From Sundown Towns to Sunlit Communities: A Kandid Chat w/Becky Nicolaides on the Rise of Multicultural Suburbs

Kandidly Kristin: Hey, hey, hey, podcast family. It is your girl, Kandidly Kristin. And this is The KandidShop, your number one destination for candid conversations. If you are new here, welcome, welcome, welcome. If you're a returning listener, welcome back. And thanks, as always, for your support. So today I am doing an author spotlight and the spotlight is shining on historian and author of The New Suburbia, How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945, Becky Nicolaides. And I forgot to ask her how to pronounce her name and I hope I got it right. So help me welcome Becky to the Candid Shop. Welcome, welcome, welcome, Becky.
Becky Nicolaides: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Kandidly Kristin: And did I get your name right?

Becky Nicolaides: You know, it's pretty good. Yeah. Nicolaides.

Kandidly Kristin: Nicolaides. OK. I was close. That's the one thing I always try to ask and I forgot today. So I am sure some of my listeners are probably sitting there saying, new suburbia, like what the heck is that? So Becky, if you could first give me and my listeners just a brief glimpse into who you are, and then tell us what inspired you to delve into the topic of air quotes new suburbia, aka suburban diversity, and then write this book.

Becky Nicolaides: Sure. So yeah, I'm a historian. I grew up in Los Angeles and went to school here, to college, and then moved to New York where I did my graduate education. But my heart has always been in Los Angeles. And I've been fascinated with this place for a long time. I ended up, as a historian, focusing my work on the suburbs. I grew up in the suburbs and I've kind of found them fascinating as a historian, trying to kind of understand, you know, how these places develop, what's been going on in them. And so my first book was, which was called My Blue Heaven, was on working class suburbs in Los Angeles. And that kind of, you know, sort of challenged that old, that old image of suburbia as these sort of white middle class places of some advantage and that kind of thing. So in that work, I really found a different kind of story where it was still a story of whites but they were blue collar workers and people kind of scrounging and scraping to get by and using the suburbs in a way to do that. That story and that book took the story up through 1965. And I knew that there was a lot more to look at, especially in L.A. And so I wanted to circle back and kind of, you know, take the story up closer to our own time now, and cast a much wider net also across a lot of Los Angeles. That first book just kind of focused on one specific part of Southeast LA. So I knew there were a lot more suburban stories to tell, and I wanted to come back to that. And then in terms of this book, so I You know, LA is at the cutting edge of a lot of trends in this country and diverse, the diversification of the suburb is definitely one of those and so when I started digging into. kind of post-1960s story of L.A., what I found was, yes, the suburbs were definitely segregated, they were heavily white and, you know, cordoned off racially in the 50s and 60s, but after 1970, things really started to diversify and that story took center stage in this book. It just opened up so many questions and interesting ways of kind of understanding like what is happening in these communities when they transitioned from white to much more multiracial and multiethnic. And it's that phase like after 1970 that I call the new suburbia. And that is because it really became diverse to a much greater level than ever in terms of like history. It was reaching, that diversity was reaching unprecedented levels at that point.

Kandidly Kristin: Okay. All right. So in your research, what ways did you see that race, ethnicity, socioeconomic diversity kind of intersected to kind of shape the development of the new suburbia, the new suburban communities?

