Firstly, there’s nothing insensitive I’m going to say about veterans or their needs, nor the altruistic ambitions of any individuals who support them. It’s just that we have this legend about suburbia - that we built it for all the men returning home from the war, ready to start families. They got back, and had no where to live - they had to sleep in their parents living rooms, etc, etc… To some extent, there was assuredly a shortage of housing. We hadn’t been building houses since the stock market crash 16 years earlier.
Stepping back into that era, lest we forget,
“By 1926 activity had peaked nearly everywhere and the long and steep descent into bankruptcy, foreclosure, default, and “frozen assets” was commencing. The capstone event was the collapse of the notorious and highly publicized Florida land boom, in which enough land (some of it underwater) had been subdivided to house the entire US population. Florida’s boom began faltering in the fall of 1925 and by the fall of 1926 was in full-scale decline, sending shock waves through the nation’s financial and real estate markets.” - Marc A. Weiss, Rise of the Community Builders
The era of the depression led the men who’d chartered great wealth in real estate and house construction into what Dolores Hayden describes thusly:
“Backroom politics of the 1920’s, 1930’s, and early 1940’s had shaped postwar housing and urban design. There was no haste at all in the twenty years of lobbying for federal support of private-market, single-family housing development.” - Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia
Or, as Marc A. Weiss puts it,
“FHA had cast the die. All of the elements that constituted what many have referred to as “postwar suburbanization” were firmly in place by prewar 1940. The real estate industry, particularly in the sectors of finance and development, had undergone a remarkable transformation. While the first Levittown was not built until after World War II, the Levitt family firm was already engaging in large-scale FHA-financed subdivision and building operations by the early 1940s.” - Marc A. Weiss, Rise of the Community Builders
So, why then, all the hyperbole surrounding the need for housing after the war? Was it a coincidence that we had prepared the housing boom on a silver platter, ready to eat when the war ended? Or was the pride and industrial might of the era enough to compel propagandists to send us into self-righteous home-building overdrive?
From films like The Best Years of Our Lives to Norman Rockwell’s painting, The Homecoming, there is evidence of grief for the returning soldiers. Perhaps the pretty house in the suburbs was an all-to-ready way for society to deal with that grief. A present to ourselves with a mythology that leans towards a nearly religious can-do spirit.