the burbs

Quickly built by amateur developers working off a handful of construction drawings, the wood-framed triplexes do the same thing for their neighborhoods today that they did then: provide a decent and affordable stepping stone between the city’s dim, shared quarters and a big house in the ’burbs.

A revival of urban population growth would signal that in spite of the headwinds—the lure of a homebound, digital-first life in the ’burbs—cities still offer a product that Americans want.

In addition to Riley’s film, she’ll soon appear in an Eddie Murphy comedy, “The Pickup”; Aziz Ansari’s directorial debut, “Good Fortune”; a buddy comedy with SZA that she produced called “One of Them Days”; and a Peacock television adaptation of the 1989 Tom Hanks movie “The ’Burbs.”

Even the mainstream stuff, I wrote funny lines in “The Lost Boys” and “The ‘Burbs.”

In his song “Rhyming While Black,” he shouts out to everyone “from the streets to the burbs / and the farms to the curbs.”