeing what records People kept reading lots of local newspapers on microfilm, spending a lot of time in the county courthouse looking at local property records, but at the same time trying to capture some of the bigger patterns that are not only influencing all of Nassau county, but across the country as well. And in particular, how these debt instruments of home mortgages and municipal bonds shaped suburban development nationwide. And so for that, did a lot of research in federal records in Washington, D.C. i read a lot of credit reports from municipal bond dealers and looked at a lot of congressional hearings when these issues got the attention of people in Washington. And so the book really tries to balance both of these perspectives, parsing the local particularities, but also trying to look at the similar institutions that are making the bigger patterns. And so the narrative of the book does a lot of flipping from zooming in to zooming out to try to get both perspectives.
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C
Sure. Thank you for that. And I think one of the things that you do so well in this book is balancing these very macro, these policies with then very, very narrative recollections. And, you know, throughout. Throughout so many of the chapters, there's your grounding these very, I don't know, very regional, very kind of larger than the local community issues and decisions being made. You're grounding that within these kind of personal narratives. So, for example, your first chapter, right after your introduction in Cracked Foundations, begins with a narrative of Irene Meals experience. I hope I'm pronouncing that right, as a homeowner in this period and her testimony in front of the House Subcommittee on Housing, kind of what you were just talking about, these congressional hearings. So what does Irene Meals narrative, and kind of how you use that, as well as some of the others that you include throughout the chapters, kind of reveal about the origins of the affordable housing crisis.
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Yeah, it's a great question, and I'm glad that that story resonated with you. And I chose this story because we often remember post war suburbs really fondly. You know, this is World War II veterans returning to the American dream of new houses, white picket fences, accumulating wealth through homeownership, sending their children to good schools. Of course, so much of the scholarship in recent decades has been tracing all of the exclusions that reserved post war suburbs for whites only, confining people of color to declining cities. But I do think the implication still has been that partly because there's been so much attention on exclusions that for the people let in, this was something like paradise. I call it a promised land in the introduction. And so one of my major Arguments of the book is that post war suburbs were way more speculative and unsteady than we remember. And so the central metaphor, this forms the central medical core of the book, cracked foundations. The sections kind of play with that metaphor. The opening chapters are cracks, as in kind of structural flaws with the way post war suburban development happened. The middle chapters are called pressure, so various campaigns and protests that put a lot of strain on those flaws. And the final section of the book is Collapse, as in how the housing and education systems really fell apart in the 1970s and 1980s. And so I chose this Irene Mele story, and don't quote me either. I think that's how you would pronounce her name, Irene Mele, for the beginning of chapter one, because I think it really powerfully illustrates those themes. So Irene Melaye was a white wife of a World War II veteran. In 1950, she and her husband drove out to a brand new suburban development in Nassau county and waited in line for several hours to put a down payment on a new house. Now, crucially, this was a model home, which was very common at the time and sometimes still today for new housing developments, which meant that the house that they were buying was not actually built yet. It was one house that was going to be part of thousands that you could see from the developer. But as I say in the opening chapter, what they were really buying was blueprints, an idea, a promise of a house. And I should say also, this was very common at the time. I found records that approximately half of the home purchases in the early 1950s were just like this at model homes. And so this is often part of the triumphal narrative. You know, look how optimistic, look how excited people are. You know, they waited in line for hours to buy a house. But I, maybe I'm more cynical. I want to stop and reflect and say, what kind of mindset do you have to be in to buy a house? Sight unseat to not, you know, just to put your life savings down for something that doesn't exist yet. And so for me, I see this as, you know, not as more so reflecting the desperation at the time, the. How extreme the housing shortage was for people after World War II, that you would go through this and sorry to.
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C
Interrupt, but almost like that desire for, like homeownership, like that has to be so to an extent that you're like, this is what we have to do to fulfill this, you know, this narrative, this dream that we've been kind of sold, that we have to own a house.
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D
Yeah, totally. That you know, and partly what I, what I argue implicitly in the book is that. And to not have other options, you know, and this probably we can get to with talking about the policy, is that this is the main policy, homeownership. And actually, I kind of question you. Maybe if there were more options, people might have chosen a different housing arrangement. But this was the main option, basically. I mean, I talk about this to my students sometimes. I see this as kind of like a giant fomo, like a fear of missing out. Right. You gotta wait in line now because the houses will be gone.
