No section of the nation expanded faster than the West and the South. Attracted by the mild climate and jobs in the defense, petroleum, and chemical industries, transplanted Americans swelled the populations of California and Texas. The proliferation of air-conditioning in residences and businesses made the hot summer temperatures of these and other southern states more livable. California’s population increased the most, adding nearly six million new residents between 1940 and 1960. In 1957, in a sign of the times, New York City lost two of its baseball teams, the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Retirees also flocked to California, and many others headed to Florida and Arizona. In Miami alone, the population jumped around 80 percent in the three decades after World War II. This migration to the Sun Belt, as the southern and western states would be called, transformed the political and social landscapes of the nation.

The extraordinary housing demand following World War II drove the suburban boom. The available housing stock could not accommodate returning veterans who married and started families. Many sought escape from crowded cities and a chance to achieve a piece of the American dream: a home with a front lawn, a backyard, and plenty of fresh air. To meet this demand, private enterprise and the federal government provided veterans and civilians opportunities to purchase their own homes.

William Levitt, a thirty-eight-year-old veteran from Long Island, New York, devised the formula for attracting home buyers to the suburbs. After World War II, Levitt, his father, and his brother saw their opportunity in the housing crunch and pioneered the idea of adapting Henry Ford’s mass-production principles to the housing industry. To build his subdivision of Levittown in Hempstead, Long Island, twenty miles from Manhattan, he bulldozed 4,000 acres of potato fields and brought in trucks that dumped piles of building materials at exact intervals of sixty feet. Specialized crews then moved from pile to pile, each performing their assigned job. In July 1948, Levitt’s workers constructed 180 houses a week, or 36 a day, in two shifts. These simple houses, placed on 60-by-100-foot lots, contained a living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and one bathroom. Levitt originally sold the homes for an affordable $7,990 and threw in a free television and washing machine. Mass-production methods kept prices low, and Levitt quickly sold his initial 17,000 houses and soon built other subdivisions in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. With Levitt leading the way, the production of new single-family homes nearly doubled from 937,000 in 1946 to1.7 million in 1950.

Levitt and his fellow builders received a good deal of public help in making suburbia possible. The Federal Housing Administration, created in the 1930s, provided long-term mortgages to qualified buyers at low interest rates. After the war, the Veterans Administration offered even lower mortgage rates and did not require substantial down payments for ex-GIs to purchase a home. The federal government also cooperated by building roads that allowed drivers to commute to and from the suburbs. In 1956 the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act provided funds for the construction of 42,500 miles of roads throughout the country. In fashioning this policy of highway construction, Congress gave a tremendous boost not only to the development of the suburbs but also to the automobile industry. Between 1945 and 1960, the number of cars in the United States more than doubled. For many families living in suburban housing tracts, purchasing a second car became a necessity as husbands traveled by automobile to nearby cities and wives drove cars to go on errands and chauffeur their children to after-school activities.

Although millions of Americans took advantage of opportunities to move to the suburbs, millions of others could not. Levitt closed his subdivisions to African Americans. Many whites moved out of the cities because they did not want to live near the growing number of southern blacks who migrated north during WorldWar II and the influx of Puerto Ricans who came to the United States after the war, and they did not welcome these minorities to their new communities. Levitt defended his racist exclusionary policy on business rather than on racial grounds. “I have come to know,” he declared, “that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 or 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community.” Levitt was not alone in his discriminatory practices. Residents of many communities in the North purchased homes with restrictive covenants, which prohibited resale to blacks and members of other minority groups, including Hispanics, Jews, and Asian Americans. Although the Supreme Court outlawed restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), housing discrimination remained prevalent in urban and suburban neighborhoods. Real estate brokers steered minority buyers away from white communities, and banks refused to lend money to black purchasers who sought to move into white locales, an illegal policy called redlining.