V-J Day and the post-war housing boom
Sixty-two years ago today, the Allies formally announced victory over Japan, a date which has since been referred to as V-J Day (Victory Over Japan Day) and which marks the end of World War II and the beginning of one of the greatest periods of prosperity this country has every known. In today’s Writer’s Almanac, author Garrison Keillor talks about the boom in births that followed all those happy post-war reunions (I refer to the Baby Boom, of course), new housing construction, and — not very glamorous but incredibly important — the federal mortgage program that allowed many new families a place of their own to settle in and grow. Keillor says:
“Hundreds of thousands of happy couples had romantic reunions after the end of World War II, and nine months after V-J day, in May 1946, 233,452 babies were born in the United States. It was the largest number of babies that had ever been born in a single month in American history. By the end of 1946, 3.4 million babies had been born, the largest generation of Americans ever born at that point.
More than anything else, these new American families wanted houses. The country became so crowded that more than a half million families were living in Quonset huts. Many newly married couples had to move in with their families. The government provided a mortgage program for returning GIs, and developers began to build houses by the tens of thousands.
The most famous housing developments were those built by the Levitts of Long Island, New York, who constructed more than 140,000 houses. The average house in Levittown cost about $8,000, with a mortgage payment of $65 a month. When people first moved into the new neighborhoods, there were no streets or streetlights, and the lawns had yet to grow grass. But every new house included a stove, a refrigerator, and a washing machine.”
As it happened, the style the Levitts quickly settled on as being optimal for tract housing was the ranch, which they designed with open, flexible floor plans, room to grow, and as Keillor hints at above, the latest amenities. I invite you to read more about the genius of the Levitt design in our Roots of the Ranch section at the website (ranchrevival.com). The Levitts weren’t the only post-war builders to utilize the ranch style, and you can read more on that, too.
A Boomer, myself, I spent about ten years of my nomadic childhood in a ranch in the suburbs of Washington, DC, and now, many years and many houses later, I live in a ranch again. This house doesn’t date back quite as far as the post-WWII years, but it shares the same design features that make those post-war gems as popular as ever. It’s not fancy and not huge, but its single-level layout is roomy enough and simple enough that future remodeling — which I keep saying I will get to — will not cost me a fortune. And, probably most importantly, it’s comfortable and requires little in the way of upkeep. Who knows, maybe I’m just comfortable returning to my own roots in this old ranch house.
‘Till next time,
Jen Wolf
