January 24, 2024
Courtesy/Penguin Random House
'Disillusioned,' by Philly-based journalist Benjamin Herold, explores how America's suburbs have changed over the years. The book was released Tuesday.
Benjamin Herold is a longtime Philadelphia journalist, but it was his hometown of Penn Hills, a suburb of Pittsburgh, where he found inspiration for his new book "Disillusioned."
"These headlines started coming out of my hometown that totally caught me off guard," Herold said. "I was really surprised and stunned by all this bad news coming out of this suburban (community) that I had honestly kind of forgotten about."
Herold, a former reporter for WHYY and Education Week, graduated from high school in 1994 and has barely lived Penn Hills since. A few years ago, though, he started seeing reports about his former school district's debt to the tune of $172 million, which caused teacher layoffs. Meanwhile, property taxes were going up but home values were stagnating, Herold said. An Allegheny County grand jury investigation said the situation was "catastrophic," making for a higher cost of living with a diminishing quality of public school experience.
Pretty soon, he learned that the area had changed since he lived there. Many opportunities afforded to his white, middle-class family — like new development, a lower cost of living and good school systems — were less available to the families of color who had moved in. (Penn Hills' public schools, which were 72% white in 1994, are now 63% Black.) Herold wanted to understand the area's changes, which led him to write "Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs." The book hit stores Tuesday.
Suburbia worked great for my white family.
— Benjamin Herold (@BenjaminBHerold) November 13, 2023
But a generation later, my hometown schools were crushed by a $172m debt, undermining the dreams of thousands of Black families.
I wrote this book because the same cycle threatens a suburb near you.
Preorder: https://t.co/Hzkb61YZVZ pic.twitter.com/q9lBmJerXR
Herold spent four years researching and writing the book, which included spending time with families in towns outside of Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Penn Hills. He found that many families of color were experiencing racial hostility, harassment, bullying and limited access to opportunities. In the book, parents share stories about the difficulties faced when trying to enroll a child in a school's gifted program, segregation and teachers who seem to punish students of color more than their white counterparts. One family shares how Compton, California, doesn't feel like a suburb anymore and instead feels like an extension of Los Angeles.
"Everyone wants what's best for their kids, and everyone sees education as a key role for that, but they're dealing with very different contexts and bringing very different dreams and aspirations and backgrounds to the story," Herold said.
Herold, who lives in Philadelphia, thinks folks in towns like Cheltenham, Pennridge, Quakertown and Neshaminy will see some of their own experiences reflected in his book. He said his family enjoyed many heavily subsidized opportunities in Penn Hills, including tax breaks, low taxes and guaranteed mortgage loans, but that new families aren't getting those same benefits and are dealing with costly infrastructure issues.
"Families of color who (moved in) ended up on the hook for paying to repair and renew all this infrastructure, for expanded services and so forth," Herold said. "It's the feeling of having this experience that is not what you expected, and that is often hostile and aggressive."
With "Disillusioned," Herold said he hopes readers can see the changing world of America's suburbs. He feels that's where many Americans have invested their hopes and dreams to give their families better lives, and that many people aren't experiencing what they hoped to experience living there.
"(When you're) having these hostile experiences, having a lack of opportunity, having these financial problems thrown in (your) lap, there's a real crumbling of the dreams that bring us to suburbia in the first place, and that's a really significant thing," Herold said.
