PRAISE FOR WELCOME TO WYNOTT
“Why not Ray
Harris for president? Ray has solved many of the problems besetting
our society. His witty and imaginative solutions, together with the
charming illustrations, make this book a must-read and a great gift.
I love it, and if you have any sense of humor, you will too.”
–
The Honorable David S. Doty
Senior U.S. District Judge,
District of Minnesota
“Precisely what we
need to hear at a time when top-down solutions seem to be failing us
and when governmental decrees seem to be stuck in perpetual
stalemates at the federal and state levels.”
– Thomas
Fisher, Professor and Dean
College of Design, University of
Minnesota
“A refreshing
serving of common sense about how to make our communities more
prosperous and pleasurable. While some might mistake Wynott for
Utopia, there’s nothing between these covers that is not a
practical idea for real people in real places in the real world.”
–
Jay Walljasper, Author
“All
That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons”
“The
Great Neighborhood Book”
“WELCOME
TO WYNOTT”
Rethinking the Way We’ve Always Done Things
By Ray Harris
With Lily Coyle
Copyright © 2012 by Ray Harris and Lily Coyle
Cover Illustration:
Kevin Cannon
Cover Design: James Monroe Design, LLC
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Printed in the
United States of America
E-Book Edition, 2012 ISBN:
978-0-9846669-1-1
Curmerian Books,
LLC
210 West Grant Street
Minneapolis, MN 55403
This book is also
available in print from select retailers and at:
welcometowynott.com
I dedicate this book to my parents:
To my father, Leo, for passing to me his vision and commitment to the community.
To my mother, Eleanor, for instilling in me her creative mind and the courage to follow my dreams and make them a reality.
“Some men see
things as they are and ask why. I dream of things that never were and
ask, why not.”
– Robert Kennedy
That’s been the modus operandi for my entire career. In 1950, at the dawn of the baby boom, I came out of Stanford with an industrial psychology degree. I then spent a hitch as an army officer, teaching recruits hand-to-hand combat. My first civilian position was as foreman at a toilet seat factory. These combined experiences inspired me to strike out on my own, sink or swim. For the next fifty-plus years I served as my own boss—and my own employee—making up my job description as I went. It worked out pretty well.
Unfettered by any corporate rules or customs, I’ve been free to take risks and face challenges, sometimes to succeed, and occasionally to meet failure head-on. I fancy myself a problem-solver, always wondering why we act and live as we do, and what best practices elsewhere might improve our ability to afford and enjoy a better quality of living. Every project I’ve completed started out as a “why not?”
Why not transform a neglected block into a hip urban retail center? Why not build some tony town homes in the scariest part of the city and bring up the value of the whole neighborhood? Why not open a new middle school that gets kids excited about learning? Why not serve the elderly with a campus designed specifically for their needs? Why not turn an overlooked scrap of land into a downtown dog park? All of these “why nots” came to fruition. And there were “why nots” that never made it off the ground. But each one was an invaluable education unto itself.
A long-standing student of how and where we live, I’ve spent my career searching for more efficient, cost-effective, and sensible ways to work, to play, to learn, and to survive in our American milieu. I’ve come away with the firm belief that acknowledgement and management of change significantly improves every aspect of our lives.
When you spend eighty or more years on this planet, you learn a thing or two. Again and again, project after project, I’ve had to break down irrational fears and push through resistance to change. I’ve had to overcome complacency, doubt, and every kind of obstacle you can imagine. I’ve learned a lot about the urban community specifically, and the human condition in general. I’ve learned enough that I could write a book about it!
Hey…why not?
INTRODUCTION
Wynott?
In our country, we hear a lot of “Why?”
“Why does it have to be this way?” “Why can’t someone come up with something better?” “Why do we keep running into the same problems?”
It is our right and privilege as citizens to grumble and complain about why things are the way things are. But at some point, we need to stop saying “Why?” and start saying “Why not?”
This is that point.
