Suburbanisation and the baby boom

are living areas built at the outer edges of towns or cities. In the 1940s and 1950s, new housing developments were deliberately built in the suburbs to attract families away from town centres. The middle-class families could afford to buy these new suburban homes. As more and more people owned cars, they no longer needed to live near where they worked. They could live in the suburbs and to work. As a result, there was increased suburbanisation during this period as people moved away from the centres of towns to live in the suburbs.

Advantages of living in the suburbs

Owning a house and living in the suburbs became a symbol of the the ideal way of life that many Americans aspired to. Houses in the suburbs could be built further apart due to increased space and had better access to the countryside. For families, moving to the suburbs meant that their children could be brought up in spacious new houses, located in specially designed estates, surrounded by neighbours who were just as as them.

Reasonable prices and low on loans meant that more and more people could afford these houses. The 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (sometimes known as the G.I. Bill), introduced at the end of World War Two, meant that war veterans could get very cheap loans with which to buy themselves a new house.

These new houses had big driveways for cars and came with many modern labour-saving appliances, such as refrigerators and washing machines. Central heating and air conditioning also made them very comfortable places to live. These suburban houses were built on big plots of land, many people could even afford to have a swimming pool in their garden.

The number of people who owned their own home in the USA increased from 23.6 million in 1950 to 32.8 million in 1960. The number of houses being built each year also increased rapidly, rising from around 114,000 in 1944 to 1.7 million in 1950. However, not everybody could afford to buy a suburban house.

Levittown

The first planned suburb, Levittown, was built just outside the city of New York by Levitt and Sons, Inc. Using the military construction technique of building from a kit, each house was made up of 27 parts, which meant that they could be built quickly and cheaply. As a result, they were soon in high demand. A builder in 1945, using traditional techniques, would have been able to build five houses a year, whereas the Levitt and Sons, Inc. were able to construct 2,000 using their kits. By 1951, there were 17,000 houses in the Levittown suburb. It became a model that was replicated across the rest of the USA for further new suburbs.

It is worth noting that, even though these new suburbs like Levittown were ‘picture perfect’, there was For example, the builders would not sell the homes to African Americans or other ethnic minorities, for fear that white people would not want to live nearby. By 1953, Levittown was the largest community in the US with no black residents.

Baby boom

Increased consumerism and the demand for more houses resulted from the growing population of the USA. The population had already grown by 6.5 million between 1940 and 1945, mostly as a result of ‘furlough babies’. These were babies born to families where the husband had been able to briefly return home from the war on leave (also known as a furlough) during World War Two.

There was also a rapid increase in the number of babies being born after the war. This became known as the baby boom. The American population increased by a further 40 million between 1945 and 1960. This was a result of a combination of factors:

men returning from the war
increased which meant that people felt they could afford to have more children
an increase in the number of marriages and fewer divorces, which meant that families stayed together longer

Around 4 million babies were born each year between 1954 and 1964. This meant that by 1964, 40 per cent of the American population had been born after 1946.

The economic impact of World War Two and post-war developmentsSuburbanisation and the baby boom