Now people could live outside of the city in places that were quieter and cleaner and still travel into the city to work. In fact, suburbs are sometimes called bedroom communities because people leave them during the day to go to work and return to them at night to go to bed!
The invention of the car and the development of highways sped up the growth of suburbs. Returning soldiers were ready to settle down and start families and the government provided low interest loans to help them buy houses. As suburbs grew, more and more land was developed, roads were built, wetlands were drained, fields were paved, and houses were built.
All of these changes in the landscape led to declines in the numbers of some wildlife species. But developing farmland and forests for suburbs also led to gardens, bird feeders, lawns, bushes, trees, garbage cans, and fast food restaurants with dumpsters full of old food! Some species were better able to adapt to these changes in their habit and their numbers have stayed steady and in some cases increased. Home Wild Files N. Growth of the Suburbs Improvements in transportation and changes in the economy led to the development of suburbs.
City or Country In the 18th and 19th centuries most people lived in the city or in a rural area. The company bought acres of farmland for the largest private housing project in American history. They named it Levittown. Every house in the division had exactly the same floor plan. Residents sometimes walked into the wrong house at night by accident. Since the GI Bill insured veterans' mortgages, Levittown could offer credit to the buyers.
In some cases, veterans and their families could move into a new house without paying out a cent. The Growth of Suburbia Overview GI Bill benefits that guarantied home loans helped many Americans buy houses and move into the suburbs.
And yet, beneath the aggregate numbers, patterns of racial disparity, sexual discrimination, and economic inequality persevered and questioned man of the assumptions of an Affluent Society.
In real estate appraisers arrived in sunny Pasadena, California. While suburbanization and the new consumer economy produced unprecedented wealth and affluence, the fruits of this economic and spatial abundance did not reach all Americans equally. The new economic structures and suburban spaces of the postwar period produced perhaps as much inequality as affluence.
Wealth created by the booming economy filtered through social structures with built-in privileges and prejudices. Just when many middle and lower class white American families began their journey of upward mobility by moving to the suburbs with the help of government spending and government programs such as the FHA and the GI Bill, many African Americans and other racial minorities found themselves systematically shut out.
A look at the relationship between federal organizations such as the HOLC and FHA and private banks, lenders, and real estate agents tells the story of standardized policies that produced a segregated housing market. At the core of HOLC appraisal techniques, which private parties also adopted, was the pernicious insistence that mixed-race and minority dominated neighborhoods were credit risks.
In partnership with local lenders and real estate agents, HOLC created Residential Security Maps to identify high and low risk-lending areas. People familiar with the local real estate market filled out uniform surveys on each neighborhood. Relying on this information, HOLC assigned every neighborhood a letter grade from A to D and a corresponding color code.
The least secure, highest risk neighborhoods for loans received a D grade and the color red. Doing so made visible the areas they believed were unfit for their services, denying black residents loans, housing, groceries, and other necessities of modern life.
Redlined Map of Greater Atlanta. Millions of Americans received mortgages that they otherwise would not have qualified for. But FHA-backed mortgages were not available to all.
Racial minorities could not get loans for property improvements in their own neighborhoods—seen as credit risks—and were denied mortgages to purchase property in other areas for fear that their presence would extend the red line into a new community. Levittown, the poster-child of the new suburban America, only allowed whites to purchase homes.
Thus HOLC policies and private developers increased home ownership and stability for white Americans while simultaneously creating and enforcing racial segregation.
The exclusionary structures of the postwar economy pushed African Americans and other minorities to protest. Over time the federal government attempted to rectify the racial segregation created, or at least facilitated, in part by its own policies.
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