My previous post in this series
concluded with an introduction to the population changes our urban areas
underwent with the advent of the automobile suburbs. Between 1945 and 1980 our urban areas, large
and small, suffered a general population decline. But the raw numbers tell only part of the
story, and not the important part by any means.
To understand what really happened, we must learn the answers two
questions:
* Who
left our urban areas and why?
* Who
took their place, and why?
These two questions and their answers are interrelated, because they
influenced each other. Let’s begin with
the first question, and pick up where we left off in discussing the immediate
post-war period.
Last time I focused on how the Federal Government provided considerable
financial incentives to both buyers and builders for the migration to the
suburbs, for the best of reasons. But financial
incentives alone cannot fully explain the national phenomenon that resulted.
The young veterans who bought those Cape
Cods on a concrete slab could have purchased a home in an urban area, if enough
had become available. Part of the reason
they didn’t was because few new homes were built in our urban areas, given the
profitability of mass-produced suburbs.
So far, so good, but insufficient housing supply might explain why our
towns and cities did not increase in population, but certainly not why the
population declined or changed in composition. To begin to understand, we need
to go back in time to a very different era, and suspend some of our current
thinking.
Part of the reason for the first phase of this movement was
psychological, and could not have been overcome by any actions of urban
advocates. A social factor was at
work. It’s hard to quantify, but necessary
to understand. It was basically a
component of what was known as “pent up demand”. People had done without for a very long time,
had won the war and now felt determined to live a new life, as different as
possible from what they had grown up around.
The overwhelming majority of the people we are discussing, whether
veterans and their wives or factory workers and their wives, had grown up in
the Depression. Whether they had lived
on a farm, in a small town, a mid-sized borough or a large city, that
experience had quite likely not been pleasant.
After a childhood of economic sacrifice followed by a war of human
sacrifice, our young men came home to face…a housing shortage. Little residential construction had taken
place during the Depression (and even less maintenance), and the newly-returned
veterans often found themselves living again with their relatives in old,
shabby buildings, or with their new families in temporary pre-fab trailers
while pursuing their government-subsidized college degrees. The experience did not dispose them toward
urban living, or in places very close to other people.
Our urban areas never had much of a chance with these people; their
memories and the times directed them to the suburbs. The vast majority had not owned a home before
the war; they were “first-time buyers.” They moved back in with Mom and Dad or
into trailers or cheap pre-fab quarters to get their G.I. Bill education
benefits, and when they graduated the new housing in the new suburbs had begun
to be available in large numbers. So
they left. Some did return, of
course. These of them came back to their
long-time family homes and resumed their previous jobs or even their place in
the family business. They would provide
the leadership—and the followership—for our urban areas in the hard times
ahead. But too many didn’t want to go
back, and armed with a college education and a mortgage guarantee, courtesy of
the federal government, they didn’t have to.
But the returned veterans weren’t the only ones in the first phase of
this movement who were entranced by the possibility of experiencing something
new, something different from how their lives had been so far. That’s part of the psychology we need to
understand, and it applied to a lot of people.
Life in a new community
seemed attractive for many, particularly somewhere else than where they had
been living. After decades of depression
and war, the urge to do something different, go somewhere different, spanned
generations and geography. Some moved to
new homes, and some just hit the road, to travel…
See the USA in your
Chevrolet,
America’s asking you to call,
Drive
the USA in your Chevrolet,
America’s
the greatest land of all”
Madison Avenue picked
up on this mood very quickly, and proceeded to add its contribution, which was
beyond substantial. Moving to the suburbs became the thing to do
because, well, everyone was doing it; everybody said so. That message, in many forms, first legitimized
then popularized the move to the periphery. Sensing a mass movement, popular culture
coalesced to make the move seem like a continuation of America’s frontier
heritage, this time to the “Crabgrass Frontier,” in the words of historian
Kenneth Jackson. Pundits invoked our
“frontier heritage,” our supposed need to keep moving in search of a better
life. The frontier was a central image
in the American psyche during this time; we had fallen in love with the myth of
the cowboy not long after his lifestyle had disappeared, and continued to show
the depth of our interest by the size of our financial commitment, from dime
novels to cowboy movies. The TV era was
taking shape, and cowboys would dominate its early decades. It all seemed to come together; everyone
pitched in to sell the image, particularly those pitching something more physical
to sell.
The reality, of
course, was rather different. Forty
acres and a mule had been the goal of frontier homesteaders; for this new
version it was one eighth-acre and an automobile. That eighth-acre still needed to be
cultivated, but the goal was lush green grass, not a crop, and an eighth-acre
is a damn sight easier to tend than forty.
On the other hand, frontier homesteaders staked out their claims on good
arable land; their descendants found their land stripped of topsoil, which had
been sold, and of trees, because they got in the way of mass production. Not to mention the fact that the journey to
this new frontier (before the term was formally adopted by the Kennedy
Administration) was a daily one, which the automobile had made not only
possible, but also faster and much more comfortable.
But Madison
Avenue—and, indeed, American popular culture—is not about reality, but about
dreams. The dream lived on, and people
continued to buy into it. The result was
a movement—usually in the form of families—from the cities to the new
automobile suburbs. This movement took
place in numbers large enough to earn the term “migration”. The motives for this migration, and the
urban population turnover it brought about, were mixed from the beginning. They also changed considerably over
time. We will give that change in motive
further scrutiny.
Next time: An overlooked point about who left on this migration and why.
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