Things can be different, things can get better, and this book is here to show how it can be done. Borrowing from the US Marines, it’s time to adapt, overcome, and improvise. Few of us choose change, but none of us can escape it. Think about what we could do if we were open to change, and had the capacity to prepare for and even to shape it!
Within these pages are some specific instructions for improving our way of life. But more important than any one detail is the all-encompassing idea that this is a book about change. Specifically, this is a book that questions why we show futile resistance to unavoidable change. In particular, we take a look at how our built environment and our way of life have changed and will continue to change.
This book is a study of the savvy management of inevitable change, as applied to the new American urban community.
This new community is called “Wynott.”
1. WHERE WE ARE NOW
Why do we allow
change to manage us?
Change is the only thing we can rely on.
From the microscopic level to the macrocosmic level, everything that
we know and experience is in a constant state of flux. Our earth is
ever in motion, revolving at a rate of nine hundred miles per hour.
By the time you reach the end of this sentence, our planet has
traveled another twenty miles in its yearly orbit around the sun. And
while our outer world hurtles through an endlessly expanding
universe, our inner world is also in motion. Our bodies are in a
perpetual state of decay and renewal as our cells die and regenerate
themselves. Roughly every seven years we replace most of the cells in
our bodies.
The world spins. Time marches on. We grow and we age, and we have no control over any of this, no say in the matter. Which may be why we tend to cling so closely to the matters we feel we can control.
If you’ve ever watched a baby turn into a toddler, you’ve had the chance to witness the discovery of the ego. It often happens in the high chair. Mom and Dad marvel at how cooperative their wonderful baby is—THIS baby isn’t fussy; this baby is curious and eager for new experiences. THIS baby will happily try any fruit or vegetable… until one day, Baby learns a new word. Baby learns to say “no.” The very same baby, the one who will pick any dirty thing up off the floor and put it into his mouth, will suddenly clam up and refuse to try a lovely new piece of fresh fruit when offered by Mommy.
And it doesn’t get much better for us humans from that point onward. The moment we learn “no,” we apply the word early and often and we resist as much as possible. We don’t care if it’s good for us or not.
When change is presented to us, we tend to stonewall, no matter the potential outcome. We are naturally distrustful of new ideas. Our natural first reaction is to resist change. Think about the popular strategy of reverse psychology—you can more easily sway someone toward your line of thinking if you can trick them into believing that they are actually refusing to do what you want them to do. We cling like crazy to our present situation, even if it’s making us miserable.
The irony is, we resist change because it gives us the illusion of control. But we could experience the reality of control by embracing and initiating change instead of simply resisting it.
An offer they
can’t refuse
There are some people who do seek
change, voluntarily. And most people will be motivated to change if
you make them “an offer they can’t refuse.” That means one of
two radical motivators, in gangster speak:
1. Pay them off—lure
them in with a big profit-making opportunity.
2. Lean on them—make
things so unbearable that they’re forced to change.
When we
human beings are made an offer we “can’t refuse,” it can lead
us to change what we are, by evolution; where we live, by migration;
or how we function, by innovation.
When are things so unbearable that we’re forced to change? Evolution gives us a clue. Most of our physical features developed as ways for our species to survive in this environment. The ones who failed to adapt have been left behind as artifacts on the path from Ardipithicus ramidus to Homo sapiens. Adaptation is our greatest survival strategy.
Migration is another. There is no more profound change, within our control, than to leave behind the familiar and strike out to a foreign land, with no guarantee of survival, success, or return.
In the United States, we know that the Native Americans were already here when Westerners arrived and that slaves were brought in by force. Most of the rest of the people who founded our early nation had nothing to live for in their homelands; things were so dire there due to famine, crowding, or persecution that they left everything they knew behind for a harrowing journey to an unknown land, where they fought like hell just to survive. Those who didn’t come because of fear came because of opportunity. Land was given away to people willing to cultivate it. For the average immigrant to America in the 1800s, it was the chance of a lifetime.
