Essay 3

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Recommended: What population growth grew after world war 2

In the essay, The Baby Boom and the Age of the Subdivision, author Kenneth Jackson tells about the changes in the nation after World War II ended, and there was a spike in baby births. He talks about the creation of the Levittown suburbs to accommodate families in need of housing because of this. While the new rise of suburbs created a new kind of community and family, it also proved to have a changing effect on inner city areas and certain people.
At the end of World War II when the nation prepared to settle back into a state of peace, there arose a few necessities of citizens that became a problem. During the five years of war, military production had been more of a priority than consumer goods. Though between 1940 and 1943, with men leaving for war and an absence of birth control there was also a rise in birth rates. With many new families coming back together, housing availability became a major problem. People opted for living with friends and relatives and others lived in Quonset huts or temporary homes fixed out of former trolley cars, trailers, or surplus grain bins.
The government’s response to this need for millions of homes was first to fund a massive construction program. Next the government started approving mortgage insurance for the Federal Housing Administration. There was also a mortgage program for Veterans under the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944. All of this triggered a building boom of Single-family housing that began at 114,000 housing starts in 1944 and increased to 1,692,000 in 1950. Among the many homebuilders that were involved the most successful was the Levitt family.
Abraham Levitt and his sons, Alfred and William began on a small scale making Tudor-style houses for the upper middle class. The ...

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... had also taken money away from inner city housing development. Nevertheless, all people who were not allowed in the suburbs were forced to live outside the suburbs and in the inner city areas. Catholics, Jews and blacks had always been excluded from some neighborhoods, but builders such as the Levitt organization refused to sell to blacks or minorities.
The creation of the suburbs had come in an era of progression. With young people able to afford to own this housing, it created a new type of family, different from the extended family, which consisted of parents and their children only. The suburbs were now a new type of community of people with similar houses, lifestyles and income levels. Though with this new achievement and progression, it meant a fall in urban neighborhoods as well as higher poverty or exclusion for those citizens not included in this culture.

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