Post World War II Suburban Development
Disturbing infrastructure issues critical to the village’s future confronted the people of postwar Richfield. The village lacked classroom space and a senior high school, it had no movie theater, no bowling alley, no baseball or football field, no swimming beach, it had no city water supply or storm and sanitary sewer systems, and it faced loss of land due to expansion of the airport. World war had shoved all these problems into the background, but they were now back and more pressing than ever, it Richfield did have a new municipal liquor store and it was doing very well, producing nearly twelve thousand dollars in its first ten months of operation. Village leaders came to depend upon this money for postwar civic projects.
Even before the war’s end, a relaxation of the strict limits on building led some Richfield contractors back to their blueprints. The village issued thirty-one building permits in September 1944.
In June 1945, with war now ended in Europe and winding down in Asia, the Richfield News reported the “partial release” of building materials for the home front which proclaimed, “Richfield is starting to revert back to pre-war building activity.”
In June 1944 Congress had passed the GI Bill of Rights designed to help returning veterans restart their lives. One such benefit affected Richfield directly. The GI Bill subsidized veterans’ mortgages helping them to buy their own housing. By December 1945 the military discharged about 1.25 million men each month. The nation needed five million houses immediately, but almost no homes were available. In Richfield and other suburbs a new kind of American army, a legion of house builders, put up modest, single-family dwellings to combat the housing shortage. Richfield became a Minnesota model for suburban growth.
The stunning growth of Richfield and similar American suburbs was changing the face of America. These flourishing communities were coming into their own as the peacetime economy gathered momentum, spurred, in no small part, by suburban home construction. Young families signed up for houses in once distant farm fields as fast as builders could nail them together.
Between 1940 and 1950, Richfield experienced a population increase of 363 percent. During the following five-year period the city nearly doubled its populace again, pushing toward a total of thirty-five thousand. Already ranked as Minnesota’s sixth largest community, there was no question the booming suburb would surpass forty thousand residents by the end of the decade.
Richfield held the unofficial title of Minnesota’s “fastest growing community,” the most prominent among those suburbs growing up around Minneapolis and St. Paul. During the 1950s, America’s suburban population grew at a rate three times faster than that of central cities. Suburbanites made up just over one-quarter of the population in the nation’s metropolitan areas in 1950. Ten years later, about half of metro area residents lived in the suburbs.
Richfield’s farm fields filled with homes during the twenty-five years following World War II. By 1970 all developable land in the community was taken.
Home construction crews applied the “mass-production” systems perfected by the American auto industry. Marlin Grant began his career in construction as a Richfield carpenter and saw the home building process as “fun.” Local builders used just two or three basic house designs, so Grant and his colleagues carried blueprints in their heads. As one writer noted of suburban builders, "it was not the assembly line that moved but the workers.
The people of Richfield embraced their city’s reputation as a “bedroom community” and used that term in describing it. They made a conscious decision to build few sidewalks in the village, readily adopting the prevailing suburban notion that streets were enough. “We wanted people to know that when they cross 62 (the Crosstown Highway border) they weren’t in Minneapolis anymore,” said a proud citizen of more than five decades.
Read more about this topic: History Of Richfield, Minnesota
Famous quotes containing the words post, world, war, suburban and/or development:
“To the old saying that man built the house but woman made of it a “home” might be added the modern supplement that woman accepted cooking as a chore but man has made of it a recreation.”
—Emily Post (1873–1960)
“Oh, Scott, for people like you and me the world can be a wonderful place. The sky’s as blue as it is for the giants, the friends are as warm.”
—Richard Matheson (b. 1926)
“I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)