What seperates "golden era" from "midcentury"?

[Guttersnipe]

There's an excellent analysis of the class-driven aspects of the modern "trophy kitchen" phenomenon here.

This is indeed an excellent and interesting article. It is so very important to examine why one may feel compelled to do something. Analyses like these definitely help one spot seeds planted in the subconsciousness by the Boys from Marketing. Thanks!

 

[LizzieMaine]

Getting back a bit to the more historical aspects of the question, I'm currently reading an absolutely absorbing book about postwar housing developments and their impact on society entitled "The Crack In The Picture Window" by journalist John Keats. Written in 1957 -- ten years after the opening of Levittown -- it's part sarcastic jeremiad and part serious critique of what the rise of a commodified suburbia was doing to the American soul.

The most interesting point he raises, though, is this: the GI Bill, thru its no-money-down-for-qualified-vets loan guarantee program, created *the first generation of postindustrialization Americans in their twenties to expect to own their own homes,* and in doing this it also created the idea of what we call today "starter housing."

Prior to the war, buying a home was something you did after you were settled -- if, indeed, you ever bought a home at all. Most prewar homebuyers were couples in their thirties or even older, with children already in their teens. These families bought homes specifically to set down roots in a community, to become a part of that community, and with the expectation that they'd live there permanently. But the homebuyers targeted by the developers during the postwar boom were just the opposite -- they were generally young, just out of the service, just recently married, with no clear idea of what they wanted to do with their lives or where they wanted to end up. But because rental units were priced way out of their reach -- due in no small part to big developers pushing for the elimination of rent control laws in cities where such laws had existed before the war -- they had nowhere to go but to the Levittowns and their many clones.

Keats points out that this left these young homebuyers with two choices. They could either stick down roots before they were emotionally or financially ready to do so -- in communities that were completely synthetic -- or they could climb onto a never-ending merry-go-round of "trading up", swapping one house for another under a continiously-escalating mountain of debt, creating the illusion of prosperity and stability with none of the substance. He argues that neither of these courses would lead to the development of the sort of solid, diverse neighborhood-based communities that had characterized American life before the war, and that the "wealth" created by this postwar approach was purely illusory.

Reading this book now, nearly sixty years after it was written, shows just how prescient Keats was. He understood just where "midcentury" America was headed. You can read this book and understand exactly where and how the roots of the 2008 housing crisis were laid. It was the natural culmination of everything the Boys From Marketing hoodwinked a generation of young, guileless Americans into six decades before.

 

[tonyb]

Many echoes of that in "Geography of Nowhere," published some 36 years later.

Circumstances had me swapping a long-established city neighborhood, a district I had been hanging around in since moving to Seattle in 1968, for a waaay outer suburban "community" an hour's drive away, in light traffic. It's a place many of my city rat associates -- lifelong residents, some of 'em -- had heard of but had never once actually visited. I typically replied, "Oh, you've been there many times, I'm sure. It was just called something else."

Change the vegetation and you could be 50 miles outside Atlanta or Minneapolis or San Antonio.

Whatever we may think of that, it is what we have become, so we had better make the best of it. The initial wave of settlers in Nowhere, USA are mostly gone now. Generations of us know no other life. It's who we are. A sizable chunk of us, anyway.

The suburbs have their defenders. Some of them make a compelling case. A personal vehicle, or two, is my birthright. It's in the Constitution, I think. Or the Bible.

And some suburbs are indeed beautiful places, in their way. And some modernist architecture is wonderful indeed. I could fantasize for hours about having a Case Study house. Floor-to-ceiling windows? Expansive, "open" floor plan? Tons of daylight? I dig all that stuff, in its context. What I don't dig are the new developments that take cues from old urban districts but get it all wrong. They look terribly contrived because they are terribly contrived.

 

[Fading Fast]

Getting back a bit to the more historical aspects of the question, I'm currently reading an absolutely absorbing book about postwar housing developments and their impact on society entitled "The Crack In The Picture Window" by journalist John Keats. Written in 1957 -- ten years after the opening of Levittown -- it's part sarcastic jeremiad and part serious critique of what the rise of a commodified suburbia was doing to the American soul.

