Landscape and City Life: Four Ecologies of Residence in the San Francisco Bay Area
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1 A. Scott and E. Soja, 'Los Angeles: the capital of the late twentieth century,' Society and Space 4, 3 (1986), pp. 249-54. The best study of LA is Mike Davis, City of quartz (New York, Verso, 1990).
2 R. Banham, Los Angeles: the architecture of the four ecologies (New York, Harper and Row, 1971); F. Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism,' New Left Review146 (1986), pp. 53-93, E. Soja, Post-modem geographies (New York, Verso, 1989); E. Soja, 'Inside exopolis: scenes from Orange County,' in M. Sorkin, ed., Variations on a theme park: the new American city and the end of public space (New York, Hill and Wang/Noonday Press, 1991), pp. 94-122; M. Gottdeiner and G. Kephart, 'The multinucleated region: a comparative analysis,' in R. Kling, S. Olin and M. Poster, eds., Postsuburban California: the transformation of Orange County since World War II (Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1991).
3 Key landscapes we cannot consider here include the domain of the very rich, retail centres, the downtowns, the agrarian fringe, and industrial parks. I hope to cover these, and the pol itics, economics and culture of the Bay Area, in a book-length study.
4 Stephenson first saw the city in the late 1870s. The term 'instant city' is due to G. Barth, Instant cities: urbanization and the rise of San Francisco and Denver (New York, Oxford University Press, 1975). The one remnant of the Gold Rush city is the Jackson Square histor ical district at the north edge of the financial district, once filled with notorious Barbary Coast dives.
5 On the other side, the libertarian freedom of the white man was eagerly asserted against Mexican landowners, Mexican and Chinese miners, and indigenous peoples, without scru ple. On this epoch generally, see Barth, Instant cities; R. Paul, California gold: the beginning of mining in the far west (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1947); R. Lotchin, San Francisco, 1846-1856: from hamlet to city (New York, Oxford University Press, 1974); A. Hurtado, Indian survival on the California frontier (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988).
6 On building in the Victorian era, see the excellent study by A. Moudon, Built for change: neighborhood architecture in San Francisco (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1986).
7 Anne Bloomfield, 'The real estate associates: a land and housing developer of the 1870s in San Francisco,' Jourrcal of the Society of Architectural Historians 37, 1 (1978), pp. 13-33.
8 On early suburban development in Boston, see S. Warner, Streetcar suburbs: the process of growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1962). On San Francisco's flexible order, see Moudon Built for change: neighborhood architecture in San Francisco.
9 The west in many ways followed eastern fashions, but not to the degree that most commen tators believe, e.g., H. Kirker, California's architectural frontier: style and tradition in the 19th cen tury (Santa Barbara, Peregrine Smith, 1973); and for the comparison between early California and present-day Las Vegas, see J. Findlay, People of chance: gambling in American society from Jamestown to Las Vegas (New York, Oxford University Press, 1986).
10 On Victorians in San Francisco, see R. Olmsted and T. Watkins, Here today: San Francisco's architectural heritage (San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1969); S. Woodbridge, ed., Bay Area houses (New York, Oxford University Press, 1976); and J. Waldhorn and S. Woodbridge, Victoria's legacy (San Francisco, 101 Productions, 1978). For a (rare) favourable view of Victorian architecture in general, which emphasizes its variety, see J. Maass, The gingerbread age: a view of Victorian America (New York, Rinehart, 1957).
11 For a rich portrait of late nineteenth-century San Francisco, see W. Issel and R. Cherny, San Francisco, 1865-1932 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986); and M. Kazin, Barons of labor: the San Francisco building trades and union power in the progressive era (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1987). On industry vs. residences, see discussions of the growth of workshops near Alamo Square in Moudon, Built for change: neighborhood architecture in San Francisco; and the displacement of South Park, San Francisco's first élite subdivision, in A. Schumate, Rincon Hill and South Park: San Francisco's early fashionable neighborhood (Sausalito, Windgate Press, 1988). On the city residence and migrations of the rich, see the ridiculous Frances Moffatt, Dancing on the brink of the world: the rise and fall of San Francisco society (New York, Putnam's and Sons, 1977). Compare the élite's hold on Beacon Hill in Boston, discussed in W. Firey, Land use in central Boston (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1947).