For immigrants from the beginning of our nation until the present day, it is the same story. They come because it’s unbearable in their homeland, or else because there’s opportunity here that they can’t find anywhere else.
Innovation is another impetus to change. When someone comes up with something new, be it fire, the wheel, the printing press, the atom bomb, or the personal computer, it forces a watershed transformation in the way we live. Innovation is not just things, of course. It’s also ideas, like systems and organizations—religions, for instance. Whatever your age, countless innovations have come to prominence in your own lifetime, transforming the way you live, and you seldom think twice about them. Cable television, Velcro, cell phones, personal computers, the Internet, hand sanitizer, high-fructose corn syrup, Facebook, ibuprofen, debit cards, and juice boxes were all unheard of forty years ago, and today they permeate our lives. There’s no way to guarantee what the next big thing will be or how it will transform humankind, but we can guarantee that something new will always come along. And like adaptations and migrations, an innovation typically succeeds because it creates an opportunity or solves a problem.
A key component to innovation, migration, and even adaptation is leadership. Some bold soul always has to show the others how much better it can be and rally followers to do the same. One fish had to crawl out of the water first and adapt to land to show it could be done. One courageous explorer had to travel into the wilderness or over the seas, migrate away from the familiar into the unknown, and lead others onward. And any innovation will founder and fizzle in its early stages if it doesn’t have a champion convincing others to try it—a leader starting a movement. Somebody has to move that invention out of the garage, demonstrate it, explain it, manufacture it, and then market it. What innovations have been lost throughout history because of a lack of leadership? How many people have come up with great new ideas, but have not had the courage or the charisma to get them out to the world?
Adaptation, migration, and innovation lead to the exciting stuff: the stuff that history is made of, the times when things get better. But we don’t have to wait for things to become unbearable or for some once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in order to make things better. All we really need are some talented leaders to show us the way. We just need to find them.
Lots of people have ideas. And you don’t have to go far to find people who have a lot to say about how much better it could be. Go to any college campus. Any rock concert. Ask anyone from roughly age fifteen to twenty-five. They’ll tell you how bad things are and how much better they can be. They’ll tell you to question authority and fight the power. They’ve got some strong ideas and a ton of energy.
This energy is powerful and exciting, but the problem is, the young people shouting for change are mostly the ones in the worst position to make it. They’re on the lowest rungs of their career ladders. They often don’t own property. They have little influence, little authority, and not much holding them down—no house payments, no kids, no real careers yet to speak of. The main thing young people have got is passion.
It would be great if we could all hang onto that passion as we advance through life, gaining power at work, building influence and authority. However, as soon as we’ve got a little something to hang onto, a little something to watch over, our tendency is to conform to society’s expectations. In other words, exactly when we reach the point where we have the power and the clout to really change things, we lose interest in causing change. Why is this?
Certainly, once we get a piece of the pie, we want to protect it. But it’s more than that. By the time we reach that stage of life we’ve endured a lot of disheartening rejection. We’ve beaten our heads against quite a few walls, and didn’t like it. From our earliest years, peer pressure forces us either to conform or to hide our true selves, lest we face consequences. We learn this fact at school, at church, in our neighborhoods, at work, in the military, or in any group we find ourselves inhabiting.
We’re told by everyone—our parents, our teachers, our bosses, our leaders—to toe the line. At some point it sinks in. We obey. And so we become subservient.
We are subservient all up and down the chain of command. We learn subservience as the way to survive the machinations of any institution, and our lives are structured by one institution after another. Whether we are the lowest-ranking member or the highest, we are beholden to some interest other than our own.