Becky Nicolaides: Yeah, I mean, so what happens after 1970, you know, we all know the story, familiar story of the suburbs, that they were really segregated spaces for a lot of their history. It's the sort of Jordan Peel, you know, get out that a lot of us know. And, you know, that's a pretty familiar history. And it was true, you know, in many, many communities. And LA, I think, was notorious for pioneering some of those tactics of segregation. And so that was really racial segregation, especially. So a lot of that was really super entrenched through the 50s and 60s. And then After 1970, because of changes, especially at the federal level, so you have the Shelley versus Kramer Supreme Court case, which basically declared like race restrictive covenants unenforceable. Those covenants had been a really powerful tool of segregation for decades. and just had walled off many suburbs from people of color from moving into those places. So the Supreme Court kind of knocks those down in 1948. And then in 1968, the fair housing law passed by Congress was another big blow to segregation. And that law was imperfect in some ways. But really, I think if you kind of take a broad view of things, it really did start opening the door to people of color having the right now in a new way with that kind of federal backing to be able to move into these communities that have been segregated for a long time. And so you really begin seeing that movement. And what's cool about LA is these trends were happening earlier and more intensely here than maybe in other parts of the country, although this is a national trend that's happening with this. But in LA, as a historian, I could really glimpse these changes in a very vivid way as people of color started being able to move into suburbs. And the groups that could do it easiest, earliest, were Latinos and Asians. There was still resistance, there was plenty of conflict, but African Americans are also moving in. And by 1990, a majority of all three of those groups were living in suburban communities in LA. So you're already seeing like this trend taking hold and becoming more of a normal experience for blacks, for Asians, for Latinos, and then of course for whites still too here in Los Angeles. So they're moving in, sometimes into communities that had been very cut off from them, sometimes to communities that had, you know, for one reason or another, that had more diverse roots too. So it sort of plays out in different ways across like all of LA County.

Kandidly Kristin: Okay, so I'm sure that with the influx of different, not seen before in these community racial and ethnic groups moving in, there were challenges. What did, in your research, did you find were some of the more significant challenges that were faced as they began to blend into the suburban landscape?

Becky Nicolaides: Sure, there were, you're right, there were a lot of challenges. I mean, the biggest one just being white resistance. I mean, there were plenty of racist attitudes that were still pretty strong in a lot of communities. So there were examples of, you know, resistance to these changes from, you know, from neighbors, you know, kind of getting together and trying to physically intimidate people from moving in. And also, you know, not even just at the neighborhood level, but even pretty late into the game, like in the early 60s, some developers also just would not sell homes to people of color. And they were kind of open about it. They were worried that if people of color moved in, property values would drop. That was often the line that was used to justify that resistance. And so that just continues on and on. But in my book, I looked at four communities really closely, and just to try to unpack like what that experience was like. So, you know, people experience things from hostile neighbors or their kids getting called names, you know, names, racist names to oftentimes the initial, like, explosive conflicts would break out in the schools, because that's kind of where people were forced to, like, come together in the public schools. And so you'd often see some of the worst kind of hostilities taking place in those settings, especially. And so it happens, you know, like, I mean, I'm thinking of one community, which was a very high-end elite suburb called San Marino here. And San Marino started out like lily white, they had it was a sun downtown. So they basically didn't allow any people of color to, you know, they allowed them in to work there during the day as domestics or whatever. But when the sun went down, they had to be out. And right. the they had plenty of like laws and things on the books to ensure that. But what they went through there was they became a receiving ground of Chinese and other Asian immigrants, which happens in the late 70s and into the 80s and then beyond. And When Chinese ethnic families started moving in, yeah, you know, they met resistance, too. And these were like well-educated doctors, people that had been in the U.S. for some time and that kind of worked their way up the ladder of, you know, career wise and that kind of thing. And so they had the means to be able to move into a suburb like San Marino, which was not cheap to get into. And so when they got there, yeah, they also met plenty of resistance. There was, you know, there were white families that just did not want to see that kind of change. And they were getting blamed for raising the cost of local education in the schools because they were needing ESL classes. So there was some hostility towards that. There was hostility towards the fact that some of these newcomers didn't help in the schools or volunteer, which was part of like a long tradition in San Marino. Just people, you know, saying, One story that kind of came up again and again among the Chinese that I interviewed there is that the parents talk to the kids, and then the parents who have these prejudices, and then the children kind of internalize that, and then that would get played out in the schools and that kind of thing. It was maybe not as explosive in a town like that, but it was still happening in ways that was creating a lot of unease and the need to try to figure things out, which they ultimately worked through there in that community. But that was just one little slice of the story. You look at other communities and it it's playing out differently, maybe more openly, more hostile, for sure. And I can, if you want more of those stories, I can tell you more.

