Search results

American suburbia changed drastically over the past century. Once home to wealthy white enclaves, suburbs opened to the masses after World War II through federal housing and infrastructure programs. A population shift from the American Rustbelt cities in the North and Midwest to the South and Southwest fueled the growth of new suburbs. The rise since the 1970s of global immigration from Central and South America as well as Asia helped diversify the country with the majority of this population relocating to suburbs rather than central cities. Located 20miles outside Atlanta, GA, Gwinnett County provides an opportunity to examine how these trends have manifested. Using this county as a case study, this chapter describes how Gwinnett has evolved over three periods of growth. From its founding in the 1820s to the 1960s, the area was dominated by small towns and an agricultural-based economy separated by elites and locals. The development of infrastructure led to the New Suburban phase from the 1970s to 1990s. A national migration of rustbelters coupled with regionals from the rural South made Gwinnett an upscale, white, upper middle class Republican area. As Gwinnett became one of the country's fasted growing counties, problems from urban sprawl appeared. In the third phase, Avoiding Slumburbia, Gwinnett wrestles with deteriorating older suburban corridors while adjusting to an influx of international migration. By 2009 Gwinnett became a majority minority county. This chapter looks at Gwinnett as a national example of a rapidly growing suburban area within a quickly expanding metropolitan area that is representative of current American suburbanization trends.

In 1975, private and social housing production in Chile started to become increasingly privatized, in parallel with capital switching into the secondary circuit due to severe deindustrialization of the country. Since then, housing demand has largely drawn on state housing subsidies aimed at middle- to low-income demand, but more recently, a growing financialized mortgage market has increased demand even further, enlarging the mortgage debt burden on Chilean households. Private housing producers achieve higher profits by increasing sales prices, whilst production costs are kept relatively stable by purchasing and developing the cheapest land available, both on the fringes and within the inner sectors of the main metropolitan areas, as a form of accumulation by dispossession in hitherto underexploited, non-commodified land. However, low purchase prices of land create housing unaffordability for numbers of original owner-residents who sell land to redevelopers but cannot then afford replacement accommodation given the soaring housing prices in the main metropolises. It is for this reason that some central areas become gentrified. Focusing on the case of high-rise redevelopment of inner-city areas in Santiago, Chile, this paper addresses the extent to which demand and private developers’ profits increase alongside the risks of a generalized growing level of household debt and the displacement of low-income communities from inner areas. The continuous expansion of the extremely privatized housing market of Santiago responds to the needs of capital expansion rather than to the people’s needs.