The most interesting point he raises, though, is this: the GI Bill, thru its no-money-down-for-qualified-vets loan guarantee program, created *the first generation of postindustrialization Americans in their twenties to expect to own their own homes,* and in doing this it also created the idea of what we call today "starter housing."

Prior to the war, buying a home was something you did after you were settled -- if, indeed, you ever bought a home at all. Most prewar homebuyers were couples in their thirties or even older, with children already in their teens. These families bought homes specifically to set down roots in a community, to become a part of that community, and with the expectation that they'd live there permanently. But the homebuyers targeted by the developers during the postwar boom were just the opposite -- they were generally young, just out of the service, just recently married, with no clear idea of what they wanted to do with their lives or where they wanted to end up. But because rental units were priced way out of their reach -- due in no small part to big developers pushing for the elimination of rent control laws in cities where such laws had existed before the war -- they had nowhere to go but to the Levittowns and their many clones.

Keats points out that this left these young homebuyers with two choices. They could either stick down roots before they were emotionally or financially ready to do so -- in communities that were completely synthetic -- or they could climb onto a never-ending merry-go-round of "trading up", swapping one house for another under a continiously-escalating mountain of debt, creating the illusion of prosperity and stability with none of the substance. He argues that neither of these courses would lead to the development of the sort of solid, diverse neighborhood-based communities that had characterized American life before the war, and that the "wealth" created by this postwar approach was purely illusory.

Reading this book now, nearly sixty years after it was written, shows just how prescient Keats was. He understood just where "midcentury" America was headed. You can read this book and understand exactly where and how the roots of the 2008 housing crisis were laid. It was the natural culmination of everything the Boys From Marketing hoodwinked a generation of young, guileless Americans into six decades before.

I agree with all these points, but have to add that it wasn't just "The Boys from Marketing." It was also "The Boys from Washington," our Government, that put incredible pressure on banks to make sketchy loans (and, yes, banks share blame too), but the US Government - through pressure on banks and by creating agencies of the government whose sole purpose was "affordable housing" and by changing tax laws - contributed greatly to all of the above including the 2008 housing bubble disaster. The US Gov't along with The Boys from Marketing, the banks and the real estate industry all conspired to leverage up the average American into houses they really couldn't afford.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Keats is quite critical of the Veterans Administration for allowing business interests, specifically the housing-development industry, to dominate the GI Bill program to the extent that it did. This problem became so notorious that Congressional hearings were held by a special committee chaired by Texas Representative Olin Teague to determine the extent of the abuses. The Committee found that the sales contracts being foisted on the desperate vets were so one-sided, and the process under which developers were building their houses was so riddled with corruption and fraud, that the VA Loan program was, in fact, being run almost entirely for the benefit of the development industry rather than for the benefit of actual veterans.

 

[dh66]

Keats is quite critical of the Veterans Administration for allowing business interests, specifically the housing-development industry, to dominate the GI Bill program to the extent that it did. This problem became so notorious that Congressional hearings were held by a special committee chaired by Virginia Representative Olin Teague to determine the extent of the abuses. The Committee found that the sales contracts being foisted on the desperate vets were so one-sided, and the process under which developers were building their houses was so riddled with corruption and fraud, that the VA Loan program was, in fact, being run almost entirely for the benefit of the development industry rather than for the benefit of actual veterans.

This has not changed.
Some years back, I lived in a "historic" (quotations because it was designated as such, but mostly the homes were just old, not particularly tourist worthy) neighborhood, with most homes dating to the 20s or 30s, the newest no later than 50s. A home across the street from me, built in the early 30s came available, and a good friend of mine, fresh home from the Iraq war wanted to buy it. He was told flat out NO. The GI bill would only help him buy a new or recently built home.

 

[Fading Fast]

In addition to the VA, FNMA, Freddie Mac and FHA with cheerleading from Congress and, at times, various Presidents all in the name of "affordable housing," either directly or through the banks - or tax advantages / incentive - broke down the old model of 20% down and your monthly payments should be no more than 1/4 of your income. That model had prevented the insane leverage, the loans to marginal borrowers, the "swapping up" and all the other nonsense that all these "incentives," "new programs," et al. created - that ultimately crashed down.