Kandidly Kristin: Well, you know what? Because just like anything, where there are significant challenges, the reverse of that, I'm sure that some significant opportunities emerged because of the increased diversity in the suburbs.

Becky Nicolaides: Yeah, absolutely. And I think some of that had to do with the openness of residents to that change and really seeing diversity as a strength, a means for learning about other cultures or just people of different backgrounds. And also I think you know, recognizing that in our history, the suburbs have been really, you know, they've played a long role in the making of racial inequality in this country for generations. You know, whites had so many advantages in being able to live in the suburbs and buy a home and then pass on that generational wealth, you know, to their children. And just for, it really helped give whites a leg up for a long time. And I think as more and more suburbanites, including white suburbanites, recognize that and wanted to undo that, you know, they, I think, had a recognition that positives could come from moving past that older way of of being, you know, in our metro areas. And so You know, for communities that I think truly saw that value, as well as for the individuals, you know, moving into these communities, yeah, I mean, they brought a lot of richness and, you know, just different perspectives and all of it into these communities where, I mean, for LA, this has really happened in a very widespread way, like every, suburban community now in Los Angeles is majority non-white at this point. And even in terms of home ownership, that's true as well. So you're really seeing it play out here in a pretty intense way. But some of the things that diversity brought to the communities Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of ways that that was enriching, I think, local culture and that kind of thing. But it was a little bit of a mixed bag too.

Kandidly Kristin: Right, right. So you mentioned a lot of the conflicts playing out at school, because it's like one of the places where folks have to be together. In your opinion or in your research, how did you see cultural and social institutions, schools, churches, civic organizations, kind of adapt to accommodate this new demographic in their suburban life, or did they?

Becky Nicolaides: Yes, I think schools were actually really crucial hubs of that kind of facilitating that integration process. That especially was true where immigrants were moving in and people from different backgrounds. So the schools became hubs of adjustment for immigrants. So for example, one of the communities I profiled is called Southgate. which is in Southeast Los Angeles. It started out very white, and then it was actually a center of industry in LA for a long time. And then in the 80s, when a lot of the factories were closing down, it flips from being white to majority Latino, and then to all Latino, it almost like completely flips demographically to where now, That whole part of LA is like, you know, over 90% Latino when that was happening. The schools truly became. a kind of conduit of integration for new immigrants. Because one of the other things about the new suburbia is the immigrant story. I mean, what's become really typical in a lot of suburbs is that immigrants move directly from their home countries into the suburbs. They don't go into the central city and then hopscotch into the suburbs, but they're directly moving and settling in suburban areas. And so the schools became, like in Southgate, for example, the middle school formed a newcomer center, which was a place where new families could go for resources. It was sort of a welcoming center for immigrants themselves. it became a place where like parents maybe who didn't speak English, you know, they could go there and learn out, you know, how to navigate their way through the community, you know, like the government, local government or local social services, where the stores were, that newcomer center, they'd even give like little tours of new parents of the community. So just to help them acclimate and and figure out like where everything was. And then the schools also were often a place where parents, new parents in these suburbs first started engaging in the community, like volunteer at the school. They were often, you know, cared about their kids and wanted to know what was happening with their children. And so they would volunteer and that often became like the first stepping stone Of engagement in their communities, it was sort of an an easier pathway for them to get involved. And that happens in a lot of different communities. On the other hand. Also, places where there was definite friction and division around, especially around busing. Yeah, I mean, I found other examples in communities like Pasadena and Lakewood, where black-white relations got very hot, where the schools were kind of playing a different sort of role. And there was a lot of variation. And you also mentioned churches. They too could definitely kind of ease the process of integrating new newcomers into the community. But like a lot of things in the new suburbia, there were a lot of variations with all of us. You had some churches that might be really welcoming, others not so much. So it was kind of all over the map on some level. But I'd say on balance, I think like churches especially tended to lean towards helping kind of create more welcoming spaces for newcomers to these communities.

