SUBURBANIZATION

The Fad of the Forties

The suburban building craze of the 1940s transformed American society. The war created an enormous housing shortage, which prompted the postwar construction boom that built suburbia. Housing starts went from 114,000 in 1944 to an all-time high of 1,692,000 in 1950. This massive construction of single-family suburban houses was largely subsidized by the federal government. The 1944 GI Bill of Rights created a program that provided federally insured loans to veterans and encouraged private investment in the housing mortgage market. Tax benefits also favored homeowners in the 1940s. Government-insured mortgages subsidized the building of single houses on large suburban tracts such as Levittown on Long Island. A veteran could buy a house in this suburb of New York City with no down payment and a thirty-year mortgage with payments of fifty-six dollars per month, far less than the rent for the average apartment in many cities. By 1946 for the first time the majority of American families lived in houses they owned.

The Exclusion of Blacks from Suburbia

Suburban life was not available to all Americans. During the 1940s blacks were excluded by de facto segregation as well as by the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) practice of encouraging covenants in deeds that forbade the sale of FHA-financed homes to blacks. In 1948 these covenants were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelly v. Kraemer. The FHA also had a policy of "redlining" inner-city neighborhoods: on city maps it drew red lines around predominantly black inner-city neighborhoods and refused to insure loans for houses in those areas on the grounds that they lacked "economic stability" or "protection from adverse conditions." Such practices fostered the decay of inner cities and further separated blacks and whites.

The Suburban Good Life

Yet for middle-class whites life in suburbia embodied the American dream of the good life. Suburbia offered protection from urban unrest and class conflict. Cold War ideology also spurred the move to suburbia. In 1947 newsman George Putnam described suburban shopping centers as "concrete expressions of the practical idealism that built America…plenty of free parking for all those cars that we capitalists seem to acquire. Who can help but contrast [them] with what you'd find under communism." A journal published by atomic scientists devoted an issue to "defense through decentralization," urging depopulation of the urban core to "avoid a concentration of residences or industries in a potential target area for a nuclear attack."

Families in Suburbia

Suburban homes reinforced a specific vision of family life. Houses were designed to accommodate a married couple and their standard "2.3" children. Builders assumed that housewives would be at home full-time and that men would be away at work all day. Home designs facilitated a mother's supervision of her children: kitchens were near the front so mothers could cook while they watched the children outside, and living rooms had picture windows that also enabled a mother to see her children playing. The suburban home was designed to be a self-contained universe: new appliances made housework efficient and easy while televisions, home games, and backyards provided opportunities for recreation, amusement, family togetherness, and fun.

Barbecues in Levittown

Young suburban families went on spending sprees to "keep up with the Joneses," to have the same new appliances and toys as the family next door, A 1960 study of the psychology of spending noted: "The impact of suburbia on consumer behavior can hardly be overstated.…Young people choose to marry early, to have several children in the early years of marriage, to live in nice neighborhoods, and to have cars, washing machines, refrigerators, television sets, and several other appliances at the same time." The suburban good life revolved around home and children, with families gathering at a neighbor's house for Sunday barbecues or at Little League games. Family-centered consumption was viewed as an investment in the strength and stability of family life, rather than a conspicuous display of affluence. In the climate of the Cold War suburban domesticity was considered proof of the superiority of the American way of life.

Sources:

George Katona, The Powerful Consumer: Psychological Studies of the American Economy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960);

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).