On top of that were the redlining guidelines that prohibited even well-off families from getting loans to buy homes in black or integrated neighborhoods. There was an invisible wall around subdivisions, erected in the form of dehumanizing racial covenants in which the prohibition of nonwhite owners was just an ordinary rule listed alongside the typical homeowners’ association requirements like keeping up your yard’s appearances and not putting billboards on the roof. working-class families.”Īssuming those families were white. “Nixon made a point of telling Khrushchev that the house was well within the means of U.S. than the Taj Mahal was typical in India or Buckingham Palace in Britain,” according to a TIME magazine story. exhibition was no more typical of workers’ homes in the U.S. “Soviet propaganda had been telling Russians in advance that the ranch house they would see at the U.S. In 1959, during a walk through an American exhibition in Moscow, Richard Nixon, then the vice president, highlighted a six-room model ranch house to the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. Compared to the rest of the world, American houses were large and full of modern furnishings, the latest appliances and a range of packaged foods and consumer products like Frosted Flakes, Oreo cookies, Hawaiian Punch, Tupperware, Minute Rice, TV dinners, Play-Doh, Frisbees and Barbie dolls. The surge of new building transformed America’s real estate industry from a collection of small one-at-a-time or a-few-at-a-time home builders to a business that was dominated by a handful of large regional builders that squeezed and streamlined until the haphazard world of outdoor construction was a tight industrial process on par with a General Motors assembly line.Īs low-density suburbs arose on the edge of every city, low-cost houses with abundant space and creature comforts became a singular symbol of progress and proof that the American way was winning. Builders started construction on 114,000 homes in 1944.
Beyond the explosion in demand, the federal government had bought into the real estate industry’s contention that the loan insurance programs developed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) during the Depression should continue to provide a generous backstop to the private housing market, allowing far more people to qualify for mortgages and creating an even more vast market for single-family houses.
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