Word: suburbias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...spring holds less flamboyant promises, as well. John Cheever has finished Bullet Park, a chronicle of fathers and sons and the communications chasm in suburbia. Kurt Vonnegut has found a subject that will support any amount of black humor and white rage, fire-bombing of Dresden-which he lived through as a war prisoner. In Pictures of Fidelman, Bernard Malamud writes of an impoverished painter who outwits a gang of forgers who force him to turn out a new Titian. From Paris comes The Fruits of Winter, the new Prix Goncourt winner that was the occasion for enough scheming...
LAST week the words that Malvina L Reynolds used in her celebrated 1964 folk song* to describe her view of the standardized world of suburbia's "little boxes on the hillside" seemed to assume new relevance. Two reports commissioned by the Federal Government-one on urban and the other on suburban problems-indicated that suburbia is hardly a refuge for those seeking escape from the blight of U.S. cities. The problems that have all but consumed many urban areas-the crime waves, the racial ghettos, the inadequate schools, the intermittent near collapse of essential services and the harshness...
...middle-class whites continue their exodus to the suburbs, they are more and more accompanied by lower-income whites and nonwhites who are also fleeing the cities-and bringing all their problems with them. But the black move to suburbia is much slower. Though the number of blacks living in the suburbs is expected to grow from 2.8 million in 1960 to 6.8 million in 1985, the white suburban population will grow from 52 million to 106 million. Already the suburbs lead the cities in population, 66 million to 59 million...
...city for the suburbs, revenue goes down while public-service costs go up because most of those who remain are poor. Welfare costs in New York City, for example, now consume $1.5 billion annually, the largest item in the city's $5-billion-plus budget. Welfare costs in suburbia are increasing at an even greater rate than those in the central cities...
...President's Task Force on Suburban Problems made a separate but parallel report, with the aid of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In suburbia, it says, "the dullness of existence is acutely felt by many older suburbanites and is often tragically reflected in the behavior of their children. Suburban vandalism, drug offenses and larceny by the young are on the rise." The report makes clear that it is no longer justified, if it ever was, to think of suburbia only as a split-level heaven with neat picket fences. In fact, the term suburbia has become...