12 The central San Francisco areas are Noe-Eureka valleys, the Haight-Cole Valley, Alamo Square and Pacific Heights. The nearby working-class areas are the Mission, Bernal Heights, Albany, El Cerrito, and central-east Oakland, with outlyers in Point Richmond, Crockett and South San Francisco. There is no comprehensive study of gentrification in the Bay Area, but see A. Kucherenko, A view of neighborhood transition (unpublished MA thesis, Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley, 1978); and B. Godfrey, Neighborhoods in transition: the making of San Francisco's ethnic and nonconformist communities (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988).
13 R. Walker and the Bay Area Study Group, 'The playground of US capitalism? the political economy of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s,' in M. Davis, S. Hiatt, M. Kennedy, S. Ruddick and M. Sprinker, eds., Fire in the hearth: the radical politics of place in America (London, Verso/Haymarket, 1990), pp. 3-82.
14 The story of San Francisco's architectural heritage movement has not been told. Key texts besides those cited in note 10 are W. Vail, Vrictorians: an account of domestic architecture in Victorian San Francisco, 1870-1890 (San Francisco, self-published, 1964); J. Waldhorn, Historic preservation in San Francisco's inner mission/take a walk through mission history (Washington, DC, US Government Printing Office for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1973); C. Olwell and J. Waldhorn, A gift to the street (San Francisco, Antelope Island Press, 1976); and M. Corbett, Splendid survivors: San Francisco's downtown architectural heritage (San Francisco, California Living Books, 1979). No doubt San Francisco was inbued with changing national sentiments about urban and historical preservation sig nalled by the writings of E. Maass, Gingerbread age and The Victorian home in America (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1972); Jane Jacobs, The death and life of great American cities (New York, Random House/Vintage, 1961); Peter Blake, God's own junkyard: the planned deteriora tion of America's landscape (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964); and Robert Venturi, Complexity and contradiction in architecture (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1966); and the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966; but the Bay Area's activists were among the vanguard of the movement.
15 E. Callenbach, Ecotopia (Berkeley, Banyan Tree Books, 1975); and J. Garreau, The nine nations of North America (Boston, Houghton-Mifflin, 1981).
16 Suburban residential spaces for the bourgeoisie go back to the late eighteenth century in Britain and the mid-nineteenth century in the United States, which imported the key ele ments of these 'bourgeois utopias' from Britain. The key US ideologues of the new domes tic and residential order were Catherine Beecher, Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux. See R. Fishman, Bourgeois utopias: the rise and fall of suburbia (New York, Basic Books, 1987); K. Jackson, Crabgrass frontier: the suburbanization of the United States (New York, Oxford University Press, 1985); and R. Walker, 'The transformation of urban structure in the 19th century United States and the beginnings of suburbanization,' in K. Cox, ed., Urbanization and conflict in market societies (Chicago, Maaroufa, 1978), pp. 165-213. But the class project had considerably broadened with the growth of the social division of labour and of cities by the turn of the century. On the rise of the new middle class, see, for example, J. Kocka, White collar workers in America, 1890-1940 (Beverly Hills, Sage, 1980); and M. Sarfatti-Larson, The rise of professionalism (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977).
17 G. Brechin, 'Living the dream in Berkeley,' California Monthly (March-April 1984), pp. 24-25. On early tourism, see E. Pomeroy, In search of the golden West: the tourist in western America (New York, Alfred Knopf, 1957). On Muir, see R. Nash, Wilderness and the American mind (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1967).
18 Although, as R. Longstreth, On the edge of the world: four architects in San Francisco at the turn of the century (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1983) points out, the rustic house was worked out first on Russian Hill, before spreading into the surrounding suburbs.