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C
I think that's a great way to describe it. Yeah.
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D
But fast forward. So one week after moving in, the Melee's suburban dream becomes a real nightmare. So in the basement, the concrete foundation started cracking and dirt came up through the basement. So in this sense, the title is also literal. A lot of these houses had actual cracked foundations. In the first big rainstorm, water came gushing through the windows and then the runoff made big puddles in the yard. They struggled to drain. And what's so interesting about this story is that Melee and many of her neighbors, this was common among their neighbors as well. In the development, they called up the federal government because the house had been marketed as insured by the Federal Housing Administration and insured by the Veterans Administration. And this is where the debt instruments are so important, because the Federal Housing Administration, FHA and the Veterans Administration, the va, they did not build the houses. What they did was they granted insurance on the mortgages for the houses. The federal government had a kind of indirect role in housing when it comes to homeownership. And that government insurance had very powerful effects, as many urban historians have shown, by offering insurance to lenders that basically eliminated the possibility of default. Because if a homeowner could ended up not being able to pay the mortgage for any reason, the FHA would pay the lender to make sure they didn't lose any money. And so under this arrangement of basically much more safe lending, mortgage brokers are, mortgage lenders, excuse me, are willing to offer much more generous terms. 30 year mortgages, steady payments, low down payments, sometimes when you factor in the VA benefits as well, no down payment at all. And as an aside, this is why redlining was so vicious. One of the many reasons, because the federal underwriting guidelines denied these benefits, with rare exceptions to people of color. And so Mele and her friends and her neighbors, they called up the FHA and asked them to do something about this. You know, their houses with these defects, and they weren't Alone. This was happening all across the country, so much so that the House of Representatives held hearings where they toured to different communities, including to Long island, where the testimony, one after another, is just filled with angry white homeowners. By and large, however, their complaints were dismissed by the House of Representatives. And it became clear in the testimony that Melee and others, they saw the FHA insured VA guaranteed as a guarantee of quality, as getting a good house, a structurally sound house. But FHA and VA insurance, that was insurance for the home builder and the lender, not, not for the homeowner. And so this, I think, establishes several important themes for the book. First, it shows that the suburban boom was really hasty, marred by lots of shoddy construction. And this is partly by design. The federal policy coming out of World War II with the housing shortage really prioritized volume and speed, build as many houses as quickly as possible, which really opened the door to all of these defects. And in a larger sense, I think what it shows us that this stamp of FHA insured sometimes offered more so an illusion of security than the reality. In this arrangement, the primary beneficiaries are the various real estate actors. For homeowners, the benefits are indirect. And it reminds us as well that even these very, very privileged subjects, the white nuclear, straight families moving into Nassau county, did not have a right to housing. You know, what they had was something more limited, a right to a mortgage. And this is part of, I think, what a lot of people are doing these days, a larger evaluation, reevaluation of the American welfare state that, at least comparatively to other places around the world, a much more indirect kind of support for people with thinner commitments. I'll say lastly, that people like Irene Mele did end up all right in the end. Despite all these defects, their homes still appreciated in value and very quickly. And so while they did not get a guarantee of good, stable, decent housing from the federal government, they did get government insurance on a financial asset that had the promise of wealth accumulation. And to answer your question, and we can talk more about this, the flip side, of course, of rising property values, of asset appreciation, is rising prices, right, for people who aren't homeowners yet. And so I think this is, we can identify as the beginning of this kind of price spiral that brings us to the affordable housing crisis that a lot of us are struggling with today.
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Okay, Diego. Prime big deal days con grandes oferta sen cocina la grandes manos haci que si 10 cansegiruno ferten una nueva batidora de Pie te transformara en el principe del.
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D
Y alconte de los cuernitos miembro.
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De prime Juan.
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Porciento de descento in prime Big deal days. Diego Prime Big deal days. Para que con cigas grandes ofertas para unuevo espa de piece te transformara en la reina de la relaxion Espera tiene chorros de porbuja approvecha horas acuarn de porciento menos in prime big deal days.
