Women in Suburbia Don’t Seem Too Worried About Its Destruction
by Emily Badger
“I don’t even think about it,” said Judy Jones about a series of apartment buildings half a block from her home in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington. She sounded surprised that she was supposed to be troubled by them. Even for the traffic they cause? Or the strain they put on local schools?
“Oh, no,” she said.
Ms. Jones, 72, grew up in Bloomington, when the local junior high and high school had no African-American students she could recall. “And now I go to my grandchildren’s school, and there is such diversity,” she said. “It’s just amazing.”
Demographic change and new development in the suburbs have no doubt unnerved some longtime residents (and studies suggest those unnerved residents speak the loudest in local politics, often blocking housing that would make communities more integrated and affordable). But those anxieties are hardly proving a decisive force in the presidential election.
If Mr. Trump hopes that fanning fears of suburban decline, following a summer of urban unrest, will help coax back some of the suburban women who have turned away from the Republican Party over the past four years, there is little evidence that it’s working.
In last week’s Times/Siena College polls in Minnesota and Wisconsin — two states particularly affected by unrest — Ms. Wonchoba, Ms. Jones and a majority of other suburban women said they would not be concerned if new apartments, subsidized housing developments or new neighbors with government housing vouchers came to their neighborhoods.
They also said, by a two-to-one margin, that they support government vouchers for lower-income families to live in more affluent communities. (On these questions, suburban women were relatively similar to suburban men.)
These views may reflect their professed values more than how they’d behave if low-income housing were proposed next door. Research has shown that even liberals who say they support welfare programs, integrated schools and affordable housing often object when it’s their own school or block at stake. But Mr. Trump’s warnings aren’t about a specific housing project down the street, or a particular suburb’s rezoning plan.
“His statements are abstract, and their statements are abstract,” said Jessica Trounstine, a political scientist at the University of California, Merced, referring to the polled attitudes of voters who say they support integration and housing vouchers. “There’s nothing on the ground going on here.”
These poll results don’t mean, in other words, that an affordable housing construction boom is about to start in the suburbs. Rather, they suggest that suburban housing integration isn’t an easy wedge issue in national politics.
In a separate national poll published by Monmouth this week, 74 percent of voters and 84 percent of suburban women said it was important to have more racially integrated neighborhoods. A majority of voters, in both categories, said efforts to increase integration in the suburbs were unlikely to lead to lower property values or more crime.
“Fear generally works best when it’s not something you can directly evaluate with experience,” said Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. It’s hard for many people to personally determine, for instance, whether “immigrants are taking American jobs.” It’s not so hard to evaluate the condition of your own neighborhood.
For this reason, Mr. Murray suspects that only voters inclined to believe these fears — who were probably supporting Mr. Trump anyway — will respond to them. And perhaps the strategy will help increase turnout of these voters. But it isn’t likely to convert many independent and moderate voters who had been leaning toward Mr. Biden.
Leslie Henschel, who voted third-party in 2016, had already come around to Mr. Trump before his recent pitch to suburban voters.
Those feelings, she said, are related to how she feels about her community; she has lived in the same home for 40 years. More nonwhite residents and renters have moved in. There are now more townhomes and apartments. Next door, the yard has gone neglected. “It’s gone downhill some,” she said of the community. “Now the neighbors are of a different caliber.”
Other suburban voters polled in the Times/Siena surveys and interviewed afterward described the president’s suburban comments as “fearmongering” and out of touch.
“What I hear him implying — or what he explicitly says — is that if he’s not president, then my community will be overrun by crime because low-income people do the crime,” said Ms. Wonchoba, 50, who plans to support Mr. Biden. “And I think that is the biggest joke in the world, because I think the biggest criminal right now is Donald Trump.”
The president has been effective in stirring fears about crime and disorder nationally, according to the Times/Siena polls and others this month. But those fears don’t translate into how voters feel about their own communities.
About 64 percent of suburban women surveyed in Wisconsin and Minnesota said they believed crime was a major problem in the United States. But only 7 percent described it as a major problem in their area. There are equally stark differences between national and local perceptions of lawlessness and unrest.
That suggests that while Mr. Trump has managed to heighten perceptions of disorder in the abstract — or perhaps in specific places like Portland, Ore. — few suburban voters believe that lawlessness is on their doorstep.
The president has also been speaking to issues that voters don’t typically think about in partisan terms, according to Lily Geismer, a historian at Claremont McKenna College who has studied suburban voters. Housing and zoning are also fundamentally local. And as much as Mr. Trump has tried to portray Mr. Biden as plotting to remake local communities, no president really has much power over where affordable housing is built.
“People understand that what happens in their neighborhood — their very specific neighborhood — is ultimately pretty detached from what happens in national politics,” said Clayton Nall, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In Wisconsin and Minnesota, suburban women said they did have concerns about their communities. But they are different ones from those the president has emphasized.
“Over all, it’s been a dream to live here,” said Lauren Yates, 35, an African-American voter who recently bought a townhome in the diversifying Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights. One of her main worries, she said, is the opposite of the one the president has described: Her area lacks enough affordable housing.
Kara Swanson, a mother of four in the adjacent suburb of New Brighton, said she was deeply worried about the pandemic, especially with a long Minnesota winter approaching.
“That is so central to everything else we’re dealing with as a country,” she said. “We can’t really deal with those other things — racism, education, social issues — until we deal with the virus.”
Ms. Swanson, an evangelical Christian who regularly voted Republican until the 2016 election, is undecided. She will either vote for Mr. Biden, or she will not vote.
Paula Bullis, a Democratic-leaning voter who plans to support Mr. Biden, lives on the far edge of the Milwaukee suburbs in Slinger. She described the area as almost idyllic. But she feels the local sense of community has eroded as the political divisiveness in the country has seeped even into her children’s school.
“You see it trickle down to the kids, too,” she said, “and them starting to divide based on what they hear at home.”
That is what threatens her suburban way of life.
Emily Badger writes about cities and urban policy for The Upshot from the Washington bureau. She's particularly interested in housing, transportation and inequality — and how they’re all connected. She joined The Times in 2016 from The Washington Post. @emilymbadger
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