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Originally Posted by Steely Dan
^ additionally, canadian cities didn't experience an influx of millions of poor southern blacks in the middle of the 20th century that kicked off wide-spread racial paranoia and sent the suburbanization engine into hyper-drive, as it did in northern US cities like chicago, philly, detroit, st. louis, cleveland, milwaukee, etc.
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Yep. And there was a racial aspect to the FHA as well. In its early days, it
promoted segregation of housing. This was seen as the "progressive" viewpoint, as the alternative was a suggestion that FHA-backed properties would be exclusively whites only.
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Originally Posted by Sun Belt
And Canada didn't experience the growth of about 180 million people since the end of the war, they've only had to plan for growth of about 23 million additional people.
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I'm sorry, this is a dumb argument. Canada's average population growth in the postwar period was higher than the U.S. (about 3% per year in the 50s, as opposed to about 1.75% in the U.S.). Canada was starting from a smaller base, but the average Canadian metro grew more rapidly than the average U.S. metro. It's just Canada had a lot less metropolitan areas.
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Originally Posted by Docere
This seems to be a good way of looking at it. So the whole interwar period is transitional?
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Personally, I think so. If it wasn't for the Great Depression/WW2 causing a near halt in residential construction for 15 years, the 1920s would just be seen as the start of the suburban era. I mean, if you look at a lot of the neighborhoods built out during this era, like
Riverside, IL, there's very little that really distinguishes it from postwar suburbia other than the housing styles. It has wide curvy streets, detached single-family homes, relatively generous lawns, and garages and driveways. Of course there's also an old railroad suburb "town center" area, but this isn't walkable to most of Riverside.
The big shift from the 1920s to the 1950s wasn't the style of construction, but the scale. The sort of developments which were only being built for the upper-middle and upper classes (since they were the only ones who could afford homes) in the 20s filtered down into the working classes. But the template was already there.
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Originally Posted by Crawford
So while I haven't read all the thread responses, in the context of NYC, prewar and postwar mean exactly what you would think - literally pre- and post- U.S. involvement in WW2. Construction was essentially banned during WW2 so there shouldn't be housing development concurrent with U.S. war participation.
These are important terms in NYC residential real estate, because prewar homes have always had somewhat more cache, with higher ceilings, larger, grander unit sizes, and the best locations, at least compared to buildings constructed in the immediate postwar decades. The prewar premium is significant enough that some postwar buildings have been renovated to "look" like 1920's-1930's construction, at least from the outside.
And, in the modern era (say 1980's to present), in the best neighborhoods, most residential new construction tries to mimic, or at least reference, prewar design.
There was very little luxury apartment house construction prior to, say WWI, so there isn't a term for the really old stuff. It's grouped in with prewar.
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Yeah, NYC is sort of in a class by itself, because the "interwar" housing is actually more urban since it's bigger scale and higher intensity, whereas the Victorian era housing was rowhouses and walkup tenements. Philly and Baltimore were also outliers, because they kept building rowhouses (albeit in progressively more "suburban" styles) up to around 1960.