“The image of the Jeffersonian self-sufficient yeoman working the earth as the real genuine American...still resonates today...American ideology for two hundred years has viewed individualism and self-reliance as more compatible with rural than urban habitats.” This self-reliant, agrarian attitude is quickly commodified in the suburb. Suburbanites are not living the Jeffersonian ideal, nor were they ever in the history of the suburb. In fact, the ideal itself seems little more than a justification for the growing imprint of private property on the geography of the American psyche.

(Palen, J. John. The Suburbs. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995. Print.)