Ex-Urbia: An Interview with Matt Hern

Today, liberals celebrate their recent electoral gains in affluent, mostly white suburbs and fret over their losses in former working-class strongholds. Yet such periods of demographic flux have been less the exception than the norm for some time now. In 2007, The Nation reported that “for the first time ever, more poor Americans live in the suburbs than in all our cities combined.” In 2014, The Economist complicated our understanding of “the great urbanization” theory, which saw cities becoming more and more populated, contending instead that “in developed and developing worlds, outskirts are growing faster than cores” (emphasis mine). And in 2022 the Brookings Institution found that “all major racial groups are more likely to live in suburbs than cities” and that “big suburbs’ populations are more diverse than the total U.S. population.” All the while, scholars have coined new, increasingly punctilious terms for the diverging patterns of non-urban neighborhoods: “edge cities,” “fringe cities,” “technoburbs,” “ethnoburbs,” “in-between cities,” “post-suburbia,” and “office sprawl,” to name a few. 

Matt Hern, author of Outside the Outside: The New Politics of Suburbs (out April 9 from Verso Books), has a new one—”sub-urb”—drawing our attention to what exactly we mean by both sub- and –urb. Outside the Outside is a provocation of sorts; it doesn’t presume to have all the answers, but it raises important questions. From his home base of Surrey outside Vancouver, Canada, Hern, a longtime organizer, visits suburbs of all kinds. He asserts in his book that “we need to find some new languages, some new vocabularies for thinking about what is happening around us, because what we have on hand now is clearly insufficient.” Still, this focus on searching for the perfect terminology was, I’ll admit, somewhat vexing to me. What good does a new term do us here—and what new things can it tell us about the processes that undergird it? 

Hern and I spoke in mid-March to discuss the political economy of the suburbs and the inherent barriers to organizing they present.

[Ed. note: This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.]

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Sam Russek: Let’s start with what happened after the post-war period, where our ideas of the suburbs seem to have ossified. What underlying factors—global, economic, financial, and political—have led to these changes in the suburbs?

Matt Hern: When I was growing up, “suburb” was just code for, you know, black holes of conformity, either white trash nests or upscale enclaves of the white upper-middle class. And in many ways that was true—you know the history of white flight, the hollowing out of inner cities, and all of the other well-documented reasons for this conception. Starting in the late 70s and early 80s, something began to shift: neoliberal restructuring drove urban deindustrialization via the downsizing and offshoring of manufacturing and industrial activity, not only out of the global north but out of city centers.

As city cores hollowed out, new urban revitalization programs echoing those of the 1960s were revived with new forms of neoliberal ferocity, reconceptualizing every inner city across the global north into spectacularist service centers for property speculation, high-end tourism, and global centers for finance. All of these factors contributed to the hollowing out of inner cities and the rush to the suburbs. 

Of course, the suburbs are not one coherent whole. It’s not like every single working-class person has left cities, and there are still parts of Surrey, where I live and work, that are classic white, gated communities. Other parts, particularly around transit nodes, are more complicated, and increasingly vulnerable to real estate speculation.

The suburbs are much more complex and fractured—but what languages do we have to begin to describe these kinds of fractured landscapes, so rarely settled in large part because of financial speculation? As soon as a community that’s established itself within a suburban neighborhood begins to establish restaurants and different kinds of, you know, civic liveliness, all of a sudden the community is vulnerable again. All of a sudden you get urban bloggers talking about the “diverse food options.”

SR: Early on, you mention your 2017 book, What a City Is For, about gentrification in the majority-Black Albina neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, to say that it had a couple of overlapping blindspots. What were they?

MH: I was particularly chagrined by how, in the book, when people left Albina it’s like they just walked offstage. My own tendency towards a kind of default bourgeois urban analysis saw these inner-city gentrified neighborhoods and forgot to ask, “Where did everybody go?” Did they just disappear into this, like, maw of suburbia? The answer is no, not at all. These communities reorganized and reconceptualized what their lives could look like.

That’s not to be an apologist for the extant urban form of the suburbs—the giant, weird traffic jams you get stuck in; the lack of walkability or density that leads to social marginalization; the endless tracts of shitty housing—all of that still sucks. But when people document gentrification and displacement, we know of the explosion of unaffordability and displacement of the low-income working class, but I think we forget to ask where people are going and what they do once they’re there.

SR: It’s not only that people have moved to the suburbs. Job opportunities are also moving to these peripheral zones, typically in manufacturing or shipping sectors. Between 2010 and 2014, 73 counties holding about 35 percent of the total U.S. population received 50 percent of new jobs, and counties with 500,000 residents or more accounted for 64 percent of all new jobs, which feels significant. 

