A

SUBURBIA

History of American Suburbs

The American suburbs, the residential ideal of the 1950s, have a long tradition in the country's history. The U.S. Bureau of the Census first used the term suburb to designate an area that had economic ties to a nearby city (because the population worked and spent money there) but was outside the city limits. Suburbs had actually been around since much earlier, in the nineteenth century, for as long as families had wanted to escape the cramped conditions of innercity life. In the 1920s planned residential communities sprang up, as land developers divided vacant areas within the city into lots to sell to hopeful home builders. But the Great Depression ended most private construction in the country, and many lots remained undeveloped or with partially built houses that would never be completed.

New Suburbs

With the boom in marriage and birth-rates following World War II, growth of the suburbs began again. Real-estate organizations now sold lots with houses already built on them in a small variety of conservative styles: ranch or split-level, Colonial, Tudor, or Spanish. Developers were financed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression. The FHA encouraged home buying by offering low-payment, low-interest loans for purchases. Additionally, veterans returning from the war were offered even better lending rates and longer-term mortgages through the Veterans Administration (VA). Because of FHA and VA loans, houses were more affordable than ever before.

Levittown

Perhaps the most famous of these early mass-produced neighborhoods was Levittown, a suburb thirty miles east of New York City. Initially the construetion firm owned by the seventy-year-old Abraham Levitt and his two sons planned to build a community of two thousand sixty-dollars-per-month rental units for veterans. By 1948 Levitt and Sons had obtained the necessary land to build six thousand houses. By this time federal regulations had made it cheaper to sell the houses than to rent them. Even so, the Levitt company found no shortage of young couples prepared to make the commitment. With each expansion of Levittown, crowds camped out for the opportunity to buy the new units. When the suburb was completed in November 1951, it comprised 17,447 homes, as well as schools, stores, parks, and a community center.

Identical Floorplans

The houses in which Levittowners lived were very much alike. Their facades and color schemes varied slightly, but their floor plans were exactly the same. The first floor of each house consisted of two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, a bath, and a stairway leading to an unfinished attic. The house resided on a lot approximately sixty-by-one-hundred feet. Each house was furnished with a refrigerator, an electric stove, a washing machine, and, for the 1950 model, a television set built into the living room wall. After 1949 the Levitt company also offered a ranch-style home which was slightly larger than the original "Cape Cod" model but laid out along essentially the same plan. The Cape Cods sold for $6,990-$7,990, and the "Ranches" for between $8,000 and $9,500. These houses, especially if their owners improved upon them, could be resold for as much as $18,000, although a couple that could afford to pay that much for a home probably did not live in Levittown, which had a reputation as a low-income community.

Housing the Young

Levittown and the other suburbs like it were populated mainly by young families. The average age of a Levittown adult in 1957 was thirty-five. The average number of children in each home was 2.13, meaning that more children than adults lived in the community. A majority—nearly three-quarters—of suburban businessmen commuted to a nearby city for their jobs; but as businesses also began to move from the city, this figure dropped slightly, to 60 percent. Wives stayed in the suburbs almost exclusively, occupying their days tending to home and family or shopping at one of the growing number of nearby shopping malls. Because of the various demands of house, family, lawn, and community, the suburban couple often developed a division of labor in which each took on some of the other's traditional roles. Harold Wattel describes the situation in The Suburban Community (1958): "Father will do the family's weekly food shopping while mother may help paint the house; the male will help maintain the … tile floors while the female will represent the family at a civic meeting; the husband will participate actively in the local Parent-Teachers Association, while the wife keeps the family's monthly accounts."

A Sense of Community

The young suburban families naturally socialized with their neighbors, informally or as part of church and citizens' groups, the PTA, or Little League sports. A self-survey conducted among the residents of Levittown in 1956 showed that 76 percent of the respondents considered themselves primarily residents of Levittown, and 70 percent were willing to work to improve the neighborhood. Clearly a sense of community prevailed. At the same time, social critics warned that the positive aspects of community living were balanced by a pressure to conform, to keep as neat a lawn and own as many appliances as one's neighbors. In his novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Sloan Wilson gives fictional life to the drive to "keep up with the Joneses"; by the end of the novel Tom and Betsy Rath decide to reject the hollow values of corporate and suburban America. The Raths might have inspired those couples already tiring of the pressures of suburban living, but most families remained sold on life on the urban fringe. According to the Levittown self-survey, 94 percent of the community's residents would recommend it to others.