Commentary on “The New Metropolitan History”

These three essays resituate metropolitan expansion, complicating simplistic narratives of white flight and capital flight with more complex realities of political place-making. These essays make an argument for what Hillary Jenks calls “place entrepreneurism” and Andrew Highsmith names “metropolitan capitalism,” but it is not simply market actors at work in these three deeply grounded essays: politicians, homeowners, racialized groups, and business-interest groups all operate in often unstable alliances in these case studies, together helping to create what Philip Ethington has called the “segregated diversity” of American suburbia. ¹ While subtly navigating issues of overlapping scales—situating individual domestic households within school districts, regional areas, and transnational global networks—these essays examine negotiations between the various public and private forces of metropolitan growth.

In addition to “segregated diversity,” the other term that recurs in all three essays is the “industrial garden,” which Robert Self has identified as a twentieth-century vision of single-family houses interspersed with small and large factories in a landscape lightly coordinated by liberal state activism, a pastoral landscape that was expected to bloom with good jobs and stable homeownership in a garden image that evaded issues of conflict. ² These essays focus on the conflicts that inevitably arose between competing interest groups within America’s postwar industrial gardens, studying the negotiations that get concealed behind labels like “white flight” or “capital flight.”

One surprising lesson that we can draw from these essays is the limited power of corporate capital. While capital sought a smaller governing area in Los Angeles and a bigger governing area in Flint, in both cases, the power of corporate capital was thwarted by homeowner groups and racial-identity groups. This is interesting, partly because the categories of capitalist, homeowner, and racialized person are far from mutually exclusive. Indeed, Hillary Jenks shows that in Gardena, people like Bruce Kaji and Ken Nakaoko were simultaneously members of all three categories.

Homeowners may be capitalists, but that is like saying that farmers are business-owners: historically, they haven’t always seen their interests aligned. Homeowners in Flint wanted to preserve their suburban identity, while in the San Fernando Valley they wanted slow growth; in both cases they perceived their interests at odds with the corporate capitalists’ economic calculations. Perhaps the term “capital” is uselessly broad. While large corporations may seek predictable and affordable government services in metropolitan regions like Flint, realtors and developers seek to differentiate space into commodifiable neighborhoods like the San Fernando Valley, and homeowners often seek both low property taxes and high property values, in economic calculations that can become impossibly contradictory. When corporate interests do succeed, in Gardena, it is partly because capital flows along cultural channels of kinship and language.

Homeowners’ economic calculations overlap uneasily with cultural issues of social identity, school quality, community feeling, and political power. Indeed, in Andrew Highsmith’s research, we are left with the unsettling conclusion that the corporate executives of GM in the 1950s and 1960s had a better, more comprehensive vision for Flint’s regional future than the shortsighted suburban homeowners, small-town politicians, and state courts.

In addition to the limited power of corporate capital, all these essays also highlight the deep power of race to create space. Blacks in Flint, Latinos in the San Fernando Valley, and Japanese Americans in Gardena each managed to thwart the desires of corporate capital in the first two instances and support transnational capital in the third.

If homeowners aren’t quite capitalists, they are—outside of Gardena—suspiciously white. In the political discourse of Los Angeles’s Valley and Flint, Michigan, it seems that “homeowner” was a euphemism for “white.” Even in Gardena, they were what Hillary Jenks has termed “honorary whites.” It is likely that there were Latino members of the Valley’s HOAs, but that the HOA leaders’ own prejudices led them to overlook their Latino peers, despite their supposed color-blind rhetoric of empowerment. It is equally likely that union members, and even black union members, were also suburban homeowners near Flint. In examining the complex alliances between racialized groups, class representatives, and representatives of homeowners, we might do well to remember the overlap that these groups’ own representatives overlooked. Conversely, when there is a clearly perceived overlap between business groups, homeowners, and racialized groups, as in Gardena, one wonders who is left out of those tight-knit networks and if there is a downside to Gardena’s global ties.

Together, these essays document the late twentieth-century shift from the liberal ideology of the “industrial garden” to neoliberal ideologies of low taxes, lean government, and public–private partnerships that did not always succeed, as they were thwarted by schisms within capitalists and trenchant ideas of racialized, spatial identities.