And yet I think you’re right that we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the so-called “financialization” of cities, and significantly less thinking about how the suburbs have not only diversified but changed their economic form. It plays into what the suburban theorist Roger Keil told you: “The bourgeois Left really only feels comfortable in urban environments, and its political program revolves around a built landscape of coffee shops, public spaces, walkable streets and public transit. We don’t really know how to live otherwise.” 

MH: The whole New Urbanist idea, of course, is aesthetically and corporeally appealing. It’s much nicer than sitting in a fucking bus for 40 minutes to get to some god-awful mall. But our capacity to reorganize in the suburbs grates against these kinds of sensibilities. In the suburbs, there aren’t obvious places to gather, and people have to travel really long distances. Many immigrant and asylum-seeking communities, they just don’t have a ton of time to come and hang out and go to a meeting that’s going to be a 40-minute bus ride away. The key to unlocking the suburbs’ potential here is to make actual, real relationships—not just organizing them, but organizing with them. 

SR: Throughout your book, you’re searching for the right language to use, a more active language or positive vision for how urban theorists and organizers might relate to the suburbs. For instance, you problematize terms like displacement, which to you implies being pushed out of something, and try to configure the suburbs, or “sub-urbs,” as something you enter or jump into. Another example is that hyphen you sometimes place between sub and urb. Why is it necessary? 

MH: I was just screwing around. It’s a bit cutesy for my liking. But I was trying to think about different ways to describe what we’re seeing because there’s a whole bouquet of different kinds of suburbs. The sub– was deployed historically to describe the outside of a city’s walls; it was for people who were not allowed inside a city’s walls or befitting protection—poor people, trans people, sex workers, immigrants. Today, there are certainly those who are escaping to white enclaves in the suburbs, but there are also those just seeking cheap rent and, by the will of the market, these places are becoming sub- to the –urb again. 

SR: I struggled with the book’s struggle for terminology. By trying to find a more positive way to speak of older colonial frameworks, critiquing, as you write, the “center/hinterland” or “metropole/colony,” I wonder if this is actually kind of taking the cart before the horse. Aren’t we describing how capital and the market function when we use terms like displacement, and isn’t that a faithful description of gentrification? What are the stakes, I guess, of this terminological intervention, and what do you hope will come of it?

MH: I, myself, am also suspect of these kinds of linguistic turns, but at the same time, I was trying to track the arc of my own thinking, like what am I doing here? I’ve never owned a car before, and now all of a sudden I have to own a car because the public transit options are just impossible. What’s actually happening here? I think some of the terminology is useful in lots of ways because there is a kind of discursive capture. Describing Surrey as a periphery centers everything in this colonial kind of way: Of course London is the center of the universe, of course downtown Vancouver is the center of Vancouver. 

But what’s it the center of, and how does that affect my thinking and my analysis? By thinking of Surrey as peripheralized, I begin to orient my thinking around the idea that I’m heading to the periphery—how does that change my behavior? Some of my thinking previously was, “How do we get these kids downtown to engage in the local social and political and cultural discussions that take place there?” But a lot is happening in Surrey, too, that’s just as important.

SR: Well, when we think about the center of Vancouver or Houston (where I’m from), these are both port cities connected to the global economy. Cargo ships are coming in and out, and from there, trucks and trains that are leaving Vancouver and Houston and delivering all manner of goods to all these other places, be they suburbs or interior cities. The most common conception looks at downtown areas as the central node and the periphery as where those who work that node live. Is this too simplistic? 

MH: I’m not saying downtown Vancouver is not the center of some things. It is the center of, say, financial capital. But what’s a working-class job now? Is it a longshoreman? Sure, but not really. They’re pretty good jobs mostly. Those are not jobs that most of the families I work with have access to. Most people get driving, delivery, or—the very basic ones—warehouse and retail jobs. And all the warehouses, all the warehouse-adjacent work, are out in Surrey and around the airport. Much of the port activity is no longer in downtown Vancouver; it’s on the Deltaport far south of the city. 

If you’re a longshoreman, you’re pretty well-paid. You’re making 100 grand a year probably. [In Vancouver, the average salary of longshoremen is between $120- and $130,000, according to Glassdoor] You’ve got your union protection and benefits, and you’ve got a kind of solidity that most of the folks that I know don’t have access to. If you’re 19 years old and just got here from Somalia, you’re gonna get a job at the Amazon warehouse or doing DoorDash, and that’s the kind of work that isn’t in Vancouver. Those nodes of labor are nowhere near downtown. 

