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.
“…the realization as soon as possible of the goal of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.”
–US Housing Act, 1949
The statement above was the closest the U.S. state came to promising its citizens suitable housing, but even that only set a goal instead of a standard or guarantee. Based on his book, Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America, Michael Glass explained an overlooked side of the development of American suburbs. While it is well known that the suburbs spectacularly failed Black and minority Americans, they also often failed even the people they were built for. A housing culture built on debt, poor craftsmanship, profiteering, and credit-rated municipal bonds, the American suburb is a fragile system that has created a landscape of entrenched inequalities. Glass argues that our housing system must be diversified, so that homeownership is not the only path to stable housing.
–Katherine Connor CC ‘27
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.