From business, to Washington, to the Boys from Marketing, to the Boys from Washington, to, also, those who took out loans they couldn't afford (individual homeowners, too, are responsible for their own actions) no one's hands are clean. Are there good people in Washington who tried to rein it in - yes. Are there good people in business and the banks who tried to rein it in - yes. Those people were dismissed, denounced (yes, there is well documented evidence of that) or marginalized during the boom. Are there good individuals who - despite what their banker, or the government agency rep or the real estate broker said - were very careful not to borrow more than they could afford - yes, but they were in the minority (and as one of them, constantly mocked by friends and others as be "too cautious, etc.").

And, it's all starting again. It's in the papers. Banks and the Government are (in the papers over the last week) reducing standards to encourage more borrowing, especially to purchase houses - unbelievable but true.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I have no problem with the basic idea of government-guaranteed loans. I bought my own house this summer thru the USDA Rural Development Program, which is specifically intended to *undo* a lot of the damage caused by postwar suburbia by encouraging investment in village/small town homes of strictly-defined "modest" construction. A program like this encourages the use and preservation of existing housing stock and discourages suburban development. I'm 100 percent behind that kind of a program, and the hoops I had to jump thru to qualify for it were well beyond "just sign here on the dotted line." The requirements themselves are so strict, on both the borrower and the bank, that most corporate banks don't participate in the program -- I had to go to a small, locally-based bank to find one that participated. In spirit it's a return to the original ideals of the New Deal era, where loans were carefully regulated and banks were closely supervised to prevent abuses of the system.

Contrast this with the "it's dough, let's go" approach of the postwar era, where loans were often approved on the spot, with no vetting of the applicant at all, and no real recourse when the property purchased turned out to be shabby and misrepresented.

 

[Fading Fast]

I have no problem with the basic idea of government-guaranteed loans. I bought my own house this summer thru the USDA Rural Development Program, which is specifically intended to *undo* a lot of the damage caused by postwar suburbia by encouraging investment in village/small town homes of strictly-defined "modest" construction. A program like this encourages the use and preservation of existing housing stock and discourages suburban development. I'm 100 percent behind that kind of a program, and the hoops I had to jump thru to qualify for it were well beyond "just sign here on the dotted line." The requirements themselves are so strict, on both the borrower and the bank, that most corporate banks don't participate in the program -- I had to go to a small, locally-based bank to find one that participated. In spirit it's a return to the original ideals of the New Deal era, where loans were carefully regulated and banks were closely supervised to prevent abuses of the system.

Contrast this with the "it's dough, let's go" approach of the postwar era, where loans were often approved on the spot, with no vetting of the applicant at all, and no real recourse when the property purchased turned out to be shabby and misrepresented.

Great point - most programs start out with good intentions and, some, remain that way, but so many get hijacked by both opportunistic businessmen ("we can make some money here if we just...") or opportunistic politicians ("I can get more votes if I just..."), that it is hard for them to stay sound and close to their original intention.

Support the small farmer - sure / but most of our agricultural support programs end up in the hands of wealthy farmers or corporations who, not coincidentally, contribute handsomely to farm belt politicians.

Provide medical insurance - Medicaide - to the needy - sure / but then the politicians through kickbacks (campaign contributions) expand it to unsustainable levels and unscrupulous or crooked doctors and insurers outright cheat or "legally" rig the system and the truly needy get poor care despite there being enough money spent if it wasn't stolen.

The same thing with "affordable housing programs" - help a small percentage of the population who have an identified need that the majority of the population wants to help - sure / but then we end up with Congressmen saying "Let's roll the dice" more on affordable housing or banks intentionally making liar loans at the same time that the bubble is about to pop.

