Word: suburbias
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...such writers as Max Shulman (Rally Round the Flag, Boys!) and Peter De Vries (The Mackerel Plaza), elaborated more darkly in John Cheever's Bullet Park. The stereotype was neither wholly wrong nor wholly accurate. But those who have taken the trouble to look carefully have recognized that suburbia has been steadily changing. Today the demographic realities are radically different from the cliché, a change that is clearly documented in a TIME-Louis Harris survey of more than 1,600 suburban Americans in 100 different communities across the land...
...census sees it, suburbia also includes such unlikely terrain as Cascade County, around Great Falls, Mont. -lightly populated towns in flat, rolling wheat country-and Minnehaha County, surrounding Sioux Falls, S. Dak., mainly onetime farming towns that have increasingly become dormitory communities. Northwestern University Sociologist Raymond Mack says a suburb has only two distinct characteristics: proximity to a big city and specific political boundaries, which result in local control of government. Most of the people whom Harris questioned do not even think of themselves as suburbanites. More often, they would say that they live in a small city, a town...
Sociologists have made studies of single suburbs, or the suburbs of a single city, or of specific aspects of suburbia (such as politics or race), but they have never attempted a systematic nationwide classification of the types of towns that make up suburbia. Louis Harris and his polltakers set out to do just that for TIME. "Our goal," he says, "was to examine suburban complexity and to find a systematic way of classifying suburban communities that would shed light on the real differences that exist within the wide and expanding belt between the cities and the small towns and farms...
...recognize patterns among the characteristics of suburbs covered by the survey data, the Harris staff discovered that the interplay of two particular factors -income level and rate of growth-can be used to classify suburbs in four groups. The result is a new four-way typology of American suburbia. Each kind of suburb has distinctive traits, though no single suburb precisely fits the Harris statistical model (see boxes). The four composite types: AFFLUENT BEDROOM. Of the four classes of suburb in the Harris catalogue, this is the only one that comes close to fitting the stereotypical conception...
...earn their living close to home. This tends to be upward-mobile blue collar country, where incomes are substantially lower than in the affluent suburbs: only 9% of the residents earn $15,000 or more. Still, four out of five are homeowners. Protestants predominate even more than in wealthier suburbia: they make up 64% of the population, and there are practically no Jews. Most townspeople claim a Democratic political preference, but Nixon won handily here in 1968. Interestingly, the Wallace vote-11%-was no greater than in the Affluent Bedroom communities. Exactly half of the residents rate their town above...