19 The best account of the Bay Area architecture of this period is by Longstreth, Four architects. Like most architectural historians, however, he fails to situate the development of architec ture in the wider context of professionalization of skilled work and growth of academic study. Other local accounts are T. Andersen, E. Moore and R. Winter, eds., California design, 1910 (Pasadena, California Design Publications, 1974); and L. Freudenheim and E. Sussman, Building with nature: roots of the San Francisco Bay region tradition (Santa Barbara, Peregrine Smith, 1974).
20 Typical of the Bay Area arts is less a particular style or styles than a tolerance that lets a hundred flowers bloom and sequesters the odd genius working at crosspurposes with New York or Paris. This is abundantly evident in music and the graphic arts; see, for example, T. Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980: an illustrated history (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1985); and J. Gioia, West coast jazz: modern jazz in California, 1945-60 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1992).
21 On McKim, Mead and White's shingle style, see V. Scully, The shingle styk and the stick style (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1971); on English cottage revival, see A. King, 'A time for space and a space for time: the social production of the vacation house,' in King, ed., Buildings and society: essays on the social development of the built environment (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 193-227. Credit for the first shingled cottages in the Bay Area goes to Reverend Joseph Worcester, whose Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco was the first building of note in the rustic style, with a Mission exterior; Brown, Schweinfurth, Maybeck and Polk all had a hand in its design. (Freudenheim and Sussman, Building with nature. )
22 Longstreth, Four architects, p. 110. Longstreth argues that there was no precedent for Polk's first multilevel house.
23 Several local artists formed a short-lived Guild for Arts and Crafts, while Keeler started a Ruskin Club in Berkeley. On the Arts and Crafts influence, see Freudenheim and Sussman, Building with nature; and K. Trapp, ed. The Arts and Crafts movement in California: living the good life (New York, Abbeville Press in conjunction with the Oakland Museum, 1993).
24 San Franciscans, including Willis Polk, soon tired of the style. Crossfertilization of ideas between north and south in California was so much the norm, as was the traffic in ideas and artists from east to west, that the issue is less the originality of a regional style than its wide spread popularity and imprint on the landscape. On the Arroyo Seco group and the Mission revival craze in Southern California, see K. Starr, Inventing the dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York, Oxford University Press, 1985); and Anderson, California design.
25 The Mission style was rarely close to actual design of the Missions, and it is hard to draw lines between Mission, Spanish Baroque and Pueblo (adobe) styles, not to mention Italian Renaissance, Moorish, Byzantine and Greek styles that followed. At Stanford University, Mission was blended with Richardson's Romanesque; at William Bourn's Filoli estate in Woodside, a Mission roof sits uncomfortably on a Georgian base. Brown and Schweinfurth's design for the Midwinter Exposition in San Francisco in 1894 looks rather Moorish; Polk and Coxhead's Hearst mansion at Sunol (burned 1966) was more in the pueblo style.
26 As, for example, the Dodd House (Wright), GTU Library (Kahn) and Moreley-Baer House (Schindler). On the Bay regional style see also D. Gebhard, 'The bay tradition in architec ture,' Art in America 52 (1964), pp. 60-63; and Woodbridge, Bay Area houses.
27 This was a stronger ideal in the US than in Britain, notes Fishman, Bourgeois utopias. Almost every American city had one romantic suburb by 1900, according to J. Reps, The making of urban America (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1965). They typically came with blar neyish names meant to evoke woods, dales, glens, gardens and parks.
28 On the emergence of the community developers and their systematic use of government to private ends, see M. Weiss, The rise of the community builders: the American real estate industry and urban land planning (New York, Columbia University Press, 1987).
29 O'Shaughnessy went on to make his name as City Engineer, designing the Hetch Hetchy system and the dam which bears his name. McDuffie was a member of the Sierra Club and the Save the Redwoods league, and active in creating the East Bay regional parks, as well as being founding vice-president of the California Conference on City Planning in 1914. G. Brechin, 'St Francis Wood: a misty haven for San Francisco haves,' San Francisco Focus, (September 1989), pp. 20-25.
30 Charles Keeler, poet, author of The simple home (San Francisco, P. Elder and Co., 1904) and patron of Maybeck usually gets the credit, but it is certain that the men were invited in for legitimacy after the real work was begun by women. On this period in Berkeley, see Brechin, Living the dream; and M. Weiss, 'Urban land developers and the origins of zoning laws: the case of Berkeley,' Berkeley Planning Journal3, 1 (1986), pp. 7-25.