SR: Reading your book, I thought back to the protests in 2020. Everyone I saw that June in Houston was struggling to find parking downtown to march on City Hall. And then by around 6:00 p.m., most people had gotten back into their cars and called it a day. The movement fizzled out quickly thereafter. At the time, I thought that was a tactical failure and a byproduct of suburban sprawl. 

Many people didn’t feel comfortable protesting wherever they lived because there wasn’t public space to protest. Instead, they chose the central area, this walkable area where they could sort of register their discontent the typical way and exit quickly. But while there’s some latent symbolism in marching on City Hall—a historical imagery of protest we’re all familiar with—Houston’s downtown is basically empty. Nor was this an action that could be easily repeated by a significant number of people. Asking someone to commute 40 minutes every other day only to walk in the heat and turn back around—it’s just not sustainable. This came to mind when I read in your passage about how we must “renovate the way we talk about and see cities,” because “then we’ll have a shot at refusing and revolting effectively.”

MH: If you think back to 1920s organizing, you think of somebody on a soapbox or somebody handing out pamphlets, but where would you go in Houston to stand on a soapbox? Most low-end manufacturing warehouses all have security gates—are you going to hand out pamphlets through car windows? It’s not impossible, but most of that happens online now. The built-in form of these communities still dishevels that normal thinking about how we organize. Sprawl by its very nature discourages gathering. 

Still, in Surrey, the city council had to restrict access to the public because so many young Palestinian activists have been rushing the council chambers every single week demanding that they call for a ceasefire. It’s not a huge number of kids, but it’s a fantastic set of organizers. I see people in Vancouver like, “Why would I go out to Surrey for a protest?” But that’s where most Muslims in the area live and there’s no question: everybody there is pro-Palestinian. It’s mothers and grandmothers in the streets, people who would never go to another protest, and they have a different tenor than the Protest Left who go to every protest there is—not to disparage in any way, I’ve certainly been that guy in my life. 

SR: It was a suburban uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, rather than one in a city, that inspired a decade of organizing around Black Lives Matter. You visit Ferguson in your book; what did you learn there? 

MH: In urbanist circles, people often talk about the “Vancouver achievement,” referring to this massive inner-city gentrification and “urban planning” campaign around the Olympics. I wanted to look beyond the apogee of neoliberal restructuring. St. Louis is a much older city so it’s less sprawling in many ways. I don’t think I’ve been in a more segregated city than St. Louis with such a wildly fractured landscape. You could call Ferguson an inner-ring suburb, but I think many of the same center-periphery relationships trace contours that I’ve seen in so many parts of the world, and it reminded me of Surrey in some critical ways. 

All the logics of suburbia have always been bound up with competing notions of safety. Ancient cities expelled unwanted residents, forcing them outside the city walls to live literally beneath the urb, and wealthier people have always been able to escape to villas and estates to enjoy fresh air and quiet surroundings. During the great American post-war suburban build-out, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) wildly subsidized construction on the condition that these new suburbs be available exclusively for whites with restrictive covenants, in combination with redlining and the withdrawal of insurance for Black families, to ensure that new suburbs were white havens. 

And this is the story of Ferguson. It used to be essentially all-white. It was a sundown town right up until the late 1960s, where Black people were banned after dark, and in 1970 the population was 99% white and perhaps 1% Black, if that. That percentage has now been reversed: in the 2000, 44.7% were white and 52.4% were Black, and then by 2020 it was 72% Black and only 21% white. 

My theorizing is still pretty limited on it, except to say those protests started there for all the obvious reasons. This story of movement, displacement, and urban reordering—of systematic segregation and a deepening cycle of service withdrawals, a declining tax base, worsening schools, fewer jobs, and rising crime rates—is tiresomely familiar to all of us: We all just presume that wealthier, whiter residents will move en masse either out of or back into the city, forcing everyone else to adjust around them. If we know displacements and peripheralizations are creating a fractured and dislocated landscape of suburbia and sub-urbias, and we see that collective refusals and revolts are happening so often far from “city centers” across the globe, whether in Ferguson or Rinkeby or Bairro da Jamaica or Tregear or banlieues or gecekondus or shanty towns or wherever—I think that offers new routes to think about reimagining safety. 

SR: You also talk about how we need to build new “fidelities” and find “new patterns of solidarities” in the suburbs—can you outline what this means based on your experience in Surrey? 

