The House That Private Enterprise Built
Produced by Keller Easterling and Richard Prelinger
The Voyager Company 1992
Produced with the assistance of Robert Cartolano, Seth Strumph, Rebecca Carpenter, Ed Tachibana, Mark Boyer and Melanie Goldstein.
This is a videodisc that can also be viewed at:
(http://www.columbia.edu/cu/gsapp/projs/call-it-home/html/)
CHAPTER 7
Residential Development 1930's-1960's
Houses built in the 30's were largely built by hand, woven together from plaster, lath, brick and other materials. All the new materials and methods of prefabrication introduced in the same decade finally were largely used to make cheaper and more automatic the traditional methods of building . Houses in these subdivisions were very ordinary with regard to space making techniques. They were largely subdivisions of a box with none or few of the planning innovations advocated by 20th-century modernism. Occasionally a modern flourish appeared as decorative treatment, but these and other finish materials were the chief differences from plan to plan. Plans, typically around 800 square feet were almost like individual apartments evenly spread through the landscape.
Houses became the assembly-line product of the financial industry as well as the home-building industry. Now there was no longer the inconvenience of individual owners and mortgages. Rather, a lending institution could use the merchant builder as a conduit. A subdivision of many individual projects as one large project with several house models meant steady business to the financier. Consistent with this practice, the FHA encouraged "pre-improved" subdivisions where builders bought large tracts of land and built all the homes before the owners arrived. The entire process could then be streamlined even further since not only the house but the entire site could be an assembly line, with multiple slabs being poured at once and framing/finishing crews completing as many as forty houses a day. Finally it was not the quality of the houses but the volume of houses which was being engineered. The potential for further "streamlining" was not lost on the merchant builders of these large tracts. Cutting corners or scrimping on materials did not pay off in the development of small numbers of homes, but a similar alteration multiplied by 17,000 homes, the number in Levittown, New York, could mean real profits for the developer.
John Keat's "Crack in the Picture Window" condensed all the potential horrors of this landscape into one nightmare novel which, though it was a pot-boiler, referred to real complaints and social trends which surfacing during the post-war years. Among those problems were unpaved roads, grass growing through the slab, diapers hung in the living room and even wife-swapping. By the 50's, couples were encouraged to "move up" from their Cape Cods to a split level and by the late 50's, when the saturated market would not sustain the same kind of home-building growth, developers began to experiment more aggressively with marketing as a way of identifying specialized groups of customers.
Recent years in the subdivision business have seen a distinct transition from mere lot selling to the merchandising of complete tracts, fully improved with new dwellings. Many of these dwellings are even equipped with the latest designs in stoves, washers, refrigerators, radios, television sets and air conditioning units, all sold as part of a completed package and so included in the almost inevitable mortgages....Subdividing is still being promoted by Realtors but most of them are doubling as professional house builders as well. Construction problems and their attendant headaches have been added to the subdivision business.[[1]
[From an advertisement.]
The 1950 House of Levittown is priced at $7990 on an inside plot and $8500 on a corner. The minimum inside plot is 60 by 100; the minimum corner, 80 by 100. Each house has an entrance foyer 4 by 8, a living room 12 by 19, a bedroom 12 by 12, another bedroom 8 by 12, a kitchen 9-1/2 by 10-1/2, a bathroom 5 by 8, and a porch, or carport, 12 by 20. There is a stairway to a large open attic which can be finished into two more bedrooms and another bath.
The following is included in every house:
* Bendix Deluxe Automatic Laundry
* General Electric Refrigerator
* General Electric Range
* Acme Aluminum Venetian Blinds
* Tracy All-Steel Cabinets
* Fasco Electric Ventilating Fan
* General Bronze Sliding Aluminum Windows
* Thermopane Insulated Glass
* Briggs Colored Bath Fixtures
* Armstrong Porcelain-on-Steel Wall Tile
* Copper Radiant Heating
* York-Shipley Automatic Oil Burner
* Cellulite Complete Insulation
* Matic Tile Floors
* Two-Way Log Burning Fire Place
* Complete Landscaping
* Outside Garden Storage Chest
* All Legal Fees and Recording Charges
* All Closing Costs
* Free Use of Levittown Swimming Pools
* Admiral 1950 Built-in Television with 12-1/2" Screen
[1]Stanley L. McMichael, Real Estate Subdivisions (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1949), 3.
