levittown03

levittown03

... an idea prevailed that since the United States had endured a long, traumatic depression, and had then so decisively won a huge war against manifest evil, its heroic citizens deserved a reward in the way of nice new things. A little house with a picket fence topped the wish list. At the war's end, Congress added another program of easy mortgages under the Veterans Administration (VA) on top of beefed-up FHA appropriations. These now made it possible for many qualified buyers to purchase a suburban house with no down payment. In each of the years between 1947 and 1957 the percentage of houses sold with FHA or VA mortgages ranged from just under 40 percent to over 50 percent. These immense market subsidies spurred a housing industry that had learned the mass-production techniques of Ford and General Motors.

A developer like William Levitt could whack together 150 houses a day in the potato fields of central Long Island, using a production system of specialized work crews and prefab components, until more than 17,000 nearly identical four-room "Cape Cod" boxes stood in Levittown, as the agglomeration was named. Levitt made buying a house so easy that you could sleepwalk into ownership, eliminating even closing costs. Classes of citizens formerly shut out of suburban home ownership could now join the migration, in particular blue-collar workers and young marrieds. The monthly mortgage payment for a new suburban house was commonly less than rent on a city apartment, or the cost of maintaining an older city house. Under the new federal income tax rules, morgage interest became deductible, another whopping subsidy for prospective homeowners. The American dream of a cottage on its own sacred plot of earth was finally the only economically rational choice.

By the time the merchant builders like Levitt and his kindred spirits got through packaging it, however, it was less a dream than a cruel parody. The place where the dream house stood--a subdivision of many other identical dream houses--was neither the country nor the city. It was noplace. If anything, it combined the worst social elements of the city and country and none of the best elements. As in the real country, everything was spread out and hard to get to without a car. There were no cultural institutions. and yet like the city, the suburb afforded no escape from other people into nature; except for some totemic trees and shrubs, nature had been obliterated by the relentless blocks full of houses.

--The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler (pp 104-5)


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