Welcome to the Lost Debata Show for Politically Ecclectics.

I'm Ravi Gupta.

Today we're going to talk about the suburbs.

And I have a wonderful guest.

As soon as I saw this book, I asked our producer to reach out to Benjamin Harold, who wrote this book called Disillusioned, Five Families in the Unraveling of America's Suburbs.

And I love this book because it touches on so much of what we have

been discussing for years on this podcast, which is the American dream, what families want, the history

from the turn of last century to today, and how suburbs have evolved, how people's expectations

have evolved, how the demographics have evolved. All of these are items I know

will touch on. I mean, I think what I love about this book is, you know, I used to run a seminar

in New York City history. There's like no end to the amount of urban historians we have in this

country. There is a rich and amazing history of these just titanic figures like Robert Caro who've written about why cities are the

way they are. But we don't really talk enough about suburbs and we don't even acknowledge that

suburbs have a history. And Benjamin, Ben, has done such a tremendous job here. Ben, welcome to the

podcast. Thanks so much for having me. Let's talk about the sort of

structure of this book first. So you decided, instead of just writing a sort of linear history,

you took a different approach where you followed a series of families and communities. Talk a

little bit about that and how you chose those families and communities.

Yeah, thanks. I think I tried to approach this story from two angles.

So one, I really want readers to see and understand that there is this big common cycle of racialized development and decline that really functions almost like a Ponzi scheme that is really sweeping

through and shaping the

fate and the trajectory of suburban areas all over the country. And so it's like trying to, on one hand,

...