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7. Suburban Nation
- University of Washington Press
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253 seven suBurBan nation When WorlD War ii enDeD, the first Car-DePenDent lanDscapes were already creeping across the United States. Especially in outlying rural locations where small neighborhood institutions had disappeared and in suburban areas that lacked public transportation, cars had become a necessary and important part of many people’s lives. Such car-dependent places remained relatively few and far between, but the residents and retailers who populated them had demonstrated their profitability. Rather than withering and dying—the fate many observers had predicted—many car-dependent suburbs retained or increased their property values, enriching their developers and satisfying their residents. Moreover, outlying retailers had demonstrated that businesses catering to an automotive clientele could thrive, even during the most difficult years of the Great Depression. In contrast to the high-rent central business districts of cities, where prospects for resuming the vigorous growth of the 1920s seemed dim, undeveloped suburban areas struck postwar business leaders as a promising and expansive frontier. Suburban Denver, Colorado, mid-1940s: large lots, no sidewalks , single-use residential zoning. Stephen P. Jarchow, from Urban Land Institute, Community Builders Handbook (Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 1947), 67. Reprinted with permission of the Urban Land Institute. 254 || suBurBan nation As housing developers and retailers eyed the urban fringe in the first decade after World War II, car-dependent landscapes became central to the basic administrative, financial, and growth strategies of several powerful sectors of the American economy. Postwar leaders in the housing, retail, and transportation industries capitalized on new transportation and land-use policies to redefine “development” as “caroriented development,” which was stimulated by federal incentives, planned by experts who operated from the narrow perspective of their training and expertise, and subject to stringent land-use regulations designed to shield large real estate investments from risk. Offices and manufacturing facilities soon followed housing and retail into the suburbs , leaving cities reeling under the burdens of a contracting population , rapid demographic change, an aging infrastructure, expanding slums, and an eroding tax base—on top of other long-standing challenges facing central business districts, such as tangled traffic, severe parking shortages, and deteriorating streetcar service. After a decade of runaway suburbanization, just as things seemed to be at their worst for big American cities, the federal government elevated its incentives for suburbanization to an even higher level, most notably with the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which guaranteed federal funding for 90 percent of the cost of a 41,000-mile system of superhighways. The system—designed by highway engineers almost entirely without consulting city planners or public transportation officials—represented a supreme triumph over the environmental constraints that had long bedeviled efforts to maximize the potential speed and flexibility of cars. First, limited-access interstates dramatically changed the landscapes that they crossed, concentrating development and traffic at entrance and exit ramps while erecting otherwise impermeable boundaries between motorists and adjacent landscapes. Second, the interstates created an entirely new driving environment in which all the physical details of the roadway were designed to maximize the speed, flexibility, and safety of automotive travel—whether driving in a snowstorm, across challenging mountainous terrain, or through the heart of a densely settled city. The interstates also directly challenged long-distance railroad traffic by linking all major metropolitan areas via a transcontinental system of high-speed, multilane, tollfree , limited-access highways. Perhaps most importantly, however, the [44.213.99.37] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:48 GMT) suBurBan nation || 255 new interstates dramatically expanded the area available for profitable development in and near metropolitan areas. Additional federal subsidies for real estate development, combined with the car-oriented landuse development standards established in the first postwar decade, ensured that the explosive new growth along the new highways would be low-density, car-oriented growth. As the interstates spread, cardependent landscapes began to dominate all others. With these basic building blocks in place, the United States completed its transformation into Car Country. housing By the end of World War II, a serious, long-term housing shortage wracked American cities, big and small alike. By 1945, housing starts had failed to keep up with demand for new housing through sixteen straight years of depression and war. The number of urban rental apartments actually contracted from 16.3 million in 1940 to just 13 million in 1950 as rentals converted into owner-occupied homes, highlighting the acuteness of the shortage as soldiers began to return home.1 The housing industry moved quickly...