Short answers, pulled from the story.
The English word suburb derives from the Old French subburbe, which comes from the Latin suburbium, formed from sub (meaning "under" or "below") and urbs (meaning "city"). The first recorded use of the term in English appears around 1350 in the manuscript of the Midlands Prose Psalter.
Suburbs began growing around London in the mid-19th century as the city became more overcrowded and unsanitary. A major catalyst was the opening of the Metropolitan Railway in the 1860s, which eventually reached Harrow in 1880 and enabled daily commutes from what became the suburbs of Middlesex.
Levittown, built on Long Island just east of New York City, is the most famous prototype of postwar mass-produced American housing. It offered a new house for $1,000 down and $70 a month, with three bedrooms, a fireplace, a gas range, and a landscaped lot of 75 by 100 feet, for a total price of $10,000.
The G.I. Bill guaranteed low-cost loans with very low down payments and low interest rates for 16 million eligible veterans. In 1947 alone, 540,000 veterans bought homes at an average price of $7,300. Annual construction of new non-farm housing units rose from an average of 316,000 in 1930-1945 to 1,450,000 in 1946-1955.
Redlining, built into federal housing policy, furthered racial segregation by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods. These policies were primarily designed to provide housing to white middle-class families, while African Americans largely remained concentrated in urban areas, creating the phenomenon known as white flight.
Metro-land was a marketing term coined by the Metropolitan Railway's marketing department in 1915, when the Guide to the Extension Line became the Metro-land guide, priced at one penny. It promoted country living with fast railway access to central London and was published annually until 1932.