31 The removal of the new University from Oakland to a hillside suburban locale (with an early plan by Olmsted) in 1873 should be seen as an exercise in suburban rejection of city life. The Greek revival plan was promoted by the Hellenophilic president Benjamin Ide Wheeler, and paid for by the philanthropist Phoebe Hearst out of her late husband's min ing fortune. The core of the Berkeley campus is one of the best formal beaux-arts ensem bles in the United States, but outside the core, anything goes. After John Galen Howard came west to undertake the commission, he, too, began to design shingle-style buildings for the campus. Soon the campus reverted to the melange of Greek, Italian Renaissance and redwood edifices that typified suburban home building through the 1920s. On the roles of Phoebe Hearst and Jane Stanford in the Bay Area renaissance, see C. Wollenberg, Golden Gate metropolis (Berkeley, Institute of Governmental Studies, 1985). On the campus plan, see L. Partridge, John Galen Howard and the Berkeley campus: beaux-arts architecture in the Athens of the West (Berkeley, Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, 1978); and Longstreth, Four architects.
32 Zoning was not invented first in New York, as is usually claimed. It spread rapidly both in northern and southern California in the 1910s. The adoption of development regulations was progressive in the sense of rationalizing the installation of utilities, but had the added purposes of class and race exclusion and of trying to contain the overproduction of lots and homes dragging down property values. The spread of regulation is closely tied to the prop erty cycle, which peaked around 1907. See Weiss, Community builders.
33 E. Burns, The process of suburban residential development: the San Francisco Peninsula, 1860-1970 (unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of Geography, University of California, 1975) shows higher-class hillside tracts paralleling the development of larger, lower-class subdivi sions down the Peninsula. Upscale ecotopian tracts often replaced large nineteenth-century estates in places like Menlo Park, Portola Valley, Woodside and Atherton.
34 It is interesting how the beats and other bohemians moved freely from the city to Berkeley, Mill Valley, Bolinas, Sausalito and other ecotopian enclaves.
35 The beleaguered city of Oakland set up a well-functioning One-Stop Permit centre for the fire zone, which effectively negated design review (despite pretenses to the contrary). For expressions of concern about the visual overhaul of the fire area, see the indigenous Phoenix Journal2, 8 and various issues.
36 On hotels see P. Groth, Living downtown: the history of residential hotels in the United States (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994), whom I thank profusely for letting me see his manuscript as it went to press; many of the ideas in this section are due to his reading of the early twentieth-century city. On apartments, see J. Hancock, 'The apartment house in urban America,' in A. King, ed., Buildings and society (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 151-89; and Elizabeth Cromley, Alone together: a history of New York's early apart ments (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990). A hotel offers rooms by the day, week or month, often with shared baths, toilets and dining rooms, and has on-site management and services (except the cheapest flophouses). Apartments have their own bathrooms and kitchens (or kitchenettes) and often separate entrances. Flats are rental units carved out of houses, usually occupying a floor each. Small establishments were generally known as lodg ing houses before the First World War, rooming houses later.
37 Of 280,000 units, 156,000 are apartments, 28,000 tourist hotel rooms and 19,000 residential hotel rooms. Data from San Francisco Planning Department. Hotel rooms peaked around 1915, when there were 65,000 in all.
38 Nineteenth-century observers remarked on the large number of people living in hotels and eating in restaurants, but the numbers do not exist to prove the case. The number of room ing houses in 1900 was higher than most eastern cities, as was the case throughout the west. The figures remain high right through the twentieth century (Groth, Living downtown).
39 On the first property long wave, see Weiss, Community builders. On the second wave, see E. Eichler, The merchant builders (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1982). Evidence suggests that the same late boom in apartments can be found in the Victorian era, too.
40 See G. Duménil and D. Lévy, The economics of the profit rate: competition, crises, and historical ten dencies in capitalism (Aldershot, Edward Elgar, 1993); and F. Moseley, The falling rate of profit in the postwar US economy (New York, St Martin's Press, 1992).
