Yes indeed, it had so much more to do with the fact that for a period of about 15 years, housing starts had been primarily "stops" due to 10 solid years of the Great Depression, where there was no money with which to build anything except some federally funded government projects, followed by a total stop on all nonessential building, a lack of not only materials, which had been diverted to the War effort for almost six years, but also manpower to build anything with. It takes time to rebuild stocks of building materials, after it had either been ravaged by war usage, or not produced at all.
During the war, there was practically nothing made from metals available to buy, from bolts to kitchen sinks to bathtubs, unless you could manage a priority purchase due to some extreme emergency, like fire or flood destroying what you had. And the available quality was certainly not up to prior expectations.
A look through War-time catalogs from Sears and Wards will show not a single sink that wasn't one bowl in size, even for kitchens, and made out of high strength glass, no metal cabinetry of any kind, no pipes or fittings without having to file a priority waiver, no bathtubs, no appliances, no metal pots and pans. Not even radios, musical instruments, toys or bicycles (unless you could prove to the priority board in power that it was your only means of getting to your war job!)
All supplies of major appliances available at the beginning of the war was frozen. Nobody could just order and buy it, even if it existed. All of them were set aside and prioritized for government/ military use, hospitals, medical clinics, labs, and day nurseries, most especially in the case of refrigerators.
The point is, there was no place to live for all the millions of new, young families, even with the GI Bill mortgage benefits, the FHA mortgage benefits for non-vets, or even the idle rich, because nothing had been built for about 15 years, and there was going to be time involved in reconverting from wartime to peacetime economies, manufacturing, and employment. It was going to take time to get all those trees needed for lumber harvested, cut down, transported, milled and back in the building stream again. It was going to take time even for men like the Levitt's, who knew what they wanted to do and how to go about it, to get the process of building even the first Levittown development underway. And this was after Bill Levitt and his brother got property located, purchased, timber located and purchased still in the ground, his own lumber mills built up and running to cut all his own lumber, railroad access to transport it, training carpenters in his methods, so that they could build 47 homes in a day at peak production. When they opened up the first day for people to come look at and apply for one of the new houses, they were stunned to find that people had been in line for up to three days to do so!
And that didn't include the second and third Levitt developments in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which came along behind. And that was just the work of one company.
It was estimated at the end of the war, that it was going to take something like ten million homes built over the next ten years, a million homes a year every year for ten years straight, to get everyone housed adequately. Not palatially ~ just adequately. Then came the slow downs in building during the Korean conflict, where young men got drafted off their jobs again, and sent off to fight. That took another, although admittedly smaller, regrouping when that mess was over with.
So, while it may have seemed short termed in hindsight, when you're a young husband and wife, maybe with one or even two kids, doubling up with the in-laws, or crowded into a one to three room flat, waiting several years for decent livable housing to come along seemed anything but short!
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texastreasure517
9 years ago
Thank you for the information. I, for one, learned a lot and that increased my appreciation of the film.
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DeepFriedJello
9 years ago
My parents were newlyweds living in a quonset hut in NY in '47 so this adds some perspective to that.
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caribeno
8 years ago
I agree with GeorgeLuvH!
I will add further that the postwar boom that we are told happened after World War II really didn't affect most Americans until the mid-'50's. By then, the Korean War was over, the rural electrification projects that brought electricity to every American was completed, and there were now almost enough homes for every American to afford and buy though this doesn't fully occur until 1957 or so. From then until 1972, the United States of America provided more adequate housing for its citizens than it did before or since.
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