| > of course they like large living spaces, most people do
[..] > nobody is willing to give up their spacious homes This is a view that is strident and sanctimonious, yet completely wrong. Suburbia did not come to exist because of a desire for big houses, which are just an incidental side effect, it's about home ownership. Specifically getting out from under the thumb of landlords. It was suburbia and the automobile -- not the New Deal -- that created the American middle class. Without the suburbs, you have to live in large urban tenements (or in rural areas) and there is no possibility of homeownership, as those landlords only sell to other landlords. Now along comes transportation technology which allows you to keep your job in the city but live where land is cheap enough to buy. Woohoo! Now you can be a homeowner thanks to automobiles, roads, and highways. The houses are larger than the urban tenements and flat just because the land is cheap. Going vertical is very expensive and makes financial sense only when land is expensive. So the size and shape of the house has nothing to do with why people rushed there. They rushed there because they want to get out from under the thumb of the urban landlord. Take a look at home ownership rates in the 20th C[1]: 1900: 46.5% <- Nothing much happens from 1900-1930
1910: 45.9%
1920: 45.6%
1930: 47.8% <- Great Depresssion + New deal: 1933-1941 sees decline
1940: 43.6% <- post-war suburbia boom: 1946-1966
1950: 55.0%
1960: 61.9% <- Increase slows as suburbs built out 1960 - 1980
1970: 62.9%
1980: 64.4% <- massively falling rates don't do much to 2000
1990: 64.2%
2000: 66.2%
So to look at the post-war suburbia boom as some kind of indulgent preference for big houses is to completely miss what this is about.And note that a side effect of the growth of suburbia is the shrinking of rural areas, as people in rural areas don't need to relinquish home ownership and become renters if they move to cities. That used to be the case. Before suburbia, if you wanted to move to the city, you needed to rent from one of these landlords. But, you counter, we have condos! Well, there were no condos in 1940, and by 1990, less then 5% of housing units were condos[2]. There are very few condos in America, because again the owners of the big multi-unit properties prefer to rent them out rather than convert them to condos, and there just isn't that much infill land available in existing urban areas for developers to come in and add a significant amount of condo urban housing stock. So please stop judging people and wildly moralizing about long term social or economic trends. That's a terrible lens through which to understand economic history. - - - [1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/tables/ti... [2] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/Publications/pdf/HUD-7775.pdf |
The modern american middle class grew because of the post war economic boom and it being the only industrial economy left standing, along with many other structural advantages, such as a large population, a safe geopolitical region and huge amounts of natural resources. It wasn't because of suburbs, the suburb boom happened because of white flight.
There are countries with higher homeownership rates, such as spain, and it really hasn't done them much good. Home ownership rates do not really matter for how well your economy is doing: https://qz.com/167887/germany-has-one-of-the-worlds-lowest-h...