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C
Yeah, that's all just so fascinating. And unfortunately, I have one more kind of burning question on the side of, you know, methodology and your writing style, narratives being included. I think another thing that this book does really well is uplifting or centralizing these kind of narratives from women and people of color specifically. And I do really just kind of want to kind of have you explain just how you include and center the narratives and experiences of people of color in cracked foundations. Because I kept being like, wow, he's really doing such a good job finding such a wide range of narratives to include and almost like you're picking the right ones to include, in my opinion. So, yeah, if you could just talk about that a little bit.
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D
Thank you. Yeah, I mean, the point of these stories is. I mean, they're great stories, but also I want them to illustrate certain themes and resonate with people. So I'm glad they did for you. I'll start by saying that the racial exclusion in Nassau county and in other government insured suburbs nationwide at the time was so comprehensive and so egregious that even as late as 1970, the Nassau county population was still 95% white. And this right next door to a very diverse metropolis. This even amidst all the civil rights battles underway. And that exclusion was incredibly vicious. You know, many black veterans waited in line as well and would be turned away at Levittown and other suburbs not able to use their VA benefits. World War II veterans other. Other places black homeowners were able to move in very early and had their houses vandalized, the windows broken, things set on fire in their lawns and so on. And sometimes also exclusion happened with a smile. A Realtor saying, sorry, can't take you to that house or can't get you a mortgage today. Nonetheless, that 5% in 1970, by 1970, I think is still very important, especially given how suburbs today have become more racially diverse. And so even during this height of all white suburbanization, we have a handful of smaller black communities growing. And I should say Nassau county in this era that I look at is mostly a black white dynamic. There are small number of Latinos moving in which you can say a bit about. Today there's really big Asian American communities, but that kind of comes later in the 20th century after this post war moment. So it's kind of a black white racial landscape. And I tell these stories of non white suburbanites through the same sources, like local newspapers and property records, but also many oral histories. I found as I started doing research that the perspective of people of color was often very underrepresented in official archives. And so I wanted to go out and just talk to people. And so here I think the story of Brady Speller is really useful in capturing how people of color navigated this landscape of structural racism. So it's very well established now that redlining policies denied most black home buyers the ability to use FHA or VA insurance and the protections that those federal agencies provided. I mean, so much so that we now hear, or we did hear a few years ago, redlining as part of presidential debates and so on. However, I think we sometimes miss that redlining did not mean that black people could not purchase, could not purchase houses. What it meant is that when they purchased houses, they did stone under far more unsteady terms. So in 1960, Brady speller and his family moved to Roosevelt, which is a smaller, older community in the middle of Nassau county, one of these places that kind of went boom and bust in the 1920s. A lot of vacant lots left, one square mile. An older black community, had been there since the early 20th century and really grows. So during the 1960s, after they moved there transitions to becoming a majority black population. And so they're really at the be at the front end of that. And Brady, when I talked to him, he was, I believe in early elementary grades at the time when he, when his family moved. It has really vivid memories of pulling up to this house that his parents had bought with green grass, white picket fence around it. His parents called it their black middle class dream, which is a really good, rich phrase that I think is worth thinking about. You know, some of the same aspirations, but what it also meant to overcome some of these racist barriers. So I went then after talking to Brady Speller and checked the property records. And what I found is that when they bought the house, the Spellers actually had to use two mortgages. So they assumed the mortgage from the older white family who had been living there, basically taking the mortgage from them and continuing the payments, picking right up where. Where they had left off, which is One way, they never had to go to a lender, they said, to get their approval to assume the mortgage. And then they. Because then they still needed more to meet the purchase price. So they took out what's called a purchase money mortgage, which is an unconventional non traditional mortgage, most likely because they would have been denied or were denied trying to get a conventional mortgage. In a purchase money mortgage, basically the white owners themselves became the lender. And so they lent the spellers the funds directly, tacking on interest to it. And so this combination of methods allowed them to buy the house, to have their black middle class dream. But it also meant that going forward, they had to make two payments every month, one for the old mortgage and one for the new purchase money mortgage. And the purchase money mortgage also had what's called a balloon payment included in it. So after steady payments every month, after five years, a big lump sum becomes due. Right. So it's kind of hanging over you the whole time. How are we going to make that big payment in a few years? Unlike a conventional mortgage, where it's steady all the way, all the way to the end, this was really onerous. You know, they struggled to keep up with it. Thankfully, they did keep the house, you know, through Brady inherited it later in his life. But after the move, his father kept working two jobs to keep up with payments. And this was in our conversations with a really powerful moment of recognition because Brady Speller himself as the kid in the arrangement, didn't know about any of this. Parents don't always share everything with their children. But it kind of showed him why so many of his memories of his dad was being tired all the time working those two jobs, trying to keep up. And I think we should count this among some of the violence of redlining as well. What it does to kind of people personally. And so to sum up, I think the speller story shows that people of color moved to the suburbs for many of the same promises, but encountered much a much harsher financial landscape that made life a lot more difficult.