 

[LizzieMaine]

As any farmer knows, when you've got a raccoon stealiing your chickens, the remedy isn't to cut the fence down. It's to shoot the raccoon.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Meanwhile, so far as the Boys and their ever-changing strategies are concerned, here's another book worth examining -- Juliet Schor's "The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need." This was published in 1997, just before the start of the housing bubble, at a time when the Internet was just taking off, and when mass television was still the dominant medium -- but it absolutely nails much of what developed over the next decade in terms of how middle-class status-seekers would be expressing their upward-mobility. In many ways it's an extension of Vance Packard's "The Status Seekers", and documents that much of what Packard had predicted in the early sixties had indeed come to pass. From the book:

The new consumerism is also built on a relentless ratcheting up of standards. If you move into a house with a fifties kitchen, the presumption is that you will eventually have it redone, because that's a standard that has now been established. If you didn't have air conditioning in your old car, the presumption is that when you replace it, the new one will have it. If you haven't been to Europe, the presumption is that you will get there, because you deserve to get there. And so on. In addition to the proliferation of new products (computers, cell phones, faxes, and other microelectronics), there is a continual upgrading of old ones--autos and appliances--and a shift to customized, more expensive versions, all leading to a general expansion of the list of things we have to have. The 1929 home I just moved into has a closet too shallow to fit a hanger. So the clothes face forward. The real estate agents suggested I solve the "problem" by turning the study off the bedroom into a walk-in. (Why read when you could be buying clothes?) What we want grows into what we need, at a sometimes dizzying rate. While politicians continue to tout the middle class as the heart and soul of American society, for far too many of us being solidly middle-class is no longer good enough.

Read the entire opening chapter here.

 

[dh66]

An interesting read, no doubt, maybe preaching to the choir, but some ideas a lot more people need to be exposed to.
There's definitely a lot of merit to what she says about Americans having moved on from "keeping up with the Joneses" and are now compelled to keep up with what they are bombarded with by the media.( internet today as much as t.v. was then) Too many people are unhappy with what the have because they are always looking "up" at those who have more. If folks would take stock of what they have, and compare it to what the vast majority of the rest of the world has (or doesn't have) they would be astounded by how "rich" they were. But perhaps that is part of the problem, they are soooo isolated from true want that they have no idea.
Around here there are some enclaves of half million$+ homes within 15 or 20 miles of absolute impoverished communities where a single family home may sell for less than $10,000, and many of the residents of the former are absolutely unaware of the existence of the latter. And I often wonder, if they were to take a ride through one of the truly poor areas, how much would they even truly care? It wouldn't even make them appreciate what they had one bit more.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We have a lot of that here. When I lived in That Upscale Town Down The Road, I had to listen to people who'd been living there six months talking endlessly about how "affordable housing will bring down property values," and saying -- as my boss at the time did, to my face -- "Hey, I've made my pile, I shouldn't have to look at a bunch of poor people." I got out of that town in 1997 -- when the building I lived in was condemned to build a new Rite Aid drug store -- and I haven't set foot there since. Come the revolution, I hope that whole town gets burned to the ground.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

The sad thing about Southern California is if you want a vintage 1900-40 house it's either in an upscale "Historic District" or "da Hood" with no in between.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We're lucky here that way. Most of our in-town housing stock is prewar, and the postwar construction can usually be identified by the constant presence of contractor trucks in the dooryard, as the beaverboard walls and saggy floors are repaired.

My mother lives in a house built in 1949. It was one of those traditional postwar Cape Cod deals with a "picture window" and an unfinished attic. It was also built in a hurry, using substandard materials -- the roof boards were cut-up signboards with tattered billboard paper still attached -- and the lot was a filled-in swamp consisting of chunks of old asphalt dusted with light topsoil. She's lived there for almost fifty years, and has spent three times what the house originally cost just trying to keep it watertight, a battle which gets more and more desperate as the neighborhood goes "upscale" and she gets runoff from the new McMansions being built on the old vacant lots where we used to play as kids.

The neighborhood wasn't a subdivision or a development -- it was just a section of an in-town street that had been left undeveloped because, duh, there was a swamp there. But in the postwar years, the developers and real-estate racketeers were in such a wild frenzy that any piece of land that could even temporarily support a house had one thrown up on it and was then palmed off on a desperate veteran.

