Lure of The Suburbs
"Throughout the nineteenth century...American cities annexed adjacent land and grew steadily...the predominant view in the nineteenth century was the doctrine of forcible annexation." However that would change toward the end of the century: "the first really significant defeat for the consolidation movement came when Brookline spurned Boston in 1874. virtually every other Eastern and Middle Western city was rebuffed by wealthy and independent suburbs."
By the turn of the 19th century, a middle class expectation of having residential space had emerged, which Jackson attributes to work of Andrew Jackson Downing, Calvert Vaux, and Catharine Beecher. “Family came to be a personal bastion against society, a place of refuge, free from outside control,” with “the emerging values of domesticity, privacy, and isolation reach fullest development in the United States. The big, mean city, with its confidence men and squalor, did not promise the same haven as the suburbs. The “ideal house came to be viewed as resting in the middle of a manicured lawn or picturesque garden.”
In 1833 in newly rebuilt Chicago, a new type of building appeared, 'balloon frame,' that "would absorb most of the population growth of the United States over the next one hundred and fifty years". A "new structure could be erected more quickly by two men than the heavy timber frame by twenty... many poorly paid immigrant groups had homeownership rates as high white Americans." "For the first time in the history of the world, middle class families in the late nineteenth century could reasonably expect to buy a detached home on an accessible lot... the real price of shelter in the United States was lower than in the Old World."
Intended to spur housing construction after the Great Depression, President Roosevelt's Federal Housing Administration established minimum standards for home construction and low down-payment amounts, and home loans amortized for the full-term of 20 to 30 years. Before that, "first mortgages were limited to one-of or two-thirds of the appraised value of the property", and loans had to be renewed every five years and interest rates were subject to revision every renewal.
After World War II, encouraged by the emergence of new cities of wartime production and government assistance for veterans, increasing numbers of Americans could afford to buy homes. Given the massive growth of affordable dwellings accessible by the highway and train, families flocked to planned towns such as Levittown where all the details such as schools and public works were already in place so that builders could erect as many as thirty homes a day to meet demand. Most importantly, the decentralization of post-World War II American cities led to the self-sufficiency of the suburbs around the urban core, both as the place of work and place of dwelling.
Read more about this topic: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization Of The United States
Famous quotes containing the words lure of the, lure of, lure and/or suburbs:
“To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“Your wits can’t thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You’ve no such colours in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.”
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)