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Nineteenth-century Chicago developed by selling the idea of widespread homeownership. At a time when the definition of suburb was narrowing, Chicago’s early suburbs were nevertheless diverse, including industrial suburbs, racially diverse suburbs, and many spaces where workers struggled to achieve homeownership. Working-class and elite Chicagoans helped develop the American dream of homeownership and positioned Chicago as a paradigmatic American city.

Between 1900 and 1940, Flint rose to prominence as the manufacturing hub for General Motors. As America’s national obsession with automobiles took root, Flint, a quintessential company town, attracted tens of thousands of migrants to work in its manufacturing and assembly plants. This rapid, largely unplanned growth spawned a series of housing, utility, and public health emergencies that shocked company officials, city commissioners, and members of the local housing industry. The bulk of this chapter explores local efforts to resolve the housing crisis during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s and the racial, spatial, and economic considerations that drove Flint’s interwar building program. During this period, local citizens and government administrators from the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) hardened the residential color line by encouraging the spread of racially restrictive housing covenants and formalizing mortgage redlining programs. By the beginning of World War II, redlining and other forms of policy-driven segregation had helped make Flint one of the most racially divided cities in the United States. Ironically, though, dozens of working-class suburbs just beyond Flint’s borders, many of them all white, also suffered during this period due to the FHA’s suburban redlining policies.

This chapter explores the political and social realities of the banlieues (suburbs). Over the last twenty-five years, the term banlieues has been mostly used as a synonym for cités, as the housing projects in working-class suburbs are known, or for grands-ensembles, a term representing the high-rise towers and low-rise blocks that constitute the projects' material and architectural form. All three terms now refer to the persistent social and economic problems of France's impoverished neighborhoods. The suburb has become a metaphor of social isolation and distress and the primary symptom of postindustrial France's sluggish economic growth and rising social inequalities. Banlieues, cités, and grands-ensembles have fueled an inflating discourse of panic, which, in its different guises, presents these territories as a threat to the social and political fabric of the French Republic.

Federal housing programs helped to modernize Flint’s working-class suburbs and make them safe for investment. Prior to the 1950s, federal mortgage underwriters and local real estate investors generally favored all-white urban neighborhoods over the poorly serviced, predominantly jerrybuilt suburbs of Genesee County. During the 1930s and 1940s, FHA administrators practiced suburban redlining in areas of the out-county that did not meet federal service and infrastructure requirements. In Flint and elsewhere, federal policies forced suburbanites to develop new municipal services and modern political infrastructures as prerequisites to gaining FHA mortgages. While suburban policymakers worked to meet these standards, federal and local officials rewarded all-white neighborhoods in the city with thousands of new mortgages. Viewing integration as a detriment to property values, these same officials also practiced policy-driven segregation by denying African Americans the opportunity to purchase homes in all-white areas. Although white homeowners received many inducements to move to the suburbs, they also paid high taxes in order to meet FHA standards. Cognizant of the tax burdens they accumulated by building new schools, roads, and sewers, many homeowners embraced a secessionist brand of suburban capitalism during the 1950s that ultimately led to a host of municipal incorporations outside the city.

This chapter explores the theme of exclusion as a central feature of socialist culture and workers’ social experience. The urban geographies of worker settlement in overcrowded, unhygienic suburbs created a sense of exclusion from the bourgeois-dominated centers of Vienna, Prague, and elsewhere. To some extent, this common experience fostered internationalist solidarity among workers. But workers also felt excluded from their respective national communities—a sentiment heightened by accusations of national indifference made against them by middle-class nationalists. Political upheavals in 1897 compelled socialists to respond more aggressively to such charges and take a clearer stance on their national identities. Increasingly, the workers’ movement was envisaged as a legitimate site of genuine national feeling and commitment.