 

[tonyb]

We have a lot of that here. When I lived in That Upscale Town Down The Road, I had to listen to people who'd been living there six months talking endlessly about how "affordable housing will bring down property values," and saying -- as my boss at the time did, to my face -- "Hey, I've made my pile, I shouldn't have to look at a bunch of poor people." I got out of that town in 1997 -- when the building I lived in was condemned to build a new Rite Aid drug store -- and I haven't set foot there since. Come the revolution, I hope that whole town gets burned to the ground.

I'd rather deal with a hundred people like your old boss than even one self-satisfied and completely self-unaware recent arrival to the rapidly gentrifying Seattle neighborhood where we still own a house.

I swear, I just may choke the next white recent arrival who tells me how much he or she treasures the "diversity" there. It apparently doesn't occur to these people that the place is made all the less diverse by their very presence there, in a home that once housed honest-to-goodness black folks, back when a workaday job was enough to pay the bills.

I can gripe only so much. Those escalating property values may keep me off cat food in my retirement.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Middle-aged middle-class white people yapping about "diversity" while crusading for strict zoning to keep the "wrong kind of white people" out of their part of town. Check and double check. That Town I Love So Well went on a rampage a couple years back because somebody had the unmitigated gall to propose opening a Dunkin Donuts in town. God forbid there should be any place where Joe Punchclock who's just in town to fix the furnace blower could get a cup of plain coffee for a buck. Tourists might think there's someone in that town who actually has to work for a living.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

I'd gladly welcome a Dunkin Donuts out here. They were in SoCal some thirty years ago but then they all closed. I really miss DD.

 

[Fading Fast]

Middle-aged middle-class white people yapping about "diversity" while crusading for strict zoning to keep the "wrong kind of white people" out of their part of town. Check and double check. That Town I Love So Well went on a rampage a couple years back because somebody had the unmitigated gall to propose opening a Dunkin Donuts in town. God forbid there should be any place where Joe Punchclock who's just in town to fix the furnace blower could get a cup of plain coffee for a buck. Tourists might think there's someone in that town who actually has to work for a living.

The term "diversity" has every meaning and, hence, no meaning. It has (or had) a halo, so it has been adopted by everyone to justify everything. I believe I share the original sentiment underlying the word when it first started being used for social change, but I have come to hate the word today because it is a billy club for anyone to advance his or her agenda. For that reason, I cringe every time I hear it (which is quite often).

As to DD, it used to be a working man place. Growing up, when I'd go there to get a cheap breakfast of doughnuts, the place was teaming with blue collar workers (hard hats, overalls, tool belts and all the other signs of real working men and women). In NYC, they don't seem to have any real identity - when I pop in for a doughnut, I see some workers in there, some cops (cliche or not) and a lot of dads with their kids (probably told not to tell Mom). They are all a bit run down and unkept - not in an old diner, we-work-hard way - but in a "we don't clean this place like we should" way. I rarely drink coffee, but I've noticed that the day of cheap DD coffee seem gone, but the doughnuts and soda are all reasonably priced - which, embarrassingly, is what I usually get.

 

[HudsonHawk]

As to DD, it used to be a working man place. Growing up, when I'd go there to get a cheap breakfast of doughnuts, the place was teaming with blue collar workers (hard hats, overalls, tool belts and all the other signs of real working men and women). In NYC, they don't seem to have any real identity - when I pop in for a doughnut, I see some workers in there, some cops (cliche or not) and a lot of dads with their kids (probably told not to tell Mom). They are all a bit run down and unkept - not in an old diner, we-work-hard way - but in a "we don't clean this place like we should" way. I rarely drink coffee, but I've noticed that the day of cheap DD coffee seem gone, but the doughnuts and soda are all reasonably priced - which, embarrassingly, is what I usually get.

Not to hijack this thread (though if you're going to hijack a thread, there are no better reasons than rasslin' and donuts), but I don't really care for Dunkin Donuts. Around here we have Shipley Do-Nuts, which predates Dunkin and Krispy Kreme. They are heaven. They also serve what they call "kolaches", but are really klobasniky.