The Birth of Sprawl: How Ending the Great Depression Meant Inventing the Suburbs

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The Birth of Sprawl: How Ending the Great Depression Meant Inventing the Suburbs


October 1, 2012

By Jeremy Rosenberg

Read More: http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures...e-suburbs.html

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"The Federal Housing Administration was established to restructure the collapsed private house-financing system through government mortgage insurance plans," reads text in the excellent 1995 APA Journal article, "Street Standards and the Shaping of Suburbia," by Michael Southworth and Eran Ben-Joseph. But, as H. Pike Oliver explains, purposefully or not, that's not all the FHA accomplished.

- Oliver says the FHA did play its intended mortgage relief role. "But," Oliver says, "through design guidelines adopted by the FHA that were used to qualify subdivisions for financing, it also played a dramatic role in shaping the design of residential communities."

- Since states began following the FHA's design guidelines when crafting their own mortgage-support programs, and since commercial lenders tended to keep the same guidelines once private dollars started flowing again, post Great Depression, what began as voluntary aims became the defacto nationwide design standard. And that standard, that shaping, resulted in nothing less than the nationwide rise of suburbs, subdivisions, single-family homes, cul-de-sacs, curvilinear streets, homes set far back from streets, grass lawns in lieu of other planting, the decline of pedestrianism and just about every other archetypical suburban hallmark.

- "The FHA guidance on subdivision design affect any project that sought eligibility for their mortgage insurance no matter where it was located," Oliver says. "The effect in Los Angeles was simply due to the massive amount of development that occurred in the greater Los Angeles area following World War II," Oliver continues. "The pace of activity was simply unparalleled in the history of the nation to that point."

- When I ask Oliver to send me a specific example of what's likely an FHA house, he passes along a Trulia link to an approximately 1,500-or-so-square-foot Westchester home. Whether that specific place was spawned by the New Deal doesn't particularly matter, of course. What does is that the FHA was such a behemoth that today it takes the work of two contemporary siblings, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to more or less match the footprint of the original. "In 1934 more than 70 percent of the nation's commercial banks had FHA insurance plans," Southworth and Ben-Joseph write in "Street Standards." "By 1959, FHA mortgage insurance had helped three out of every five American families to purchase a home and helped to repair or improve 22 million properties."

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The economic, social, shelter, public health and other woes of the Great Depression have been well-chronicled. This period chart, for instance, is titled, Los Angeles County Total Relief Load. Image courtesy Los Angeles Public Library

[vid]

Oh, so it's socialism! I get it now.

[Chicano3000X]

YOU FOOLS! Look what you've done to us!