Detached America: Building Houses In Postwar Suburbia

This book explores the quarter century between 1945 and 1970, when Americans crafted a new manner of living that shaped and reshaped how residential builders designed and marketed millions of detached single-family suburban houses. These dwellings were the basic building blocks and the single most important components of the explosive suburban growth during the postwar period, luring families to the metropolitan periphery from both crowded urban centers and the rural hinterlands. Favorable government policies, and sympathetic and widely available print media such as trade journals, popular shelter magazines, and newspapers, emboldened the residential building industry while informing the public of these new possibilities. A vast and long-lived collaboration involving government and business—and fueled by millions of middle-class homeowners—established the financial mechanisms, consumer frameworks, domestic ideologies informed especially by the notion of "casual living," and the architectural precedents that permanently altered the geographic and demographic landscape of the nation.