American Suburb KQED

Gentrification is changing cities across America, forcing people from neighborhoods they have long called home. Call them the displaced. Now those priced out of the Bay Area are looking for a better life in an unlikely place. American Suburb follows this migration to one California town along the Delta, 45 miles from San Francisco. But is this once sleepy suburb ready for them?

KQED’s Devin Katayama and Sandhya Dirks explore that question, taking us into the ordinary spaces of suburban life to find extraordinary stories about race, poverty and belonging.

A school counselor and local pastor arranges a middle school graduation celebration for African American students, but protests against the ceremony lead to racist graffiti on the pastor’s church door.

Nowhere are the changing demographics of suburbs like Antioch clearer than in the city’s classrooms. But while the population of students is shifting, many of the educators still remain the same, and black students are far more likely to be suspended or expelled from school. How do young people learn to claim Antioch? And how does the city embrace the new class in town?

It can be hard to get back on your feet when you’re starting from scratch — even when opportunity falls in your lap. We meet Kevin Kunze, who was living on the streets until Doug Stewart decided to do something unusual: He took Kevin home with him to live with the Stewart family. It’s a test for the family, but an even harder one for Kevin.

Antioch residents are finding it hard to ignore the increasing number of destitute people living on the streets. Last year, the number of people living unsheltered grew by 30 percent in the far eastern Contra Costa suburbs– the rest of the county saw declines. In this chapter Devin joins a group of drifters who’ve set up camp in an abandoned field on the edge of town. They’re honing their survival techniques and dodging authorities… trying to create their own version of suburban life.

More African Americans are now living in suburbs than anywhere else. And some of the country’s most recent controversial police shootings of unarmed black men took place in the suburbs outside St. Louis, St. Paul and Orlando.

In suburban Antioch, police chief Allan Cantando is trying to bridge divides with the new community. To do that, he meets with a class of college students and asks them to role play as cops. Meanwhile, a budding group of community activists who say they’ve faced police brutality are learning how to organize. The challenges of policing and protesting in suburbia, in this episode of American Suburb.

Iris Archuleta is the daughter of a Black Panther who grew up in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. She and her husband were part of the first wave of upper middle class African-Americans who moved to Antioch 20 years ago. This is the story of an unlikely alliance between Iris and the Antioch police. Both reject the single narrative here of “poor blacks” and the “inner city” moving out to Antioch. For them, Antioch is actually doing things right, if only their work wasn’t getting lost in a larger negative narrative about the town.