Housing + Wages of the American Dream: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America
Michael Glass, associate professor of history at Boston College, will discuss his award-winning book Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America (2025), which examines how home mortgages and municipal bonds built suburbs in the decades after World War II while also making suburban life financially fragile and deeply unequal.
FREE.
Speakers
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Michael Glass
Associate Professor of History, Boston College
Michael Glass is a political and urban historian of the twentieth-century United States, specializing in race, metropolitan development, and capitalism. His research examines how financial systems generate inequality and shape everyday life, from housing and education to environmental risk. His first book, Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), won the 2026 Lewis Mumford Prize for Best Book in American Planning History from the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, as well as Honorable Mention for the 2026 Joe William Trotter Jr. Prize for Best First Book in Urban History from the Urban History Association. Glass is currently working on a new book project, Built to Burn: Real Estate and the Making of Fire Disasters in Southern California, which traces how a century of housing development in fire-prone landscapes turned wildfire into a recurring disaster.