My opinion of the suburbs changed a few years ago on my first trip to the Katy Mills Mall, a sprawling shopping center just west of Houston. The place didn’t look like much from the outside—a white concrete behemoth then accented in ’90s primary colors, with a giant 3D red star adorning the sign out front. In town to visit family over the holidays, I’d been lulled into a stupor as our SUV joined thousands of others crawling along the massive Katy Freeway—one of the world’s widest and most congested roads—past endless acres of big-box stores and cookie-cutter houses. My ennui had set in on a jog around the neighborhood a few days earlier, when I’d gotten lost in the maze of identical cul-de-sacs. A woman in a minivan nearly hit me as I crossed the road at a light, then gave me a puzzled stare, apparently surprised to spot a rare pedestrian in the wild.
In the mall, though, things felt different. The place was packed with people of every age, race, and class. Women in hijabs pushed strollers past a Churromania cafe, where teenagers pecked at their phones while drinking cafe con leche. At the Bass Pro Shop, a multigenerational Chinese American family clustered around the fish tanks. Conversations in at least five languages drowned out the Muzak.
Fort Bend County, home of Katy Mills, is now one of the most diverse places in the nation; nearly 30 percent of residents were born outside the United States. As Houston becomes more and more unaffordable, people are moving to the outskirts at a rapid clip, and similar changes are happening around the country. If you want a glimpse of America’s future, the ’burbs are a pretty good place to look.