41 Russell Jacoby, The last intellectuals: American culture in the age of academe (New York, Basic Books, 1987) makes a compelling case against the loss of such urban spaces.
42 On the growing numbers of women in sales and clerical work downtown, see S. Benson, Counter cultures: saleswomen, managers and customers in American department stores (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1986); M. Davies, A woman's place is at the typewriter: office work and office workers, 1870-1930 (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1982); and E. Rotella, From home to office: US women at work, 1870-1930 (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1981). There is not, to my knowledge, any significant work on migratory labour in the west.
43 Data from 1910 manuscript census, thanks to Phil Ethington, History Department, University of Southern California. Conversely, 95 per cent of San Francisco homeowners (living mostly in the outer districts of small homes) were married and 81 per cent had chil dren in 1900 (Groth, Living downtown). Flats also tend to be more family-oriented than apartments and hotels.
44 On working women living in the city, see Joanne Meyerowitz, Holding their own: working women apart from family in Chicago (unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of History, Stanford University, 1983).
45 Groth, Living downtown. On the fear of women's freedom in cities, see E. Wilson, The sphinx and the city (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991). On the American cult of the family, see S. Coontz, The way we never were: American families and the nostalgia trap (New York, Basic Books, 1992).
46 Such terms easily overlapped, as when the crucial Conference on Housing and Home Ownership of 1930, called by President Hoover to determine urban policy, cited cheap hotels and entertainment districts as their chief example of 'urban blight'.
47 On the tenor of US urban reform over the years, see R. Walker, The suburban solution: capi talist urbanization in the United States (unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, John Hopkins University, 1977). On the dis course of the early twentieth century, see Groth, Living downtown; R. Fischler, Standards of development (unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley, 1993). R. Beauregard, Voice of decline: the postwar fate of US cities (Cambridge, MA; Blackwell, 1993). Compare this with Edward Bellamy, the Utopian author of Looking backward, or Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who were proponents of dense, multiple living in cities. On the preference of many women for denser urban living, see M. Marsh, 'From separation to togetherness: the social construction of domestic space in American suburbs, 1840-1915.' Journal of American History16, 2 (1989), pp. 506-27; and D. Hayden, The grand domestic revolution: a history of feminist designs for American homes, neigh borhoods and cities (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1987).
48 Cf. C. Hoch and R. Slayton, New homeless and old: community and the skid row hotel . (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1989). And in the 1960s and 70s, some 30,000 men tal patients were unloaded from the state hospitals to the inner cities with little provision for continuing care.
49 No one, to my knowledge, has worked out the economic changes in the urban base in the 1930s and 40s. On changes in Federal urban policy, see M. Gelfand, A nation of cities: the Federal government and urban America, 1933-1975 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1975); and Walker, Suburban solution.
50 On the destruction of San Francisco and Oakland, see C. Hartman, The transformation of San Francisco (Totowa, NJ, Rowman and Allenheld, 1984); and E. Hayes, Power structure and urban policy: who rules Oakland? (New York, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1972). A key plan ning document was the work of the estimable Mel Scott, later to become an environmental ist. See M. Scott, Western Addition District: an exploration of the possibilities of replanning and rebuilding one of San Francisco's largest blighted districts. (San Francisco, Department of City Planning, 1947).
51 See M. Berman, All that is solid melts into air (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1982) on modernity, urban renewal and the bourgeois fear of dealing with the devil (from Goethe's Faust onwards).
52 It is this banality and the human heart beating within that Bill Owens captured so tellingly in his 1960s photographic study of Livermore, in the outer East Bay. B. Owens, Suburbia (San Francisco, Straight Arrow Books, 1973).