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C
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that. I guess just where we kind of where you kind of ended that, that response and that, that story, it kind of just makes me a little bit more generally interested after reading this book. If you could just describe kind of what impacts the post war housing boom brought and were these impacts tied to racial and socioeconomic inequality and just how.
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D
I guess, sure, definitely. So the post war housing construction brought several different overlapping impacts, many of which can still be felt today. So we've already talked about the deepening Racial segregation, which I do think is relatively well known today. And we've also talked about some of the shoddy construction, which I think is not as well known, but is right in the opening pages of the book. But there were still other important impacts. One that the book talks about is that these policy goals of volume and speed, build as many houses as quickly as possible, led to flagrant profiteering. I think we should count as the impacts. And so what I mean by this is that many home builders during the post war suburban boom abused the FHA mortgage insurance arrangement to inflate their costs and reap excess extra profits. And they use several maneuvers to do this during their application process. They would have to own the land to build a new suburban housing development. But you might mark up the land, say it's worth more than maybe it would be by its true market value, might overestimate the construction cost, put a big number on the application when you know, maybe that you could build it for cheaper and add all kinds of fees to bring the number higher. Once you have that application with a really big number and get the FHA insurance, what a home builder would do next is take it to a bank to take out a loan to finance the construction. And from a bank's perspective, because it has that stamp of FHA insurance, it's basically risk free because the federal government is saying, we will. You were backing this loan so you won't lose any money on it. And so they get this large amount of money from, from a bank loan and then proceed to build very quickly and cheaply. If you can come out at the other side with the construction ending up much, much less than what you said at the beginning, you have some money left over in your bank account. And when this was exposed, investigative journalists and rumors circulating around Washington, D.C. it started a major congressional investigation and eventually hearings in Washington D.C. in 19 that exposed a lot of this profiteering. So one of the star witnesses was William J. Levitt, head of the home building firm Levitt and Sons that built the iconic Levittown development. 17,000 houses right in the middle of Nassau County. And what the investigation showed is that for the first 4,000 or so houses in Levittown, the Levitt and Sons company had invested just $50,000 of its own money. Because, you know, it was just the upfront cost and then a big loan. And then through these methods of cost inflation and rapid construction. And here the Levitts are also very famous for their construction methods and frankly, quite efficient, ordering all the appliances and materials wholesale, having A kind of reverse assembly line employing non union contract workers. They famously could put up dozens of houses in a day. At the end are left with $3.8 million, which for inflation it comes out to something like $50 million today. And this is on top of the standard 10% profit margin that you get from a federal housing development. This is extra money that left over from squeezing it out of the mortgage. And so the Senate was very upset and called these windfall profits, meaning this is excess and we're mad. I mean, think about it. 50,000 in and 3.8 million out, which is a pretty sweet deal. So for these home builders, FHA insurance was a money machine. And I should add also that another star witness in these hearings was Fred Trump, father of the current president, who used similar maneuvers to build apartments in Brooklyn and Queens in New York. And so in addition to the segregation and shoddy construction, the post war housing boom unleashed profiteering and empowered a small number of real estate actors, one of whose descendants is now at the most powerful office in the world. And maybe, maybe just to discuss one last impact, to follow up on something I said before, I also think the way the post war housing boom unfolded really laid the groundwork for the affordable housing crisis today in another key way. So the suburban housing boom, you know, it's sometimes celebrated all these new houses built for, you know, Americans, but it's extreme. It ended up extremely unbalanced, with so much priority given to single family houses. So in this, in this sense, you know, the cliche expressed probably most famously in that Malvina Reynolds song, little boxes, you know, little boxes on the hillside all made of ticky tack, they're all the same. There is a lot of truth to that. So in Nassau county today, like many suburbans nationwide, the housing stock is almost entirely single family houses, something like 85% single family houses. What that looks like is 450,000 single family houses versus just 40,000 apartments. And of those apartments, about 2,000 are public housing. And this arrangement, over time, the story I trace in the book, became completely unsustainable. And it created a lot of pressure for people to maintain the single family housing lifestyle. Many people would prefer to have an