Risk-aversion exists at the highest levels. Take a look at the leaders of our corporations. Some CEOs become too fearful of losing a bonus to make bold decisions and exhibit true leadership. A true leader has to make difficult and unpopular decisions that may cause short-term pain in order to bring long-term gain, but the short term is all that seems to matter in these times. If the quarterly earnings aren’t going up, up, up, that CEO could be out on his duff, because he is beholden to the shareholders. Most shareholders are only focused on the bottom line—if the bottom line isn’t in top shape, they’ll just ditch their shares and find a better investment. This puts those with the weakest loyalty to an organization in charge of steering the ship, and from the top to the bottom, very few people want to rock the boat. Visionary plans and daring ideas are watered down in committee. Organizations grow too big to be nimble or to stay relevant.
In politics it is the same. A candidate must make so many compromises just to get elected and stay elected that it is impossible to achieve any real goals. He or she is too terrified to make unpopular decisions—and should be. Every breath is monitored by opinion polls. The polls run their lives.
And polls run our personal lives. Everything we want to do seems to require approval from somebody else. We lose our appetite for risk and adventure, because when we fight authority, authority always wins. We get tired of questioning, resisting. There are so many rules to keep track of, so many ways to fail, so many pitfalls that we just duck and cover as best we can.
There’s an old trick that farmers use to tame a bull. When the bull is still a tiny calf, the farmer will pick it up and carry it around as often as possible until it grows too big. It’s not long before the bull is mighty enough to trample the farmer, but in the bull’s mind, that farmer still has the power to pick him up and carry him around. That makes the farmer the boss. We do the same thing to ourselves. We still fear the authority of our younger days, even after we surpass that authority. By the time we reach the height of our powers, we’ve allowed ourselves to be tamed.
And whether we once raged against the machine or marched to the beat of a different drum, or just dreamed of being something other than what we are now, we’ve let it go. It’s too much work to keep up that level of resistance. Who has the time and the energy? We are complacent, because it’s just plain easier. We get in a rut and stay in a rut, and we call it comfort. The hell we know is better than the hell we don’t know. Why rock the boat? Things could be worse. It’s so much easier to just wind down and settle into complacent inertia.
So we give up on changing, on trying to make a difference. We actually spend more time and effort resisting change than we do trying to direct it. And most of us simply ignore it. Que será, será. Let the others make the plans. What’s the point? Nothing really changes anyway.
By doing nothing at all, by approaching life with a laissez-faire philosophy, we’re not preventing change. We’re simply allowing it to happen willy-nilly.
Because everything DOES change. Everything.
Think about that.
Things are gonna keep changing, so we may as well acknowledge it and have a say. Whether we’re younger and filled with passion, older and filled with experience, or somewhere in between, we’ve got far more power than we realize. So...
Wynott manage
change?
When you expect things to change, it’s not so hard
to figure out what you really want and to work to make that happen.
Imagine you live in a place where change is a normal part of life,
and it is planned for as surely as the sun and the rain and the wind
and the snow. For the sake of our story, we’re going to call this
new neighborhood “Wynott.”
Why
Wynott?
Because it works. It satisfies. It’s the most
logical and fulfilling arrangement for a human community.
Prove it? Okay.
How about this: People who’ve lived on a college campus usually remember that time as being incredibly rich and satisfying—possibly the highlight of their lives—even though they may have been dateless, broke, and sleep-deprived. What’s so great about that time of life? (Besides being independent for the probably the first time ever, not to mention at the peak of one’s physical perfection?)
What’s great is being surrounded by peers, especially a diverse group of peers involved in endlessly different associations, teams, clubs, organizations, and groups. What’s great is learning and thinking about the future and being exposed to a constant stream of new information, ideas, and possibilities. What’s great is being able to walk or bike to nearly everything—classes, meals, bookstores, the clinic, the chapel, the gym, and various hangouts. What’s great is running into pals, or making new pals, anywhere on campus. What’s great is signing up for work-study opportunities that make it possible to put sweat equity toward the cost of living. What’s great is the enduring bonds and friendships formed while navigating the close quarters of a dorm room or other shared housing.