Kandidly Kristin: Yeah. Well, here's the thing, you know, across color, race, ethnic and economic lines, most people care about their kids. Right. So that's an awesome place to find some common ground. If you no matter what you look like, if your religion is the same, that's a common ground. So you can at least that's something you can stand on where we're the same, because in many ways we're not. But this is these things can help to build a foundation toward better communication, understanding, acceptance, and those sort of things. So that's interesting. So I want to segue a little bit into your process when you wrote The New Suburbia. Like, what were your methodologies or primary sources for uncovering the stories of diverse suburban communities. I know you said it kind of centered on maybe three or four communities, but like, how did that work for you? Did you talk to a bunch of people? Did you give out surveys or have town halls or what was your process like, your research process?

Becky Nicolaides: Yeah, I love that question. Thanks for asking that. I mean, as a historian, so the place I always start when I do any kind of, well, most of the stuff that I do is I want to look, have some kind of data to help me understand what's going on. So, like, when I started this book, I knew that the suburbs were diversifying. That was a given. I, you know, encountered that in other projects and stuff. But I didn't really know, like, what that looked like. So, pretty early on, when I started working on this project, which was quite a long time ago, too, I have to confess, I started crunching and pulling together a lot of Census data on LA County, and I ended up putting together this pretty ginormous data set on all. So there's 86 independent towns in LA, like independent municipalities. And so, and because L.A. is L.A., it's very suburban. And so, I had some student research assistants over the years help me put together a really big data set on all 86 of those communities. from 1950 to 2010, looking at like about, I think we had about 54 variables. So by race, ethnicity, class markers, occupations, you know, women, in the workforce, were they working, were they stay-at-home moms, age, education level, and also housing, like was it mainly single-family homes? How was that changing? And home ownership too, like how was that evolving over time? And so that was an incredibly valuable sort of empirical base for me as a researcher to look at that data and go, huh, okay, this is interesting. Like, okay, like there's not many blacks, you know, in these outlying towns until, you know, such and such a year or, you know, with Asians or whatever, like, you know, where, like to be able to kind of really see through the numbers, like how this was playing out. And that data were actually, I got a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. and we're putting up that entire data set on the USC Digital Library, which will be open access, just as a side note. So the data was really key, but of course, that only tells you a little bit of the story. In terms of other research, I did a lot of digging in local newspapers, In local city halls, I would go looking at ordinances, like, you know, were towns passing new laws, like when things started to diversify, what did that look like? And then, of course, I did a bunch of oral histories, because really that is the best way to get a feel for the lived experience of this, that kind of emotional experience of what it was like for people of color, you know, to be moving into these communities. And I learned so much from those interviews. I did, I think, like around 60 interviews over the course of my work on the book. And not only did these people sort of tell me things about the history itself that I couldn't see from the written record, but just also that, that human, the lived experience of it, something you just cannot get in, you know, it's really hard to, to get that in written records. So I really valued my, all of those opportunities that I had to talk to people. You know, the other thing I do a lot is drive around places and just do, you know, visual surveys or just look around. Like, what does this place look like? Take tons of pictures. You know, like, why am I driving around a suburb that is, you know, over 50 percent Chinese? But I don't see any Chinese characters in any business signs. So things like that were all ways that I was able to observe, raise questions, and I might circle back and try to answer it through different kinds of research and just flesh that larger story out.

Kandidly Kristin: Nice. Nice. I like it. I like the driving around and just kind of experiencing a neighborhood for yourself and noticing things. That's awesome. So in what ways do you believe that your research and this book will challenge common narratives, stereotypes, misconceptions about suburban life and suburban diversity, if you think it will?