affordable rental to being a homeowner. Even in the suburbs, family patterns change, and especially a lot in the 20th century. People started getting married, older women, married women started entering the workforce. People have less children. And so eventually you have a situation by the 1970s where a lot of people, young people, retirees, widows and widowers, low income families, all kinds of other People who seek out rentals, especially as home prices keep rising, putting them out of reach, putting homeownership out of reach. And so, as I show in the book, the pressure for rental housing eventually gets resolved through informal housing. And this term informal housing, it's most familiar in the context of the global South, Favelas and Rio de Janeiro, slums in Mumbai, squatters across Latin America. But increasingly urban scholars have applied this concept, this analytic, to places in the global North. And so informal housing refers to housing arrangements that are technically illegal, although tacitly condoned by government officials. So these arrangements, they break established laws, but officials allow the infractions to persist. And so what this, I think, this scholarship on informal housing shows is that by ignoring the kind of legal infractions, by refusing to enforce the laws, that itself is a choice. So letting it happen, turning a blind eye, is a very powerful housing policy in itself. And so in American suburbs, this takes the form of people in single family houses renting portions of their houses in direct violation of the zoning and building codes that are supposed to reserve these houses for single families only. And so one of my major findings is that there is, especially by the 1970s, so much renting happening. You know, people may be turning the basement into an apartment, turning the attic of their house into an apartment, turning the garage into an apartment. Urban planners in the 1970s developed these really ingenious methods, like checking different records against each other, walking around neighborhoods house by house, and developed these estimates that something like between 10 and 10 and 20% of single family houses in Nassau county have an illegal rental happening. And I should say today you can pull up Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace and click through the listings and find a lot of the illegal renting in single family suburbs with a second kitchen. That's, that's what, that's, that's the main thing that makes it a, a multi family dwelling if you have a second kitchen. And so some of this is by resident homeowners living in the house and renting in part of it for some extra income. Other times it's absentee landlords renting entire houses, multiple families. But the, but the key point here is that informal rentals become the resolution to the shortage of affordable rentals. And on Long island and in many high cost metros across the country, informal housing is a very essential form of affordable, affordable housing. When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together, use polls to settle dinner plans, send Event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone.
- [40:34]
C
Learn more@WhatsApp.com yeah, that's all really interesting and it kind of just hearing where we started of people buying homes without even knowing what they were putting their life savings into, and then that kind of being something that they land on being like, yep, this is a great idea. This is what we have to do. That reflects, you know, just in general housing shortage. But then kind of moving through this history and then you get to multiple families living in single family homes and kind of this whole illegal renting scheme that comes out of it of putting more people into communities that like, weren't originally designed to have that many families and people living there. It's just really interesting to think about how population and population disbursement and all of those things is like very attached to just these modular homes being put up in mass numbers and that being the option that's available.
- [41:34]
D
Well, I should say also, yeah, I mean, and we shouldn't be surprised, right? This is what people do. As an urban historian, we can go back to the 19th century where when people are moving into crowded cities, what do they do? They bring in borders. They have chop up bigger apartments into smaller apartments, make more out of less. And I guess it's a question the book raises, which is like, why have we missed this in suburbs? I should say there's a number of scholars now who are starting to do this and I'm building on their work. But big picture, I think we've really missed this. Is it because of the mythology of the suburbs? Is it maybe just because all this, all of the zoning codes say single family only, right? That was the whole point of single family zoning. To not let what happened, not let what happened in the Lower east side, to not let it happen in Nassau County. Except for Fast Forward, it does. You know, when people are squeezed, they find ways to make more income. And then when there is this kind of informal market for housing, there are other actors who see an opportunity to make money from it. And so we have absentee speculative landlords who come in as well. And I should say in that case, sometimes those become quite dangerous. You might provide an affordable rental to someone, but if you plug three ovens into a house or three sets of appliances into a house that's wired for one set of appliances, you're creating the danger for fires and you are Subjecting people to kind of very cramped and very often kind of uncomfortable living conditions.