53 This powerful national ideology was more than Jeffersonian agrarian values, as it touched the heart of the artisan and industrial craft workers of the nineteenth century. Home own ership meant control and stability, not to mention the lordship of the family partriarch over his dominion. Immigrants felt that owning property and a home was the way to be a 'real American'. In this century, 'own your own home' became the slogan that steered capitalist interests, worker independence and state policy into a convergence. On home ownership, see C. Perin, Everything in its place: social order and land use in America (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1977); M. Doucet and J. Weaver, Housing the North American city (Montreal, Queens-McGill University Press, 1991); E. Blackmar, Manhattan for rent, 1785-1850 (Ithaca, ' Cornell University Press, 1989); C. Clark, The American family home (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1986); R. Harris and C. Hamnett, 'The myth of the promised land: the social diffusion of home ownership in Britain and North America,' Annals of the Association of American Geographers77, 2 (1987) pp. 173-90; and Marsh, 'Separation to togetherness'.
54 For the Fordist reading of the golden age of housing, see R. Florida and M. Feldman, 'Housing in US fordism: the class accord and postwar spatial organization,' International Journal of Urban and Regional Research12, 2 (1988), pp. 187-210. No one disputes that the detached single-family house flourished after the Second World War, but family-owned small homes have been prevalent in small towns and cities such as Baltimore since the nine teenth century. Nationally, the leading urban home owner group by 1900 was the rising professionals, with skilled workers next and common labourers lagging badly until after the Second World War - but rates vary dramatically over time and by class, with ground gained and lost quickly (see, for example, the detailed figures for Hamilton, Ontario, in Doucet and Weaver, Housing the city, Table 7.7). Postwar prosperity and federal policies generated extraordinarily high ownership rates by the 1960s (close to 70 per cent), but by English standards, home ownership rates among the US working class were already very high- 25-40 per cent - in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Peter Rowe, Making a mid dle landscape, (Cambridge Mass, MIT Press, 1991).
55 On Henry George, see C. Barker, 'Henry George and the California background of progress and poverty', California Historical Society Quarterly24, 2 (1945), pp.97-115. On Norris' Octopus in light of economic conditions in California, see G. Henderson, Regions and realism: social spaces, regional transformation and the novel in, California, 1882-1924 (unpub lished PhD dissertation, Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, 1992).
56 On Los Angeles, see R. Fogelson, The fragmented metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1967). San Francisco home ownership in 1910 was 38 per cent, compared to 20 per cent in New York and 26 per cent in Chicago (data from 1910 Manuscript Census, thanks to Phil Ethington, Department of History, University of Southern California). On early San Francisco housing, see generally Bloomfield, Real estate associates; and Moudon, Neighborhood architecture. On the Santa Clara valley see G. Matthews, A California middletown: the social history of San Jose during the depression (unpublished PhD dis sertation, Department of History, Stanford University, 1977).
57 On the bungalow and its epoch, and the key role of the California bungalow in particular, see King, The bungalow: the production of a global culture (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984); C. Lancaster, The American bungalow (New York, Abbeville Press, 1985); R. Winter, The California bungalow (Los Angeles, Hennessey and Ingalls, 1980); and D. Holdsworth, 'Regional distinctiveness in an industrial age: some California influences on British Columbia housing,' The American Review of Canadian Studies12, 2 (1982), pp. 64-81. On improvements in house design, see A. Gowans, The comfortable house: North American suburban architecture, 1890-1930 (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1986). On the efficient and mechanized home, see A. Forty, Objects of desire: design and society, 1750-1980 (London, Thames and Hudson/Cameron, 1986); and R. Miller, 'The Hoover in the garden: middle class women and suburbanization, 1870-1920,' Society and Space1 (1983), pp. 73-87. On the family-cen tred home, see Marsh, 'Separation to togetherness'; G. Wright, Building the dream: a social history of housing in America (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1981); G. Wright, Moralism and the model home: domestic architecture and cultural conflict in Chicago, 1873-1913 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980); and D. Hayden, Redesigning the American dream (New York, Norton, 1984).
58 See, for example, Keeler, The simple home, and Maybeck's efforts to design a cheap home for the masses; these men were radicals by the standard of downtown lawyers, of course. ('Simplicity' was later replaced by 'efficiency' as the code word of modernity, a change which indicates a loss of idealism and gain of Taylorism by the 1920s.)