Becky Nicolaides: Yes, I mean, I think there are some folks who still really harbor an image of suburbia as a kind of segregated white space. Maybe that's starting to go down a little, but I think that there's still You know, people have that image and I think it still has a hold on a lot of us. Hollywood loves this image. There's been so many movies that really portray suburbs as these sort of, you know, white places where the hero is trying to break free of the oppressive conformity or whatever. And even if you recall in 2020 during the presidential election, Trump was even using this trope of the suburbs as a white space. And he was accusing Biden of saying, oh, he's going to abolish the suburbs because he wants to bring in affordable housing. So Trump was evoking the same image. And I mean, I think that image was reality in the 50s and 60s. Absolutely. Like, I would never deny that. However, after 1970, things really do start to shift. And my real hope with this book is that we kind of put to rest some of those older misconceptions about the suburbs. I mean, that, you know, these are really places where a greater cross-section of Americans are now living, you know, African-American, Asians, Latinos, Immigrants, the poor, the rich, suburban poverty is a thing that has become a norm in many, many places. So I think my real hope for this book is to just raise a kind of new way of reflexive thinking about the suburbs, that if we think suburb, we think of something that looks a lot more like America, that it's not just, you know, this privileged white space. And so it looks more like America with the good and the bad. Right. I mean, the problems, the challenges, all of it, the poverty, you know, all elements of it. You know, the other thing about this is that the suburbs really matter to our national life. Right when I was finishing this book, I was scrambling around trying to get a statistic on 2020, like what percentage of Americans lived in the suburbs as of the 2020 census. And I was really having trouble finding it. And I reached out to this person named William Frey, who's a demographer at the Brookings Institution in DC. And he wrote me back and they pointed me to this really obscure census table, which I was grateful that I would have never found it myself. That table showed that 54% of Americans now live in the suburbs. That is a lot. That's more than cities. It's more than rural areas combined. So my, you know, my little line about this is the suburbs have become America's center of gravity, and we really need to understand what is going on in these places. in all of their complexity and diversity and everything. And at the same time that they continue to grow, they're also diversifying. So yes, like LA has been ahead of the curve, but as of 2020 also, 45% of suburbanites in America are non-white. LA, yeah, maybe it's way higher here, but it's happening all over the country. And it's just something that we really need to be paying attention to in terms of the dynamics of community and politics, equity, how that's all playing out in these suburbs that are more and more diverse. So those are my hopes for the book.

Kandidly Kristin: Oh my goodness, you stole my question. And it was, what did you hope that readers would take away? So thank you for me not even having to ask that. But I do want to ask you personally, how or did doing the research for this book, studying the history of suburban diversity, how has it or did it influence your broader perspective on social issues?

Becky Nicolaides: Yeah, I mean, it has, like, I don't even know if I can answer that because it's imbued in my being and my brain at this point. I think you know, it's describing these sort of new realities that I think a lot of people like kind of know this is happening. But I don't know that we're thinking about it that much in a in a like specific way. You know, we might have neighbors that are diverse. And it's not just by race, too. It's also, you know, by it used to be like typical suburban family was the dad, the stay-at-home mom, and the two kids. So there's more senior citizens. There's single people, divorced, multi-family generational households. There's LGBTQ people living in the suburbs. Everybody's living in the suburbs. So suburbia is a distinct kind of place, right? It's a place where there's a lot of single family homes. people living in these homes with the yard, whether it's a big home or a small home or whatever. And it's often local governance And so there's a lot of control that these communities have over land use and social behaviors and public zoning and things like this. And so what are these diverse suburbs doing with those powers? Are they welcoming in different types of people? Is there class inclusion? Yes, communities might be more increasingly racially and ethnically diverse. But what's happening with like affordable housing or the problems that we're facing in terms of sustainability, right? I mean, the suburbs have been not great for that because they, you know, they take up a lot of land and resources. And so you know, how can the suburbs kind of contribute to more equity in terms of inclusion by class, people seeking, you know, affordable housing, as well as, you know, caring for the planet and climate change and that kind of thing. These things are so interrelated. I don't know how it is where you are, Kristin, but I know where I am here in LA, housing is so crazy expensive. It's gotten really out of hand. You know, my family members are thinking about leaving L.A. because they just can't, younger ones especially, because it's so, you just can't buy housing here. It's really gotten crazy expensive. And some of that is suburbia's fault, right? Because suburbs have put the brakes on building more housing, made it harder to do that through things like zoning, R1, like, you know, single family home only zoning and that kind of thing. That's starting to change here. But it's going to take a while, I think, to really have us feel the impact of that. So I think for me, digging into this history just raised a whole gamut of issues that are really impacting our lives today in so many ways. I mean, I'm feeling it in my family, my kids, all of this. These are issues that we're facing right now as challenges. And how do we overcome some of these?

