Table Topic questions are meant to stimulate family and classroom discussion.
Use the questions below after reading,"The booming of the 'burbs"
- Cheap land and cheap government loans to veterans made the dream of home ownership
available to many Americans for the first time. The net result was an expanding middle class of
upwardly mobile Americans. Is home ownership a key to inclusion in the middle class? If so,
what does that mean for Generation-Xers that can't afford today's housing market, and for
long-term social structure? Are government policies in place today to help people become home owners?
- The Lake Hills development was the first huge mass-marketed subdivision in our region.
"Suburban pioneers" moved there without basic services but a lot of hope. What do you guess that
original $13,000 investment in a field of mud is worth today? Why was it feared by some of the
Bellevue community? Is there any comparison between this fear and recent fears generated by the
concept of Urban Villages in city neighborhoods?
- The suburbanization of the '50s could be characterized
as the expansion of the American Dream or the development of a crassly material,
conformist lifestyle. Which of these assessments do you think is correct? What did Americans want
from a suburban lifestyle? Has it been achieved in the decades since? Was there something missing?
Is the current trend toward or away from the suburbs and why?
- Utopia was a term used both to explain migration to suburbia and to satirize it.
Utopian thinking and utopian social experiments have a long history in America, with
recent manifestations in-back-to-the land movements, communes and urban co-housing.
What kind of utopia would you like to live in? Could you make it work in reality?
- Babies and the suburbs boomed together-- in 1957,
an American baby was born every seven seconds. The suburban lifestyle was primarily a white
single family lifestyle. When the first black family moved into Lake Hills in 1958, what do you
think they experienced? Has suburbia since diversified to include ethnic populations, and single,
widowed, or retired people? How diverse is your own neighborhood and has it changed in the last 40 years?
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