We all know the story. After World War II, white families left cities for suburbs, where they created oases of affluence, supposedly free of “urban” problems. In this eye-opening, prize-winning book, Tim Keogh argues there was more to it. Focusing on Long Island, America’s richest postwar suburb, Keogh shows that the problems associated with cities like New York were present from the start. Military contracts subsidized well-paying local jobs building planes or filing paperwork for the Cold War. But a similarly large and diverse cohort of suburbanites remained impoverished. Not covered by New Deal labor law, they mowed the lawns, constructed the houses, scrubbed the kitchen floors, and stocked retail shelves. Likewise, while the GI Bill and other federal mortgage programs helped many buy single-family homes and leave the working class, they also underwrote efforts to cram others into suburban attics, basements, and sheds. In Levittown’s Shadow thus reveals how the government created both poverty and prosperity, fueling the largest engine of postwar middle-class wealth creation, while keeping millions across the nation in suburban poverty. But policymakers ignored these features of suburbia, instead depicting housing segregation as the cause of inequality and dispersing the poor as the solution, even as suburbs began to outpace urban and rural areas in terms of poverty. By shifting the focus to suburbs, Keogh thus forces us to recognize that poverty was never just an urban problem, and to consider whether depicting suburbs as the cure has not doomed generations of reform.