I am finally reading David Halberstam's The Fifties. In discussing Bill Levitt and his post-World War II mass housing construction projects for GIs, Halberstam compares Bill Levitt with his brother Alfred: "Alfred looked at the Hempstead land and saw a lot of potato farms being cleared for a few houses; Bill Levitt looked at it and saw a gargantuan, virtually self-contained suburban community."
Two men look at the same thing and one sees an ordinary potato field with a couple of houses while another sees mass housing that leads to the suburban lifestyle so common in America after the 1950s. One has a limited, narrow vision of what can be and one has a vision that stretches beyond the imagination of the times. I like this vision thing--I don't just want to see the ordinary in the ordinary. Yet. . . while providing much need post-war housing, this vision has led to suburban sprawl and unforgetable strip malls.
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"Yet. . . while providing much need post-war housing, this vision has led to suburban sprawl and unforgetable strip malls."
And what has the suburban sprawl led to? The general affordability of housing, the decay of personal property (in the sense that we put our own work into our own homes with our thoughts on the future generations who would live there), urbanization of America - My family lives in East Texas, while I live in Montana. I wonder whether this would be so if we had to build our own houses, live from our own means, provide a trade for the next generation to continue. I wonder if Bill Levitt foresaw the breakdown of families sharing in eachothers' lives, generations living under the same roof, the young learning from the wisdom of the old... I wonder if he saw all of the ramifications of his vision.
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