MH: Twenty years ago, I was a classic bleeding-heart, white, middle-class organizer. I cared about protecting the neighborhood, and I worked within one three-block radius. But once my family and pretty much everyone we knew got priced out of the neighborhood, I felt unmoored—because if you’re not protecting the neighborhood, if that isn’t the core of your thinking anymore, well then what do you fight for? 

One of the great mobilizing discourses of the right is resistance to immigration—”build the wall” and such—bound together by a fear and loathing of Black and brown migrants. Liberals have no real answer, except “build a smaller wall,” and the progressives’ program is an ill-defined, charitable condescension, something like “those poor, poor people, we really should try to help.” Both positions are desubjectifying and awful and in many ways equally shitty. We need to chart an approach to migration that is not hostile nor charitable, but can think past borders, and think about mobility and movement, not as inherently regrettable but a basis for liberatory political organizing and movement building.

SR: Movement is important to how you consider these questions, but if we’re valorizing movement, are we not just playing into the way capital tends to absorb communities and discard surplus peoples? Capitalist development is what’s moving people—I don’t know if people moving would still leave their communities if they didn’t have to. I struggle to see the positivist vision there.

MH: This idea grates against me too. There’s a phrase I land on that I hope isn’t too wishy-washy about how to “celebrate both rootedness and mobilities in the same breath and politicize both equally.” How do we frame having to move out of the neighborhood as something other than just loss—that it’s actually an act of hopefulness? Movement is the essence of all things political. Is there a way to think of refugees fleeing their homes and tenants being priced out in a way that we’re not always losing? 

Others have said that there has never been a successful resistance to gentrification. I don’t know if that’s exactly true—people could come up with answers, like with Boyle Heights in LA—but it’s basically true. The sheer capital needed to fight gentrification is mostly just not available to people I’ve known in social movements on the left. At the same time, in Canada, social movements at their most vibrant are rooted in indigenous solidarity, and those are movements against movement and are about regaining control of their homelands. Those things are not antipodes of each other. 

SR: To that point, you write, “Someone might call the movement of working class and racialized people to sub-urbs ‘retreat,’ but mostly it feels like refusal.” What forms of refusal are you talking about when you see that kind of movement?

MH: I’m riffing there off a pal of mine, Audre Simpson, a Mohawk author who talks about indigenous refusal, refusing to capitulate to colonialism. But I’ll give a personal example. There’s a way I could’ve stayed in my old neighborhood in Vancouver. It would’ve involved an insane mortgage, reorienting my life in all kinds of ways, and a more normal job than the one I have. But it was just like—no, I’m not fucking doing that. We’re going to do something else. That’s not the life I want. I see that over and over again. 

The presumptively normative route for a young adult in North America is to go to school, get some post-secondary education or training, get a job, move out on your own, get a place of your own, and build your career. But I know hardly anybody who has charted that smooth path. So many of the young people I know live at home, in part because they don’t want to move away and fracture their family lives, but also because they are refusing the teleological arc of a career as the centerpiece of their lives. For so many families I know, the white North American middle-class presumptions about individual achievement as paramount are turned upside down. Is that a kind of refusal? I think so.

SR: Isn’t it still a kind of individualized refusal?

MH: In that example, yes. But I also want to think about collective social refusals and creativity. Try this example: a large number of my colleagues in Surrey are Muslim and it’s Ramadan right now. Ramadan is hard in a Canadian context, because schools, jobs, and the larger culture do not recognize Ramadan as a relevant event, and very few institutions will adjust their schedules to give Muslims a little grace while they are fasting. So people just have to go to work, go to school, and carry on with their lives, largely with little acknowledgment that they are carrying a significant extra burden of fasting. 

But every Muslim I know just carries on with their lives, doing their best and refusing to give up the practice of praying and fasting. Even though the larger structures around them don’t give them any breaks or even recognition, my colleagues and pals are still really joyful about Ramadan. It is a collective will to refuse, based on a set of values that are anomalous to many secular and non-Muslims, but creates a joyous and freeing set of social relations. 

SR: How do we get “outside the outside,” and how will we know when we’re there?

MH: For the most part I want to describe the outside as a very affective experience, and I don’t mean that as a personal sensibility, but as a collective political opening. The more that we can build real relationships and movements in what has always been called “the periphery,” it changes how we see what constitutes the inside and the outside, the center and the hinterland. Going back to my language questions, and asking: the center of what? Whose interest is it to see the city as a coherent whole? For me, this began to dishevel so many of my easily held certainties and political assumptions.♦