Kandidly Kristin: I got you. I got you. And to answer your question, I live in a suburban town in New Jersey that was predominantly white a long time ago. And now you'd be hard pressed to find anyone white in my community. And everywhere I look, there seems to be new developments being built. And that's not just a single family. There are more townhouses, and then one part is for sale, and then there's the other part that are rentals. Lots of that going on here. And the price of housing here was, it's just starting to level off. There were in my immediate neighborhood that were selling for triple what they sold for years ago and honestly triple what they're worth. The market is just ripe again to bottom out and people are going to be upside down in equity in their homes because they pay way too much for it and it's just not worth that. So that's happening here. My last question to you, Becky, is what new areas of interest are you looking at delving into next? Anything new in the pipeline in terms of the new suburbia or another topic?

Becky Nicolaides: Well, one area I'm really interested in is this quote unquote suburban vote. Every time a new election cycle hits us, there's always a lot of focus on the suburban vote and what suburbanites, you know, what they want. politicians are trying to figure that out. And I think scholars are too on some level. It's kind of hard to pin that down. So I was thinking of kind of taking a bit of a, because I'm a historian, just taking a bit of a historical look at that and see how that's been evolving. That's one area and the other I think is I've started working with communities here in LA that are struggling to deal with their own diversity. There's been, I think ever since 2020 and The George Floyd BLM, like, there have been a kind of raised consciousness in a number of towns near where, you know. in LA that I've seen kind of more up close. I know this is happening all over the country where there's a desire of some racial reckoning of some of these communities to kind of take a look at their own past and see how they contributed to racial inequality and that kind of thing. So I've started working with some communities that have invited me to give talks about how segregation was put into place, you know, what were the tools of exclusion used? And then like, what can they and what was their role in, in all of that? Like, what did that look like in their particular town? And then they want to know, okay, now what do we do? So and that you, you know, you asked earlier about churches, and often these are happening by churches. Churches are kind of spearheading some of these efforts. And so I've started developing this thing I'm calling the Suburb Toolkit. which is ways that suburbs can harness their own resources to create more inclusive and welcoming and equitable communities at the local level and just create a more welcoming environment for people. And those suburbs use toolkits for the opposite for a long time. It's the time that we sort of move things in the opposite direction. And what was cool about the research on this book is that I found examples in history of when they were getting it right and doing things well. And I feel like we have, you know, we can use those examples to help us to help communities even now, like maybe replicate some of those things. Like, I mean, this is a minor thing that may seem not that important, but even a simple step like there was something called dinners for eight that like one community did where two couples of one race and two couples of another race would get together over dinner. And it was just a way for them to you know, break bread together to kind of demystify their differences, get to know each other. And, you know, just take those simple steps at the neighborhood level, like just a level of inner relations to help build community. help people get to know each other. So you feel like some trust amongst your neighbors and this kind of thing, even those individual efforts, it's not gonna solve like systemic inequality and racism and this sort of thing. But even these small efforts can just help us build neighborhoods and a sense of connectedness. I mean, the other thing just really quickly, is one thing I hope this book does is helps build a little bit of empathy among readers for people of different backgrounds who maybe had to go through all kinds of, you know, bad stuff in order to just buy a home in the suburb, right? Like, that was not always an easy thing. And just reading these stories of what that was like may help people build empathy for their own neighbors, people of different backgrounds.

Kandidly Kristin: And guess what? I'd be interested to read when you said the suburban vote, especially now, I guess, because we're in a presidential election season, and that's all you hear from the pundits and everybody. I'd be interested to see the data set on that.

Becky Nicolaides: It's a whole other area, and I would say that it is diverse. It is just the way the suburbs are diverse. You can't really overgeneralize about the suburban vote. It's going to be as diverse as the suburbs are. So if anything, just to raise our consciousness about that, it's going to be a lot more complicated than a soccer mom, a white soccer mom somewhere. There's going to be a lot of other impulses and outlooks at work, I think, in the suburbs.

