I just don’t grok certain statements by our current President regarding American suburbia. To hear him talk you’d think that it’s all Mayfield, where the Cleavers raised Wally and Beaver on Mapleton Drive, where everybody has a stay-at-home Mom who wears high heels and pearls in the kitchen, where Dad arrives home from work soon after 5:00 PM, where everybody’s white and middle class, where most families are two-parent nuclear.
But Mayfield was a fiction even back in the 1950s. I grew up in suburbia: first Spring Branch on the west side of Houston, then Westcliff on the west side of Fort Worth, finally Applewood on the west side of Denver. They were all upstanding places to live. But by no means were they filled with suburban housewives and working Dads, nor were they Anglo-Saxon across the board, nor were they homogenous.
After a lifetime in San Francisco I have returned to my natural suburban habitat, this time on the far eastern edge of the SF Bay Area. Brentwood is in many ways the quintessential American suburb: long a Delta farm town, it saw rapid suburban evolution starting in the 1990s. Although many of the farms, vineyards, and orchards have survived the transformation, Brentwood has morphed into a small city of landscaped developments dotted with parks and schools and shopping malls, traversed via wide streets. Quiet, safe, and clean, it’s a haven for families with kids, for retirees, really for anyone seeking escape from the grittier realities and/or stratospheric pricing of inner Bay Area cities such as San Francisco or Oakland. It’s as pleasant a place to live as one could possibly imagine.
My street is a one-block cul-de-sac, built in the early 1990s and lined with sixteen houses of similar design, on three basic floor plans. Each house has two stories with a minimum of four bedrooms; each is on a 6000-some-odd square-foot lot, each has a full front yard and back yard with side yards/paths, each has a three-car garage, each is in a contemporary Mediterranean design with red tile roof and stucco exterior. The street is old enough for the trees to have grown to full height but is still reasonably new, if perhaps getting on a bit by suburban standards. It’s a lovely little street, homey and welcoming.
It looks like a California version of Mapleton Drive. But is it sixteen houses of Cleavers? No way. Consider:
Two black families, one Caribbean and the other Californian, one with kids
Four young-to-middle-aged couples, one Asian, one Hispanic/Anglo mix, all with children, all with both parents working
Three retired couples, two Hispanic, with grown kids and grandkids who come & go
An unmarried Afghani couple with a son; the woman works, the man does not
A working divorced woman with two daughters
An indolent older man with a live-in handyman/charity case and two dubious lodgers
A divorced/remarried Hispanic man who lives elsewhere and uses his house for storage
A retired widower who lives alone
A young-ish couple, both working, no kids
A working single man (me)
Quite the diverse little neighborhood, but these days altogether typical of suburbia. Definitely not a place where suburban housewife par excellence June Cleaver stands over her immaculate kitchen sink and clutches her pearls in dismay over the thought of somebody different moving in and chipping away at her enviable quality of life. If our folk fret about anything, it’s that our geographical area needs more fire stations, and that Brentwood lacks a full-service hospital. That’s what matters to us. The ignorant flapdoodle of an overprivileged duffer is as unwelcome as it is meaningless.