Michael Glass, "Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Oct 7, 2025

Michael Glass, an assistant professor of history, discusses his book, which reveals how debt and speculation shaped the suburban American experience. He highlights the myth of uniform prosperity in suburbs, using Nassau County as a case study to show inequalities. Personal narratives illustrate systemic issues, especially for marginalized communities facing predatory lending. Glass critiques the prioritization of single-family homes, linking it to the affordable housing crisis. His insights challenge postwar policies, advocating for a redesign of housing and education systems.

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ANECDOTE

From Bronx Classrooms To Suburban Research

Michael Glass recounts his 2008 graduation and teaching in Bronx schools as formative experiences driving his research interest in housing and education inequality.
He links personal encounters with failing school resources and the 2008 housing meltdown to his focus on suburban finance and segregation.

ANECDOTE

The Model Home That Wasn't

Glass opens Chapter One with Irene Mele buying a model home that later suffered cracked foundations and flooding.
Her story illustrates how FHA/VA insurance protected lenders, not homeowners, turning promises into precarious ownership.

INSIGHT

Federal Insurance Secured Lenders, Not Buyers

FHA and VA insurance guaranteed lenders, not construction quality, creating an illusion of homeowner security.
The policy prioritized rapid volume over durable housing and turned mortgages into the primary social support.

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How debt and speculation financed the suburban American dream and led to today’s inequalities

In the popular imagination, the suburbs are synonymous with the “American Dream” of upward mobility and economic security. After World War II, white families rushed into newly built suburbs, where they accumulated wealth through homeownership and enjoyed access to superior public schools. In this revelatory new account of postwar suburbanization, historian Michael R. Glass exposes the myth of uniform suburban prosperity. Focusing on the archetypal suburbs of Long Island, Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) uncovers a hidden landscape of debt and speculation.

Glass shows how suburbanites were not guaranteed decent housing and high-quality education but instead had to obtain these necessities in the marketplace using home mortgages and municipal bonds. These debt instruments created financial strains for families, distributed resources unevenly across suburbs, and codified racial segregation. Most important, debt transformed housing and education into commodities, turning homes and schools into engines of capital accumulation. The resulting pressures made life increasingly precarious, even for those privileged suburbanites who resided in all-white communities. For people of color denied the same privileges, suburbs became places where predatory loans extracted wealth and credit rating agencies punished children in the poorest school districts. Long Islanders challenged these inequalities over several decades, demanding affordable housing, school desegregation, tax equity, and school-funding equalization. Yet the unequal circumstances created by the mortgages and bonds remain very much in place, even today.

Cracked Foundations not only transforms our understanding of housing, education, and inequality but also highlights how contemporary issues like the affordable housing crisis and school segregation have their origins in the postwar golden age of capitalism.

Guest: Michael Glass (he/him) is a political and urban historian of the twentieth-century United States, with research and teaching interests in racism, capitalism, and inequality. Michael is an Assistant Professor of History at Boston College.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: here

Linktree: here

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