Marshall here.

Welcome back to the realignment.

Today's episode is all about America suburbs and what their fate means for the American

dream. I spoke with the author

Benjamin Herald about his new book, Disillusioned, Five Families in the unravelling of

America Subgroups. Suburbs have always been a touchy subject.

On the one hand, ever since World War II

and the construction of highway-fueled lava towns,

they've been seen as the clear path

to property ownership, good schools, safety,

and an upwardly mobile middle-class lifestyle.

Another hand, the early suburbs were explicitly racially exclusive and were tied up in debates around desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1990s suburbs were seen as colorless and deadening.

Think back to Kevin Spacey in American Beauty.

In the 2000s they represented the to Kevin Spacey in American Beauty.

In the 2000s, they represented the McMansion Excess

that fueled the 2008 financial crisis.

Benjamin, in this conversation and his book,

builds on the idea that when you look at the

foundations of suburbia in the 20-20s you don't just find the fault lines around

culture, race, and the economy that I mentioned previously, but instead you also find a broken

foundation that looks a lot like a Ponzi scheme. He does this by performing the stories of five

...