Own-your-owns, Co-ops, Town Houses: Hybrid Housing Types and the New Urban Form in Postwar Southern California

摘要

What's the fun of fighting crabgrass in your front lawn when your friends, who live in apartments, are playing golf or catching albacore on weekends?rnSouthern California was the first great metropolitan region to have a residential fabric characterized overwhelmingly by single-family detached houses. Although freestanding houses had long predominated in many parts of American cities, it was not until the 1950s, when L.A. supplanted Philadelphia as the nation's third-largest city, that there was a major urban area in which the individual house was the norm. For generations, Americans had moved to L.A. to enjoy its good climate and modern, relaxed way of life, and most everyone-designers, politicians, and voters-made efforts to ensure that it did not come to resemble the more congested, centralized cities of the East Coast and Midwest. Wartime and postwar industrial growth in aviation, aerospace, and auto making brought millions more people to the region. The city's superior road network, ample stock of undeveloped land, and success in mass-producing modest houses in large, cost-efficient developments (coupled with federal programs designed to make homeownership more accessible), helped white Angelenos achieve the American dream of a detached suburban house. Most did.