Cars Changed Everything

The decades immediately following World War II have been mythologized as a time of affluence and stability. New technologies reshaped homes and cities, while a new suburban landscape took shape providing new kinds of homes and neighborhoods with an endless array of consumer goods to fill them.

Aesthetic preferences changed considerably during this period, but fundamentally, the most important forces shaping new domestic landscapes were finance and transportation. The postwar period ushered in a new era in home finance, putting the dream of homeownership within reach of many more families with the creation of the Federal Housing Administration. This new agency provided backing for mortgages and changes to the tax code gave preferential treatment to the financing of owner-occupied homes. All this set the stage for a system that created intergenerational wealth for middle class white families hitherto unseen in the world. Minorities were largely excluded from this boom, by redlining and de facto or de jure segregation, until addressed by the civil rights legislation of the Johnson administration.

Portland experienced a somewhat different trajectory from the postwar boom of the rest of the country. After the demobilization of wartime industries, Oregon returned to being mostly a resource extraction economy. While the middle class boomed back east where urbanization was more dominant, and manufacturing and finance were a much larger part of the economy, far less “inner ring” suburbia exists in the Portland area. In fact, much of what was then known as “mid-county” was only annexed into the City of Portland in the early 1990s. Construction of Sunset Highway opened pockets of farmland for development on Portland’s west side, while I-84 provided convenient access for new residents as builders snapped up tracts in the unincorporated area between Portland and Gresham. Pre-World War II, this area had been home to a mixture of small farms and orchards interspersed with some light industrial and residential pockets. Being unincorporated, it lacked zoning or requirements for infrastructure.

One result of consolidation was the increasing homogenization of subdivisions. Because homeownership had become most families’ primary vehicle for building wealth, protection of that investment became a source of anxiety. Exclusivity was a common theme of the marketing materials of the time. Indeed, in addition to the overt racial discrimination of the era, a more subtle and previously unknown level of class segregation developed with the creation of residential tracts. To protect homes from losing value due to association with less well-heeled neighbors, tracts of homes began to represent increasingly narrow bands of family income, such that new neighborhoods were more finely parsed by income than the U.S. tax code!

While economic forces drove the market for new construction on the fringes of American cities, the physical form of urban areas was radically transformed by the Federal Highway Act of 1956. Intended as an inter-city network, legislation was rapidly seized upon by municipal governments and politicians who morphed it into an intra-city transportation spending package. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, we shape our transportation systems, then our transportation systems shape us. Prior to mass adoption of the car, American cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were shaped by radial networks of streetcars. The commercial boulevards of inner Portland reflect a way of life common to much of our country prior to World War II. Downtown workers would ride the streetcar home, stopping when they reached their streets. Shops lined these boulevards, allowing for convenient purchases before walking into neighborhoods of relatively closely spaced houses.

Cars changed everything. No longer bound by fixed transportation and the need to walk from home to transportation, land use patterns became much more dispersed. Car-based lifestyles encouraged development of serpentine streets and scattered development. Urban features like sidewalks were often deemed unnecessary and even inimical to the bucolic image of these new hybrids of town and country.

These “auto suburbs” had a prewar precedent in neighborhoods like Portland’s Laurelhurst and its diminutive cousin Garthwick (located between Sellwood and the Waverly Country Club golf course). Nationwide, similar neighborhoods catering to the growing professional class cropped up from Los Angeles to Long Island. Yet for the most part, they remained a novelty until changes unleashed in the postwar economy made them more desirable. Land added to cities in tracts, and platted as additions, typically followed a modular pattern, extending the existing grid system.

In the postwar era, it became increasingly common for builders to buy a farm or orchard and develop it as a self-contained neighborhood, with an internal network serving lots within, and a few entry points along the perimeter. It also became increasingly common for a developer to purchase, sub-divide and plat a property, install utilities and build roads, then sell lots to one or more builders as part of a pre-arranged scheme. In a few cases, these entities were one and the same, with a sophisticated developer undertaking both the “underground” and “vertical” aspects of development, allowing the developer unprecedented control over the look and feel of the completed neighborhood.

As the real estate and finance worlds became increasingly commodified and globalized, this trend only accelerated. The Mid-Century neighborhoods of east Portland represent an intermediate point between the gridded pre-war development format and the self-contained pods of the late 20th century. Houses were spread out, cross-streets were few and far between, and sidewalks were scarce, but neighborhoods nonetheless remained connected to a loose grid of streets connecting all of East Portland.

Automotive influence on neighborhood design extended beyond the layout of blocks and streets. The very shape of houses and yards was a result of the speed and flexibility of personal transportation, as well as the storage needs of cars themselves.

Pre-war plats often measured 50’ wide by 100’ deep. Lots and houses were oriented with the short end facing the street. This eye toward efficiency meant more doors per street and more efficiency in providing utility services. Post-war subdivisions upended this pattern with lots wider than city lots, which in some In East Portland’s Mid-Century neighborhoods, lots range from 70 to 100 feet wide. House footprints are turned 90 degrees, and the long faces of homes are oriented parallel to the street. Two-car garages can occupy a third of a home’s total frontage. Front yards are often large too, with houses slid back on their sites, the apotheosis of the suburban front lawn. 

Early Mid-Century neighborhoods represent the aspirational nature of green suburbia and peaceful family life. The horizontality of their landscapes is striking. Single-story houses spread across wide lots, freed from the space-saving requirements of narrow urban confines. Meant to be experienced from behind the wheel of a car, the spaces between houses in these neighborhoods are as integral to the Mid-Century experience as the homes themselves, stretching in response to the speed with which they slide past a viewer’s car window-framed gaze.