- [43:19]
C
Yeah, it's almost like a system that was designed to be exploitative beginning and it's like weird to laugh at that. But it's this, every step of this, this book that we've talked about is just exploitative and like kind of unchecked capitalism at its worst, truly. So, yeah, again, I'm not laughing because it's like funny, but it's just very ironic, I guess. So, kind of moving back to the content of the book here, I kind of want to go back to redlining a little bit because we've touched on that a little bit kind of as a continuous thread. And I think it is somewhat of a continuous thread throughout your book because it's such a, such an important topic. What does cracked foundations kind of contribute to the origins of redlining? And how does this book further our understanding of the perpetuation of racial and social economic disparity and kind of the foundations of all of that stuff?
- [44:22]
D
Yes, definitely. I've already said a little bit about the unconventional mortgages used by people of color. How in the era of redlining, non white home buyers have to use these more precarious loans with harsher terms, creates more cost pressures, higher rates of foreclosure, less property appreciation, just like really devastating consequences. And I think this is a place for more research that I think if we dig into more of the personal stories and property records will find more of these kind of precarious arrangements. But I think my book also shows that we have more to learn about the legacies of redlining for white people. To return to Irene Melee, the story at the beginning of the book with shoddy construction and her complaints to Washington D.C. i said that despite her frustrations, individual white homeowners like Mele ended up all right. And that's because the, the major benefit offered to white homeowners under this arrangement is this promise of accumulating wealth through asset appreciation through their houses going up in value. And we know that this moment, the post war housing boom, is a very important chapter in the growth of the racial wealth gap. But I think my book shows that white people did not accumulate wealth in the way that maybe it's conventionally understood. So during the, during the post war era, most white homeowners did not simply move to a new suburban house and stay there for decades and wait for the value to go up and then suddenly they are wealthier. Rather, they moved very frequently, trading up from their initial smaller houses into bigger more expensive houses, and through this process of buying and selling, accumulating wealth over time. So the chapter in. The chapter in the middle of my book traces this phenomenon. The chapter is called starter home, which is a very common real estate term today. But I think it shows the history of where this dynamic came from and traces some of this initial moving and reselling very early in the 1950s and 60s already. So I focus a lot on Levittown with talking about starter homes in large part because it's probably the most well documented suburb in America. But what I found in Levittown, and I do think these. The census records show that this can be applied elsewhere as well, is that the average stay in levittown in the 1950s is something like five years, remarkably short. People are in and out pretty quickly, and they move for many reasons. We sometimes forget that the initial Levittown houses were very small. The first cape Cod were 750 square feet, two bedrooms, one bathroom, an attic above, unfinished, that could be expanded. So you picture a young couple moving in, maybe having a second or third kid and starting to think about you either need to do a big renovation project or move to a bigger house. To a bigger house. I should say also that federal lawmakers made a lot of key policy changes to tax and mortgage insurance policies in particular to help facilitate resales. But this all could not have happened without the houses appreciating in value. It's very expensive to move. You know, another down payment for a more expensive house, all the realtor fees and so on. But just. Just to say it again, and actually, I think this connects to what we were talking about, this is what happens, I show in the book, in between the initial rush to the suburbs and the kind of vicious informal housing in the 1970s, is people are in and out moving very quickly. You know, schools are overcrowded. We can move, right? The, you know, things aren't working out. We can move. And this is all premised on a. In a very tight window in the 1950s of rising wages, low interest rates, abundant credit, and very generous tax and insurance policies that make it possible. And all of those conditions fall apart in the 1960s and 70s. And so I think you see the rise of informal rentals even in all white suburbs by the 1970s, because suddenly that option is off the table very quickly. But in the 1950s and 60s, it's just remarkable. And I do think this is a very important part of the racial wealth gap that we've missed, that people are moving several times. They're trying to time it just right when the values are going up and taking advantage of all these tax loopholes. I mean, in the book, I call this speculation that homeowners, ordinary homeowners, are learning to become speculators, you know, and that's a loaded term. And I think we can understand speculation as a continuum. They're not moving only for the higher values, but they're coming to expect it. That my house will go up in value. This is a common assumption about real estate today. Buy a house, it'll go up in value and you'll be more wealthy. You know, that's, that's an incredible world that I think emerges in the 1950s and is facilitating these, these resales. And so I think we should count this high mobility, the whole starter home mentality as yet another of the legacies of redlining.