Those bonds and friendships mean that those who grasp Organic Chem. or Beowulf are often willing to tutor those who don’t. Those who have cars on campus are often willing to give lifts to those who don’t. Those who have TVs and game consoles are often willing to open up their rooms to those who don’t. Those who have family nearby are often willing to play host and tour guide to those who don’t.
Many of these patterns are also found on military bases, aboard ships, or in any place that brings a diverse group of people together to build community while using resources as efficiently and conveniently as possible. These patterns are what make Wynott a satisfying place to live, at any age:
—Constant
learning, new ideas, and possibilities
—The sense of a wide-open
future
—A community filled with familiar faces, as well as a
diversity of interests, goals, and abilities
—Everything handy,
within walking or biking distance
—Alternative ways to defray
the cost of living by way of sweat equity
—An efficient density
of housing that saves money, fosters neighborliness, and builds trust
—The voluntary sharing of resources, transportation, goods,
knowledge, connections, and other intangible valuables
Wynott is a lot like that rich and satisfying campus experience, but without the final exams.
Where is
Wynott?
Well, where do you live? Wynott might be an
inner-city neighborhood, an aging suburb, or a small town. It might
be defined as a high-school district or a municipality. Wynott might
be an area defined by physical boundaries, such as a river on one
side, a highway on the other.
It’s entirely possible to paint a thick purple borderline around Wynott to indicate that things are just a little bit different on the inside. Possible. But not a requirement.
Wynott is small enough for you to run into folks you know, yet big enough to be its own entity with a healthy mix of shops and businesses. Wynott is home to a variety of people of different ages, household types, and socioeconomic standing. Some of these people are students, some are retirees. Some are in the trades, some are professionals, some are artists, some are self-employed, and some are homemakers. Each Wynott has its own flavor. Maybe it’s a company town or a tourist town. Maybe there’s a high concentration of seniors or of one particular ethnic group. While there isn’t conformity, there is camaraderie.
Who lives in
Wynott?
Whatever the makeup, in Wynott there are three
kinds of people: those who lead, those who follow, and those who get
out of the way. Any person in Wynott might fill any of those roles at
any given time—sometimes following, sometimes leading—but
everyone in Wynott understands that without talented, trusted
leadership there’s no adaptation, migration, or innovation.
Leadership is a difficult, uphill climb—both ways. And when someone
is called to lead in Wynott (as many are) they can count on support.
This refers to leaders, not dictators. Real leaders take the needs of
others and the good of the community into account, accept input,
consider all factors, and act in the best interests of the group.
Wynott cultivates and supports this kind of leadership. While healthy
debate is always encouraged, in Wynott it’s not okay to stonewall
and naysay just for the sake of stonewalling and nay saying.
Wynott is simply a place where people have agreed to try something different, and enough people have committed to make it work. But you could live in Wynott and not play the game. Participation is not mandatory. You could live in the next district over and still be great friends with Wynott, because it’s not a competition. It’s just a fresh perspective. It’s the idea that citizens can work together to guide change instead of getting left in the dust when the inevitable changes run them over.
Yeah, but—
Yeah, but we can’t change the laws and we don’t have enough money and we’re never gonna get everyone to agree to go along with this—we can’t even agree on where to put the lawn chairs for the block party!
Don’t worry about that. It’s easier than you’d think.
What is
Wynott?
Wynott is the voluntary and democratic act of
working with what we’ve got to improve our quality of life in
measurable ways.
See? Told you it was easy.
Consider these guiding principles:
1. Wynott works with what’s possible within the existing system. Don’t worry, for now, about trying to change the laws of your community, your state, or your nation. There’s not much need for new legislation, although legislation may eventually and spontaneously be inspired by Wynott. The first deal is that we do the best we can to work with what we’ve got. Bloom where we’re planted. Start making lemonade out of lemons. It is possible to have a different lifestyle, and a different perspective, without making huge changes in the law.