Kandidly Kristin: Absolutely. And the dinner for eight, while I believe that small things are how big things happen. So baby steps get you there too. So we're not going to understate the importance of the small things. I think that's an excellent, excellent first step. Because once you sit down and eat with somebody and you're like, huh, they eat just like me or the demystifying of, you know, one population versus another is an important first step. So I love that. And I love the work that you did here. Becky, I am really super interested in any new, because I live in a suburban community. So I'm interested. I'm interested generally, and as it pertains to the broader conversation about diversity. So thank you. And thank you for joining me, but we're not done. Now we get to do the fun stuff. We get to play 10 KandidQuestions. 10 Candid Questions is this 10 random questions that I called from some ridiculously big list on the internet. Some are either or, and some require a little bit of thought to answer. So are you ready? I think so. All right, question number one, sunrises or sunsets?

Becky Nicolaides: Sunrise.

Kandidly Kristin: Mm-hmm. Almost everybody says sunrise. It's just the start of the day. It's amazing. So, all right. Question number two. If you had a magic wand for just one day, what one problem in the world would you fix?

Becky Nicolaides: Oh my God.

Kandidly Kristin: Poverty. Good answer. Question number three. Airplane travel or road trip?

Becky Nicolaides: Oh, road trip.

Kandidly Kristin: For sure.

Becky Nicolaides: Although I wish you could do that over the Atlantic or in Pacific too.

Kandidly Kristin: Right, right. Question number four. What technological advancement do you think will have the biggest impact on our futures?

Becky Nicolaides: Oh, God. Great to say it, but it could be AI.

Kandidly Kristin: I think so too. Question number five. Handshakes or hugs? Oh, hugs. For sure. Question number six. What's the most valuable lesson you've learned from a mistake or failure in your life?

Becky Nicolaides: Oh, gosh. Maybe to forgive myself.

Kandidly Kristin: Good one. Definitely give yourself some grace. Question number seven. Mountains or beaches?

Becky Nicolaides: Oh, wow. Maybe beach.

Kandidly Kristin: Being from LA, I thought that would be automatic beaches for you. All right, question number eight. What's one question you wish I had asked you during our chat that I didn't, and what would your answer have been?

Becky Nicolaides: Oh, gosh. You ask so many good ones. Oh, my goodness. That's a tough one. OK, OK.

Kandidly Kristin: And if you can't answer it, that makes me feel good. That's a trick question, and it really is designed to help me ask better questions. So when somebody goes, huh, I can't think of anything, then I know I did pretty good.

Becky Nicolaides: I think you did great.

Kandidly Kristin: Awesome. All right. Question number nine, introvert or extrovert?

Becky Nicolaides: I think introvert.

Kandidly Kristin: Yeah, you give me introvert vibe. And question number 10, which is the same for all my guests, how can my listeners connect with you and get your book?

Becky Nicolaides: Oh, thank you for that one. You can go to my website, which is https://www.beckynicolaides.com. That has a ton of information about the book and different things, projects and things I'm doing. You can find the book, The New Suburbia on Amazon, as well as the Oxford University Press website. And, you know, hopefully at your local bookstore, maybe might start carrying it. My local bookstore here is Romans and you can get it there. And we have another amazing independent bookstore near me called Octavia's Bookshelf. which is named Octavia Butler. And you can go to their website and I believe you can get it there as well.

Kandidly Kristin: Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So Becky, once again, I want to thank you for your time today, for having this chat with me. Thank you for this book and for tackling a topic that most people don't even think a whole lot about and they should. So thank you.

Becky Nicolaides: Thank you so much, Kristin. It's been great talking to you.

Kandidly Kristin: Yes, and guys, if you didn't write down all that Becky said, her website, all of that information will be in the show notes with clickable links to her website, her book, and any of her socials. And please, please, please don't forget to visit my little old website at www.thekandidshop.com candid with a K, and listen to an episode, drop me a review, and share, share, share the show. And until we meet again, I want all of you to keep it safe, keep it healthy, and keep it kandid