- [49:47]
C
Yeah, yeah, definitely. It almost makes me think too about how I'm assuming during this kind of era of, you know, everybody thinks their house is going to increase in value. It's a good investment because it's going to grow your money eventually when you decide to move. But it almost makes me think about just where financial literacy in this sense emerges and where it becomes this expectation that if you're putting a down payment on a home, you are going to be well versed with how to make that, that asset, how to get the most out of it to speculate on the housing market. Are we going to invest into our home? Are we going to move all of these different things that I don't know. It's a very complicated system and it almost seems like it was only becoming more complicated during this, this time. And I guess I just. Now I'm like thinking of like your second book could probably be entirely about homeowners, you know, having either resources to learn that financial literacy and to, you know, continue this like, cycle of buying and reselling a couple times throughout their lives, or homeowners maybe being kind of excluded from those spheres in which they'd be learning that knowledge then. Now my wheels are turning and I'm like, more inequality. It never ends well.
- [51:11]
D
I think also it's. I think the book helps contribute to. I think it's important to historicize these things. Right. So if you read real estate propaganda, I mean, you'll say people have all. Everyone always wants to be a homeowner because it's always great, you know. Right. And you can find that propaganda through U.S. history. If we go to this post war generation and think about them, you know, say you were 25, you know, veteran family, your parents have lived through the Great Depression, and they've seen the foreclosures, they've seen the whole housing market collapse. So much so that we had to invent these new instruments of federal insurance in 1930s to rescue the housing and mortgage industry. And so, you know, back to that initial story with Irene Melee. I mean, we can never know and we can never prove what people are thinking. But my interpretation is that in this initial moment, the initial Russia suburbs, it's a housing shortage, it's desperation, it's fomo. It's the best housing option on the table for those who are able to access it. I think what happens when people get there is there's a learning process. Oh, wait, I have to fix that leaky roof. Oh, wait, there's no sewers here. Oh, wait, the schools are overcrowded. Those realtors said the schools would be perfect and they're very overcrowded. Oh, wait, now a realtor's knocking on my door and saying, my house is worth more. Maybe we could sell it and move somewhere else. Right. And then to zoom out, I think what's happened historiographically is we've had so much great urban history and particularly studies of racial inequality that really took off in the post civil rights generation, the 80s, 90s, 2000s. But that's all kind of happening as this system, at least big picture, seems to be functioning well. Right. But now I'm kind of one of these jaded millennial babies. Like I said, the beginning grew up. Post 2008, it's all meltdown again. And so I think partly what I'm going back to, what I'm doing in the book, is to go back and say, oh, wait, well, maybe, maybe this whole system that a lot of people assumed was working relatively well in the mid 20th century, maybe there were a lot of problems here. Right. And that we shouldn't be so surprised that eventually all fell apart. Spectacular in 2008. If anything, it's. It's surprising it took so long for that. Right?
- [53:35]
C
Yeah. Yeah. That's really fascinating. Just kind of, kind of thinking on your conclusion and everything. And I know we've covered a little bit of this, but just to kind of kind of wrap up your book, how my readers kind of think about post war America differently. This, you know, this dream of home ownership, this, this wonderful time, this like, romanticized vision that we have of that white picket fence and like these suburbs and that being such a. Such a moment in American history. That, again, is just so romanticized. How Might they maybe think about that a little bit differently and maybe reflect on deep structural foundations of inequality in contemporary America differently after reading Cracked Foundations?
