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Talent. With a little prodding from his wife, the suburban husband develops a big yen to mix in Government affairs at the local level. How can the head of the house, father of the brood, refuse to campaign for school bonds or stand for the board of education—particularly when his firm urges him to be civic-minded? The result is that Suburbia often shines with the kind of topnotch talent that makes troubled big-city fathers wince with envy. In Kansas City's suburban Prairie Village, for example, the $1-a-year mayor is a lawyer with a growing practice, the president of the city council is a Procter & Gamble Co. division manager and the head of the village planning commission is assistant to the president of a manufacturing firm. In Philadelphia's suburban Swarthmore, the town council includes a Philadelphia banker, a Du Pont engineer, the president of a pipeline company and a retired executive of Swarthmore College.
Biggest of the problems that such people face is Suburbia's growing morass of overlapping services and functions, especially in counties that have experienced a big building rush. In the 17 towns that comprise Denver's four-county suburban area, for example, there are 27 school districts, 35 water districts, 59 sanitation districts. The Suburbia of Portland, Ore. embraces three counties, 178 special service districts, 60 school districts, twelve city governments. And the granddaddy of them all is the megalopolis of Los Angeles which is fish-netted with 72 separate governments and an uncounted array of districts, authorities, and floating unincorporated communities.
But suburbanites, more than their urban or rural brethren, tend to want to get things fixed. Lakewood, Calif., 22 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, was just another boondock of 5,000 people ten years ago when the boom thundered. A development group poured $200 million into 17,000 homes ($8,000-$11,000) and a big shopping center. As residents took hold, the sense of frustration that came from long-distance county rule and the absence of locally administered services flashed into a new, self-starting energy. Lakewood, with a present population of 75,000, incorporated itself in 1954, sank its own home-nurtured political roots and fashioned an identity of its own. Then, while running its own affairs, it devised a method of contracting for police, road maintenance and building maintenance to the county government. The "Lakewood Plan" was later copied by many other California communities. So ably has Lakewood fashioned its living pattern to suit itself that many Lakewood families who might have moved on to more expensive, status-setting locales, have decided to stay where they are.