CHAPTER 9
Racial Segregation
The statistical division of the FHA prepared real property inventories which charted, among other things, the racial content of cities across the country and the link between race and the likelihood of foreclosure on mortgage development. "Redlining" maps, coding areas inappropriate for mortgage insurance and largely coinciding with the location of racial populations, were then prepared in FHA offices across the country. Largely following received directives from traditional methods of real estate development, FHA philosophy as it appeared in Technical Bulletins, underwriting manuals and other publications clearly encouraged homogeneity and exclusion.
"A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing in a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in the neighborhood." From the National Association of Real Estate Boards-code of ethics[1]
"...But building and real estate men ever since the 1920's had advocated racial segregation. Up to 1950, the code of ethics of the National Association of Real Estate Boards imposed an obligation on Realtors to keep minorities out of new neighborhoods. Dozens of texts and more than hundred real-estate courses in colleges from coast to coast emphasized that when non-white families go where they are not wanted, they threaten real estate values and become undesirable neighbors.
The FHA and the Home Loan Bank Board adopted these policies and from 1935-1949 openly advocated racial segregation of minorities, the barring of 'inharmonious groups' from new neighborhoods, restrictive covenants, and other exclusion devices. The official manual of the FHA during the period read like a chapter from Hitler's Nuremberg laws. [2]
[1]Stanley L. McMichael, Real Estate Subdivisions (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1949), p.209.
[2] Charles Abrams, The Reporter, 9 May 1954. Chapter 10
CHAPTER 10
Highways
After World War II, highway boosters mounted an intense effort to finance the construction of new roads and the upgrading of existing ones, as railroads and urban public transportation found it difficult to compete with over-the-road alternatives. Besides promising an end to endemic congestion, delays and traffic jams, highway proponents cited many advantages to be gained from road expansion and construction: a better system of farm-to-market routes, the acceleration of commerce and industry, and a stronger national defense. The "highway lobby" was an alliance of influential players: the automotive industry, farmers and their organizations, truckers, oil companies, highway engineers and the Bureau of Public Roads. Throughout the teens, twenties and thirties, the highway lobby, working through organizations like Project Adequate Roads and the National Highway Users Conference, fought for the application of road and gasoline tax moneys to highway construction and for a system of trunk-line interstate highways. The highway lobby was joined by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, who sought highways as a limitless means of increasing property values. The lobby invoked standard themes of "elbow room," "horizons" and "freedom of the road" in their pamphlets and promotional literature.
In the New York World's Fair of 1939, the General Motors Futurama exhibit portrayed the world of 1960 as completely dependent on the automobile and highway. The exhibit valued speed, extolling the graceful engineering of highway interchanges. Of all "utopian" proposals with corporate backing, this one has come closest to fruition.
In 1944 a national system of Interstate Highways was authorized, but not funded, and finally a complicated financing formula led to the enactment of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. This legislation, which was to have a greater effect on America's landscape than any other conscious planning initiative, authorized a 41,000 mile system of Interstate and Defense Highways, of which 5,000 miles were to be urban freeways. For all the endless "horizons" and Conestoga Wagons used in its promotion, the Interstate highway system was among the most centrally controlled and bureacratically directed episodes in American history.
Highway development played a major role in the continuing decentralization
of this country's landscape and, naturally, made it possible for the
low-density housing model to succeed. At the local level, the traffic
engineer gained ascendancy over the designer; after the forties, streets
were most often engineered to meet the requirements of traffic, rather than
designed with broader purposes in mind. Even residential streets were
designed for the passage of large phantom vehicles moving at top speeds.
>From the size of the interstate to the turning radius of the driveway,
traffic engineering had a pervasive effect on American land use.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)