- [54:24]
D
Well, I'm glad that you're thinking in these terms, because one of my main goals for the book is to really challenge how we think about the post war era, not just for housing and education in Nassau county, but in a larger sense. So this was supposedly the greatest generation of America, the golden age of capitalism, a really hopeful time when homeownership was expanding, educational opportunities were opening, and certainly comparatively, to many of the struggles today, it often feels like a time when more Americans were experiencing prosperity and economic security. Yes, we now have a greater appreciation for how many people were excluded and left out. But I think the big kind of fuzzy sense still kind of holds. And I think we see this play out that the impulse, even in politics today, is often to try and restore certain elements of the post war era. And this nostalgia, I think, takes many different forms. For conservatives, it coheres around make America great again. And of course, the fall of question always is when exactly was America great and for whom? And it's often implied, rolling back some of the gains from the civil rights, feminist and LGBTQ movements, and now increasingly in the current administration, explicitly rolling those things back. So you have that version of the nostalgia. But progressives sometimes do this as well. We've seen a lot of organizing in recent years around a green New Deal and in charting a course through the climate crisis. I think the analogy here is to, excuse me, the impulse here is to try to draw an analogy to a time in American history when federal government did big, ambitious things. I'm more sympathetic to this campaign, but I also have real hesitations. Yes, the New Deal did a lot of great things, but the New Deal that I look at in my book is more mixed for housing. It often looked like institutionalized redlining and the. The profiteering unleashed by those instruments. For education, it looks like delegating a lot of essential features like school construction to Wall street loans. Right, which was not covered. Education famously not covered by the New Deal. And so I have questions here about this nostalgia. And then in the last couple years, we've seen centrists mobilize around this agenda of abundance, and it's less explicit, but it's still kind of historical. The story is we used to build things, but now Americans are mired in so many regulations, whether it be zoning or environmental regulations, labor regulations, so on. And sure, I think we can all agree that there's a shortage of housing today. But I would have questions about what kind of housing and where. I don't think the impulse should be just build anything anywhere, because I don't think we need a repeat of the post war era. Single family houses everywhere, totally neglect public infrastructure. Especially now, what we know about the dangers of climate change. Right. To be much more careful. So for all these political formations, I think we, and there's probably more we could identify, I think they cohere around this ambition to restore certain aspects of post war America. But my book really tries to dispel these versions of it, not only to set the record straight, but to point toward a different set of solutions. And so what the book I think shows is that so many of the problems we see today, whether it be segregation, affordable housing, school funding, didn't happen because we lost something from the golden post war era. Instead, a lot of decisions made in that period have produced these problems. It's cumulative, it's added up over time. So instead of restoration, I think my book says we need to think that true solutions would be thinking about fundamental changes, not just getting more people of color into all white suburbs, not just making more people homeowners, not just making minor tweaks to our education system. So really thinking about how to redesign them. And so to return to the central metaphor of the book, when you're, when the foundation of your house is cracked, you know, it calls for major repairs and maybe even rebuilding the whole thing. So I think we need something similar certainly for housing and education in this country.
- [59:04]
C
Absolutely. Thank you very much for that. Very well said. And I really enjoyed reading this book. Truly. The introduction here, I was like, this is one of the most well articulated introductions that I've read in a while. So, yeah, for our listeners, 12 out of 10, please give it a read. It's so enjoyable. It's academic, but it's like engaging and it doesn't feel like you're. It doesn't feel like you're gonna go to sleep if you're a little too cozy while you're reading it. It's just, it's all around a very balanced book. But I always love to ask, what are you working on now? This is your first book project, so where are we headed? I hope you're taking a little bit of a break, but after that, yes.
- [59:47]
D
Trying to take a break, but I'm actually shifting my focus to something pretty different. I've started working on a new project about wildfires in California. And so I'm, I'm personal.
- [59:58]
C
Well, not fun, but fun that you're switching gears.
- [60:00]
D
Yeah, yeah. So I'm, you know, really concerned about climate change. I've been horrified by the fires in LA this year, but they're certainly not unprecedented. So I'm looking at the kind of long history, particularly in housing and real estate, that basically put so many people, so many houses in the path of these wildfires. And I think in some ways it can be seen as an extension of my first book that our housing systems are one of the key generators of this environmental risk that a lot of people are experiencing.
- [60:36]
C
Yeah, absolutely. That's very interesting. And I can see your intellectual curiosity of, like, why are we putting housing in places housing shouldn't be? And weirdly, I'm seeing some overlap with. With this one, just kind of where. Where your curiosity is. So sounds like a very good project and just really exciting next steps for you. For our listeners, Cracked Foundations, Debt and Inequality in Suburban America, published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. It's available wherever you get your books. It is out to this week, October 7th. Michael, thank you so much for being on the show today. I really enjoyed chatting with you. Really just overall, wonderful discussion.
- [61:18]
D
Thank you. This has been great. Limu Emu and Doug Limu and I always tell you to customize your car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual, but now we want you to feel it. Cue the Emu music. Limu.
- [61:43]
C
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D
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C
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- [61:52]
D
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