The Birth Of The Suburbs

The building of these single-family homes away from the cities also meant that racism followed.

Who is the original jailer? Who created the prison that now holds me captive like an overzealous security guard at a shopping mall?

Although the suburbs grew from the urban sprawl of the early 20th Century, there is one man responsible for creating the Frankenstein Monster called suburban life. His name is William Levitt. And this sire of the American suburbs climbed willingly into a sordid act of procreation with another man — namely Uncle Sam, AKA the U.S. Government.

The suburbs could not have been hatched without a massive federal program that steered developers toward affordable housing, providing them with up-front, government-guaranteed financing.

The Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill, was piggybacked with housing legislation that had created the Federal Housing

Administration a decade earlier. The two operated in tandem to put the government in the business of guaranteeing financing for developers and then risk-free individual mortgages for GIs that required little money down.

It pumped $20 billion into the industry in its first four years and was the closest thing to free…