My Redacted Life: Chapter 32

As I waited for August of 1972 to arrive, the firm was humming with activity. We were about to break ground on our first subdivision. It was a small, but elegant thing, based on the current thinking.

Urban planners had decided, for example, that such frivolities as sidewalks didn’t deserve a place in modern America. Who walked anymore? Where would one walk? Neighborhoods would no longer be connected. That might lead to the mingling of social classes and other urban ills.

The disappearance of neighborhood schools was making the motoring of kids more important than ever. Planners spent their leisure hours contemplating how, in the future, they would configure ways to make automobile travel more seamless, even if it meant sacrificing the pedestrian.

Then there was the growing preference for dead-end streets, called cul-de-sacs. Homeowners seemed to like them as they helped keep strangers off their street. Police weren’t so sure because it made patrolling neighborhoods more difficult. Firefighters worried about entire streets being stranded by downed trees or power lines. In large developments, property owners had to carry maps with them to navigate the development.

We called it progress and moved on.

There was also a new generation of home buyers entering the market, the so-called “Baby Boomers,” or those born in the post-World War Two procreation frenzy between 1946 and 1964, much of that time free from the nighttime distraction of television. At any rate, they represented some 20 percent of America’s population, the largest identifiable population cohort in America’s history, also one of the most spoiled, pampered, and selfish. They would impact the economy of the Untied States for decades.

To call them a schizophrenic would fall way short of the mark. As a measurable group, they supported the Vietnam War, but as that same measurable group, they chose, rather pointedly, not to participate in it. 

Their parents, the generation that had survived both the Great Depression and the Second World War, knew full well the meaning of sacrifice. To their credit, and perhaps our country’s detriment, they harbored the hope of protecting their children from trials such as they had endured. The fact that America enjoyed the only fully functioning economy among developed nations, made this possible.

Consequently, the Boomers were neither accustomed to, nor fond of, privation. The so-called “Greatest Generation” had rushed by the millions to purchase modest homes of 800 square feet or less, often in developments labelled as “splintervilles” or some such demeaning term by later wags.

The Boomers, on the other hand, demanded an entry-level purchase of a three-bedroom two-bath brick home, well beyond their level of purchasing power.

Because of such old-fashioned habits of saving and parsimony, parents of the Boomers stood on hand to help their kids purchase their dream homes, often larger and more expensive than those of the parents.

The GI Bill had helped World War Two veterans, who were of Caucasian descent, purchase decent, safe, and sanitary housing in areas where the housing was marketable, if not luxurious. Other veterans did the best they could. That’s where housing stood in my early career. A family’s home was destined to become, for the Boomers, the single greatest portion of their net worth. Choices of location were important, for those who could make them, a distant dream for those who couldn’t.

How did this all affect someone like me? We shall see.

Some neighborhoods were
more desirable than others.