WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING

The Democratic Party’s triumphal romp through suburbia was the big story of the midterms. In 2016 the suburbs, home to the majority of American voters, voted 50 to 45 for Donald Trump; in 2018, 52 percent went Democratic . ...

The suburbs are where most Americans, including roughly 4 in 5 residents of our largest metropolitan areas, live. Historically, they have favored Republicans in most elections. But that tie has been weakened for reasons including the growing diversity of these areas and revulsion at President Trump, particularly among educated women . ...

The trouble, however, is that progressives, for the most part, love density and disdain suburbs. They have recently espoused calls, for example, to ban single-family zoning altogether in deep blue Minneapolis — with the entire state of Oregon considering a ban of its own.

The Democrats’ dilemma is how to reconcile the interest of largely married, middleincome suburban homeowners with their rock-solid activist base of city-dwellers, who tend to be renters and childless. Suburbanites, for example, tend to be less interested in public transportation than media people who live in New York City, and more interested in improving the roads they take to work . ...

The clamor to restrict single-family homes, and thus push the American dream further out of many Americans’ reach, represents an assault on what both parties once espoused. An America without widespread homeownership is no longer an aspirational country, but a place where people remain imprisoned by their class and unable to pursue what they perceive as a better quality of life. Joel Kotkin, Daily Beast