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

Oct 7, 2025

Michael Glass, an assistant professor of history at Boston College, explores the hidden complexities of suburban America in his latest work. He discusses how debt and speculation shaped the post-war suburban dream, revealing that homeownership and education weren't just privileges but commodities tied to financial strains and racial segregation. Glass shares personal narratives that highlight these systemic failures and how Black homeowners faced predatory practices. His insights redefine our understanding of suburban prosperity and emphasize the need for policy reform.

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ANECDOTE

Teaching Sparked The Research

Michael Glass recounts teaching in Bronx high schools with broken resources and understaffing that contrasted with his suburban upbringing.
Those experiences drove his research questions about why educational inequalities persist and how suburbs shaped them.

ANECDOTE

Model Home Became Nightmare

Glass opens with Irene Mele's story of buying a model home that revealed cracked foundations and flooding after the first rain.
Homebuyers had federal mortgage insurance but not guarantees of construction quality, exposing them to shoddy building practices.

INSIGHT

Federal Insurance Insured Lenders

FHA and VA insurance protected lenders and builders, not homeowners, creating an illusion of security for buyers.
That arrangement prioritized rapid construction and volume over durable housing quality.

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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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