2. Wynott doesn’t need special funding. We may not control the financial decisions made at state and federal levels, but we can be savvier with the money that we are entitled to use. Wynott says, “Give us what we’re entitled to, no more, no less, and let us handle it.” Wynott simply does a better job with the funding that’s already designated to run the community by taking the same budget and looking at it differently. Starting as a revenue-neutral project, Wynott sets a plan in motion to create efficiencies that will save money over the long run. Squeezing everything we can out of the assets we’ve already got will both eliminate waste and curb unnecessary new spending. It’s important to consider the lifecycle costs of any venture, not just the outlay costs. Some quality-of-life issues do require additional expenditures or larger up-front expenditures, and that option is always on the table. Changes take time, like any tree, to reach fruition. Wynott is not about instant gratification, quarterly reports, and short-term results. Wynott looks further ahead than the next election. Wynott requires vision—vision that will pay off, and cost less, over time.
3. Wynott isn’t Left or Right. It’s everywhere. It can work for conservatives and liberals, urbanites and suburbanites, the affluent and the underfunded. Basically, it covers any group of people that might be into food and shelter. There’s no dictator, and it’s not autocratic. The governance of Wynott must be practical and possible while maintaining the power of democracy.
4. Wynott isn’t telling anybody what to do. That includes residents of Wynott as well as neighboring communities. The Wynott environment is not competitive, but rather supportive of and cooperative with adjacent communities. As they succeed, so succeeds Wynott.
5. Wynott produces measurable results. “Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.” Intellectually and intuitively, we know we can do better. There are subjective goals and quality-of-life issues, which can’t really be measured. Expect to notice a lot of that happening in Wynott. But don’t think it’s all just feel-good Happy-O-Meter stuff. We are implementing changes that are subject to real analysis and accountability to demonstrate that we’re doing a better job. As the efficiencies and improvements are integrated, our value goes up. Expect to see a measureable increase in the value of our time, the value of our spending dollars, and the value of our properties.
With these five sensible guidelines in our hip pocket, there’s only one thing left to learn:
How Does Wynott
Work?
Wynott works by applying fresh thinking to all
existing systems and structures.
Now don’t let the all-encompassing totality of that concept frighten you. The first step is a doozy, but once we get going, it soon becomes a way of life. It’s just a simple matter of systematically changing the “Why?” to Wynott!
2. HOW WE GOT HERE
Why are things
the way they are now?
From the very beginning, human beings
have been social creatures. Even the Bible says, “It is not good
that man should be alone.” The first social system we built was
tribalism, and it has had a very adaptive effect on human evolution.
Tribalism, for better or worse, is still in existence, in various
forms, making it the longest-lasting societal structure to date. When
individuals do leave their “tribe,” it’s usually to find or to
build a new one.
Consider the American pioneers. They entered the wilderness seeking freedom, land ownership, and adventure. Isolated from society, they had to build their own homes, make their own clothes, and hunt and grow their own food. They also had to serve as their own doctors, dentists, teachers, and police officers. It was a grueling life of hardship, and we proudly think of the founders of our land as rugged individuals who knew how to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Which they did. And as soon as they got those boots pulled up, they quickly did what human beings have always done to survive—they banded together. The pioneers went from being isolated individuals to living in small settlements to forming small communities. They watched each other’s backs, built each other’s barns, delivered each other’s babies. They traded goods, food, and services. The foundation of our nation may be the Declaration of Independence, but our success is due to cooperation, communication, trade, and interdependence. As people worked together in our nation’s early years, communities prospered and grew into small towns, and then larger towns, and then cities.
Cities boomed and flourished—or sometimes went bust—across the United States. Surrounding each city was the country. Urban or rural, those were the choices. If you rode a train from coast to coast, the demarcation was clearly seen through your window. There were no suburbs. Unless it was wilderness, land was for farming. If you weren’t growing crops and feeding others, you didn’t have need for much land. And you had no concept of lawn. Grass belonged in prairies and pastures. A yard was used to grow edible and medicinal plants or to keep a few animals. The rest of it was usually hard-packed dirt, which was swept clean daily.