59 The first innovation in home financing was installments, said to have been invented in Cinncinati in 1880s, but San Francisco's Homestead Associations of the 1860s already allowed people of modest means to buy lots on the installment plan, according to Bloomfield, Real estate associates.
60 Allen Scott, the leading student of industrialization in Southern California, has also come to this view in his recent work. See A. Scott, 'Industrial urbanism in Southern California' (unpublished paper, Lewis Center, UCLA, Los Angeles, 1994).
61 Doucet and Weaver, North American city, argue that integrated mass production had appeared in places by 1900, but the generalization of the community builder only came later and in no case did even the largest merchant builders handle their own sales; this was contracted out to realty firms. Weiss, Community builders, p. 40.
62 Some huge tracts (of both small homes and barracks housing) were built during the war, encouraged by the Federal government because they housed defense workers, particularly around aircraft plants in Los Angeles and shipyards in the Bay Area. G. Hise, Roots of the post war urban region: mass housing and community planning in California, 1920-1950 (Unpublished dissertation, Department of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley, 1992); and G. Hise, 'Home building and industrial decentralization in Los Angeles: the roots of the postwar urban region,' Journal of Urban History19, 2 (1993), pp. 95-125.
63 For the Levitt-centred view, see Eichler, Merchant builders; Jackson, Crabgrass frontier ; and B. Checkoway, 'Large builders, federal housing programs, and postwar suburbanization,' International Journal of Urban and Regional Research4, 1 (1980), pp. 21-45. On Doelger, see G. Brechin, 'Mr Levitt of the Sunset,' San Francisco Focus (June 1990), pp. 23-26; Brechin claims that Doelger was the biggest homebuilder in the country before Levitt. On Burns and Kaiser, see Hise, Postwar urban region and 'Industrial decentralization'. Kaiser took many of his cues from David Bohannon, who built Rollingwood in Richmond during the war for Kaiser's shipyard workers.
64 Ned Eichler, Merchant builders, calls finance the key to the postwar mass market for homes. See D. Harvey, The urbanization of capital (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); A. Schneiderman, The hidden handout and the Keynesian welfare state (unpublished PhD disser tation, University of California Berkeley, Department of Sociology, 1994); Gelfand, Nation of cities; Walker, Suburban solution; and Florida and Feldman, Housing in Fordism.
65 The case for the new minimum ideal in homes is carefully made by Hise, Postwar urban region. He argues that the small home tract was perfected during the Depression by the Farm Security Administration for its rural labour camps inthe Central Valley, proposed by Berkeley activist Paul Taylor and designed by Bay Area architect Vernon DeMars.
66 Los Angeles builders were, overall, the most advanced in subcontracting and the complex of building material suppliers was largely self-contained. See Eichler, Merchant builders. Kaiser Homes, in particular, led the way in rationalizing mass construction. California had a definite advantage in year-round work that kept capital turning over. Standards for build ings had been heavily promoted by Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce, as he car ried the gospel of modernization in housing from California to Washington in the early 1920s. E. Hawley, ed., Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce: studies in new era thought and practice (Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 1981). They continued to be pushed by the new Federal Housing Administration in the 1930s.
67 It must be said that Doelger gave little regard to Nature, building tracts right on the bluffs where the San Andreas Fault plunges into the sea and the ground is wrenching beneath the rows of little houses. J. McPhee, Assembling California (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993).
68 Kaufman and Broad broke into LA with these, while George McKeon of Sacramento blan keted the state with four-unit condominiums.
69 On this housing shift and the passing of the first generation of merchant builders by the 1973-5 recession, see Eichler, Merchant builders. Joe Eichler worked in Foster City and on San Francisco apartments before going bankrupt in 1974.
70 See M. Scott, The future of San Francisco Bay (Berkeley, Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California, 1963).
71 Figures from the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and California Association of Realtors. Add to this the destruction of the protected pool of mortgage finance represented by the now-defunct Savings and Loan industry, which self-destructed in a desparate attempt to stay profitable in the face of financial deregulation and the loss of their interest-rate advantages. See Schneiderman, Hidden handout.
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Bibliography
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Digital space meets urban place: Sociotechnologies of urban restructur...
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