delores hayden

i was excited to read delores hayden, who offers feminist critiques of suburbs. i was particularly excited to find an article drawn from her book that my advisor reccommended be on my reading list -- now i don't have to read the whole thing.

i found myself captivated, and jotting notes of the history she traces of public subsidies and cronyism that brought about the suburbs, beyond just the invention of the car. it's one of those things that i've had an impression of being true but didn't have the evidence. Things i wrote down include:

-look up post WWII VA Bill - vets get homeloan at 4% with little/no money down. was this different than the GI bill that was for whites only, or is that the same thing? (edit: it's the same thing.)

-William Levitt, among the first tract suburban home builders, said "No man with a house can be a communist, he has too much to do." I don't know if he had ties to McCarthy when he said that, but eventually the two were pals. It's way significant that in the 50s, patriotism was demonstrated by spending your money, and that the nature of american identity shifted from the democratic nature of our government for all [white people] (political) to your ability and willingness to demonstrate your participation in capitalism (economics). He was playing on his personal interest and prospects for wealth as well as national cold-war anxieties (and eventually, hysteria). and to be honest, I don't all-the-way understand how fear of a communist economy grew to be such a global force. but i'm not adding another book.

(Leticia showed up, and I left this post for a few days. I'm back.)

Levittowns are significant in everybody's writing, from Kevin Lynch and Jane Jacobs writing about their form, Hayden writing about the political economic forces that made them possible, and Loewen's inclusion of the fact that they were explicitly racist. Talking about them is a possible and really good exam question, that I'll have to come back to to tie together --later.

Tax subsidies for greenfield development, hightways, and 'economic stimulus building' at highway nodes began to appear beyond existing suburbs to predicting and making possible future suburbs, sort of like an anti-environmental Johnny Appleseed (who was a real estate speculator creating future orchards for cider production; he wasn't just some hat-wearing wierdo concerned with nutrition on the frontier)(see Michael Pollan's 'The Botany of Desire'). This is not because of the nature of things by themselves, but reflect the growing power of auto manufacturers, energy companies (who had a huge interest in the 'all-electric home,' for obvious reasons) and real estate developers who profit from growth in the context of post-war anxieties, a baby boom, civil unrest (black people were part of the filthiness of the cities) conspicuous consumption and a fear of communism.

In this new development, there were no requirements for public space! Public gathering points were desirable to and created by only the people who stood to profit from them, and so were always private centered around consumption -- like shopping malls -- and, particularly when these places were being erected as community forecasters instead of current community amenaties, there was no one around to advocate for anything public. not only is a mall a community space reinforcing a culture of consumption (and unattractive or unwelcoming to folks who can't participate in the spending), but they also behave very differently than free public spaces or commons. Try holding a protest at the mall, or a union strike. Private property rights protect the mall's right to evict people who are not in accordance with what they can deem acceptable behavior. (they do this every day, well before anything would escalate to civil disobedience. this is often recognized readily by people falling outside of norms while staying relatively invisible to people falling within norms, as David Sibly points out. punk rockers get asked to leave for looking spiky and broke, but 'regular-looking' people may never notice the absence of spiky punk-rockers. they probably assume that they're self-selected away; they have no interest in being at the mall. eventually, this is probably true, but it's important to understand the exertion of power before it becomes a result of personal choice. this is probably why today there's not as many black people in suburbs even though segregation is no longer legally enforced. but i'm ahead of myself.)

*******To say that private spaces masquerading as public spaces is significant, and problematic beyond what i've just said, it implies that true public spaces are important and worthwile. I think that they are. They're fundamental to democracy, if you ask me. though I'm going to have to do a little research to remember who said what that lets me say something like that.

Beyond public space, these first new developments had no zoning requirements whatsoever -- no examination of well-designed neighborhoods or transit either. They were built from the notion of the 'garden city,' building little small-towns that replicated the (presumably understandable) desire to have a small-town life without the noise or dirt (or diversity) of the city, but still have the access. (jane jacobs talks about this a lot, and it extends what loewen notes about the solution always coming from the way you frame the problem. in this case, no one bothered to look at successful city examples or get to the root of some city problems (noxious industry and OVERcrowding [not high density], and more difficult to talk about, the Nadir of black-white race relations.) However, because they were made possible with PRIVATE funding rather than public, they didn't bother with things like schools, road maintenence, trash collection or sewers. They built private service roads and no infastructure, and had no accountability or promise to even maintain the roads. The true libertarian market-analysis would suggest that a savvy consumer would pick up on these things and the development would fail because no one in their right mind would buy in to such a place, but the truth is that they did sell, and it was federal public money in the 60s that retrofit these developments with proper infastructure -- thus, offering William Levitt and the suburban residents a HUGE invisible subsidy (that still exists, though it's buried now under more complex planning processes, zoning, city budgets and public-private partnerships that are SO CONVALUTED that the simple process of endorsing policy with private individual purchasing power is rediculous, especially when it creates artificially low prices that are, on the surface, in a private consumer's best self-interest.)

Gail Radford cites the 1930s as a period when Americans "developed a two-tier policy to subsidize housing. Cramped multifamily housing for the poor, the elderly, femaile-headed families, and people of color would be constructed by public authorities, and more generous single-family housing for white, male-headed families would be constructed by private developers with government support [invisible subsidies and allowance of explicit exclusion of minorities]"(Hayden 45). And the consequences are profound -- for housing, culture, public sector and urban design -- "inadequate financial resources behind one effort [public housing] and wasted material resources [expedited obselescence, poor land-use] behind the other. And worst of all, it mystified many working-class and middle-class Americans, who saw minimal subsidies for the poor but never understood their own tract housing, highways, and malls were far more heavily subsidized” (Hayden 45, italics my editions).

RANDOM THOUGHTS

Can a capitalist economy ever be truly sustainable? It's built on GROWTH and PRIVATE SELF-INTEREST, not staying sufficiently the same. and we keep increasing the population. and communalism will only work in capitalism when it's realized by individuals that collectivism/collaboration is in a self interest, and then it will be figured out how to make profitable.

where are the women? theyre the ones i know the least about as i look at this history of the 20th century, and I know they had some things going on, esp. during WWII. I know about the rosies, but I don't know how their history influenced the shaping of space.