But sweeping dirt can get kind of old. By the mid-1800s, the wealthiest Americans began to emulate the European gentry, whose sparkling green lawns were one of the earliest forms of conspicuous consumption. To further differentiate themselves from the peasantry, wealthy European estate owners turned their land into grass, meant only for leisure—no grazing allowed. Acres and acres of manicured lawn, a high-maintenance crop that served no purpose and fed no one, was the ultimate status symbol and the highest form of luxury.
A European-style lawn wasn’t possible for most Americans, until the push mower was invented in 1870, and until the garden hose and running water became widely available. Even then, it wasn’t until the 1930s that a suitable mix of lawn grass was developed to grow in our climate. The moment it did, the Garden Club of America (GCA) took over. According to Virginia Scott Jenkins in The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession, the GCA launched a beautification campaign to convince homeowners that it was their civic duty to maintain a beautiful lawn, which was described in pamphlets as “a single type of grass with no intruding weeds, kept mown at a height of an inch and a half, uniformly green, and neatly edged.” Americans fell in line, and fell in love— with their lawns. To own a home with a patch of green grass was to truly own an estate.
Lost on the average homeowner was the fact that a genuine estate could, and did, employ teams of laborers to maintain its lawns. For the gentry, a lawn is a carefree place to spend leisure time. For everybody else, leisure time is spent caring for lawns. To this day, average American homeowners proudly discharge their own lawn duties and spend their precious little free time seeding, feeding, weeding, watering, and mowing a small green acreage. The sparkling green lawn is still the most enduring symbol of the American dream.
The GCA had only just cinched its victory over American yards when World War II came to a close. The GIs returned from war with VA loans to buy houses, and everyone wanted an estate of their own, with a green lawn to mow. Oh, and a big garage for the family car. For now we had a lot of cars. We had factories freed up from war work to put them together. We had access to raw materials from which to build them, and we had cheap gasoline with which to run them. We also had pent-up purchasing demand with which to buy them, after years of depression and war, and we had the Federal-Aid Highway Act.
Also known as the National Interstate and Defense Act, it was signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 and launched the largest public works project to date in American history. At a cost of $25 billion, 41,000 miles of interstate highways were constructed over twenty years. Eisenhower supported this act because of his own military experience and his conviction that good highways are essential to national defense—that is, to transport troops and goods across the country in the event of an invasion. But instead of preventing an invasion, the new highways fueled an explosion—the explosion of suburban America.
This subsidization of suburban road infrastructure suddenly made commutes between urban centers much faster, enabling the growth of suburbs in rings around the city. As service sector jobs began replacing industrial jobs, many factories were shuttered, leaving large gaps downtown. At the same time, skyscrapers rose downtown, and real estate prices inflated, pushing residents out and bringing commercial tenants in. The city center became a clearly defined and clearly zoned business center, its former residents left looking for somewhere to live.
GIs who came home to isolated farms or crowded urban environments were drawn to the suburbs for many reasons. With VA loans at an unheard of 3 percent interest, they’d have been fools not to buy, and it made no sense to resist the incentives to fill the suburbs, the most logical and attractive location for growing families.
The need for housing was real. Very little had been built during the Great Depression. During World War II, even fewer homes had been built, due to a scarcity of raw materials as well as laborers. Everything and everyone had been needed for the war effort.
During the war, one innovative Navy Seabee named William Levitt paid close attention to the mass-production techniques used to build military housing. When he returned home again to work with his father and brothers’ custom home-building firm, he preached the gospel of uniform and interchangeable parts and quickly converted his entire family. Levitt & Sons designed efficient blueprints and perfected cost-effective construction techniques, anticipating the postwar boom. They were able to increase speed and cut costs by leaving unfinished “expansion attics” for the owners to complete. They used precut lumber, and negotiated a change in the building code to allow building on concrete slabs. They hired nonunion contractors.