But mostly he blames America's inability to deal with race, asserting that whites simply don't want to live with blacks and will continue to move out further and further to prevent that from happening.
Suarez passes blame around freely for what happened to the cities and their neighborhoods, citing the loss of inner-city manufacturing jobs, crime, the decline of urban schools, and the increased availability of the automobile and development of highway systems.
One of the best things about the book-no doubt a product of Suarez's radio background-is its tendency for extended quotes, where the voices of his interview subjects more fully emerge. The Old Neighborhood makes its case with an effective mix of data and quotes from interviews with community organizers, government officials, people who stayed in the cities, and those who left. He visited a number of cities-including Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Miami, and Washington-to find out what went wrong. With a great deal of sadness, NPR host Ray Suarez chronicles the effects of the American migration from cities to suburbs in the second half of the 20th century. It is a book about "old neighborhoods" that were once cherished, and are now lost. It is a book not just for first- and second-generation Americans, but for anyone who remembers the prewar cities or wonders how we could have gotten to where we are. The Old Neighborhood captures a crucial chapter in the experience of postwar America. The result is a rich tapestry of voices and history. He has talked to longtime residents, recent arrivals, and recent departures community organizers, priests, cops, and politicians and scholars who have studied neighborhoods, demographic trends, and social networks. Ray Suarez, veteran interviewer and host of NPR's "Talk of the Nation®," is a child of Brooklyn who has long been fascinated with the stories behind the largest of our once-great cities. Since then, especially since the mid-60s, a way of life has simply vanished. In 1950, except for Los Angeles, the top ten American cities were all in the Northeast or Midwest, and all had populations over 800,000. One in seven of us can directly connect our lineage through just one city, Brooklyn. This life in "the old neighborhood," so lyrically captured by Ray Suarez, was once lived by a huge number of Americans.
A concertina maybe? A family Bible? A hunting rifle?" Their material life was made of the things they didn't have to eat, wear, or burn right this minute. For most, the home was not a display object but a place to keep the few things they had managed to hold on to from the surpluses produced by their labor. "Life in the city, for the millions who lived it, was once something less than the sum of their lifestyle choices: they woke up, they ate, they shoveled coal, loved, hated, prayed, mated, reproduced, died.
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