07-24-2018, 07:24 PM
(07-24-2018, 03:49 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: It wasn't until after WWII that owning a car became pretty much a necessity for a majority of the people. It would be nice, but I often wonder if a majority would ever accept self-contained communities? This was to an extent promoted with the hippie commune idea in the 1960s. In order for such to work in more places, suburban areas and many urban neighborhoods as well would need to break away from the idea of allowing only single family housing to be built, which has contributed a great deal to the homeless problem which began during the late 1980s.
The World War II veterans got the GI bill which ensured cheap education and low interest for housing, Most WWII veterans wanted to become part of the middle class, including 'ethnic' white people who had recently known poverty as a norm. If one had been an officer who got saluted despite the surname "Kowalski" or "Rossi", one saw no reason for returning to a permanent underclass.
The returning white GIs had no desire to live in cramped apartments like the slums that many of them knew. Builders accommodated the whims and tastes of young buyers of new housing.
Note well that America also had a smaller population, so Americans could building single-family houses in what had recently been farmland near the urban fringe. So what is another ranch-style house in the grand scheme of things.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.