in the ballroom. Hollywood regulars included Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich, and Katherine Hepburn, as well as the already reclusive Howard Hughes.2 Poolside during the day or sipping cocktails in the Polo Lounge at night, Howard and Dottie were pampered by Howard's college friend, hotel manager Hernando Courtright. Yet the scene was strangely surreal.
The war was not over. Although the Allies were closing in on Germany, the invasion of Japan was expected to be bloody. With the military focus on the Pacific Theater, many people anticipated that Los Angeles would expand even further as it continued to serve as the major West Coast embarkation point and manufacturing center and to receive the battered bodies of the nation's heroes.
In preparation for the last phase of the war against Japan, policy makers worried about housing an even greater number of war workers. “Scores of men and women [are] sleeping in all-night or past-midnight theaters because of lack of conventional quarters,” the Los Angeles Times noted.3 Charities and government agencies appealed to home owners to open spare rooms to families desperate for shelter.4 Mayor Fletcher Bowron wrote to President Roosevelt to say that “more than 100,000 unfilled applications for housing are now on file with the Los Angeles War Housing Centers.”5 The federal government, which controlled the supply of building materials, approved the construction of six thousand new homes in areas of Los Angeles near shipyards and aircraft factories. But this allocation represented only a small step toward meeting the demand.
The need for housing reflected one of many ways in which the city and region that Howard Ahmanson returned to at the beginning of 1945 had been transformed by the war. Nearly a half-million new residents had arrived to assemble aircraft, build ships, forge steel, refine petroleum, make machine tools, and manufacture a host of other vital war matériel. At its peak, the Los Angeles area produced 10 percent of the goods needed to wage the war. Large military installations at Terminal Island, San Pedro, Long Beach, and El Toro also brought soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines passing through on their way to the Pacific.6
Despite this growth, L.A.’s postwar future was not clear. When builder and developer Mark Taper tried to get a construction loan in 1942 to build government-insured FHA homes, the first bank he approached turned him down. “The bank told me they thought this would be a ghost town once the war ended.”7 When Howard Edgerton went to Chicago to borrow money so California Federal Savings & Loan could buy more government bonds, a senior executive from Continental Illinois eerily told him the same thing: “We do not care to invest our money directly or indirectly in any Southern California enterprise at the present time because we are convinced that when the war is over Los Angeles is going to become a ghost town.”8
Taper and Edgerton weren't convinced, and neither were Howard Ahmanson and Charlie Fletcher. “We already had evidence that some of the war workers who had come here during the peak production periods had decided to stay,” Edgerton recalled later. “What we didn't anticipate was that they would send for all their relatives and friends.”9
For those lucky enough to survive the war, the memory of Southern California was compelling. “A lot of guys had been here and seen what it was not to have snow in their ears,” remembered one local resident.10 The ocean, the mountains, the citrus groves, and the region's bustling wartime economy were all attractive.11 When they returned after the war, these new residents sparked a gold rush in real estate, construction, and mortgage lending. For a handful of entrepreneurs who saw how the government had, intentionally and unintentionally, created profitable opportunities to finance that gold rush, the postwar suburban boom produced massive personal and corporate fortunes.12
A REGION POISED FOR GROWTH
Southern California's growth before, during, and after the war was phenomenal. More people and better wages fed a booming economy. The population of Los Angeles County alone rose more than 50 percent in the 1940s, climbing from 2,786,000 to 4,374,000.13 Before the war, in contrast to most other large American cities, residents had worked in trade, services, and agriculture. With the war, trade and services grew 51 and 35 percent, respectively, but manufacturing jobs more than doubled, adding nearly 213,000 positions. As citrus groves and bean fields were bulldozed to make way for factories and homes, agriculture lost nearly three thousand jobs. Meanwhile, employment in construction increased 88 percent, providing work for another sixty thousand people. The burgeoning field of aeronautics contributed substantially to the growth of L.A.’s manufacturing sector. By 1953, aviation accounted for one in four manufacturing jobs in the region.14
These new jobs came with good wages. Between 1940 and 1951, average income in the area tripled.15 Median family income in Los Angeles County in 1951 was 19 percent higher than the national median for metropolitan regions.16 And like most Americans, Angelenos had saved money during the war.17 Across the country, liquid assets of businesses and individuals had increased 252 percent; in California, they had increased nearly 300 percent.18 In short, households in Los Angeles after the war had income and savings to spend on new homes.
Demographic changes also fed the demand for housing. During and after the war, marriage rates soared. “The nation has fewer bachelors and old maids than in former years,” the Census Bureau reported in 1946. More marriages led to an increase in the birthrate. Even before the end of the war, for every soldier or sailor killed in battle, six “war babies” were born over and above the prewar birthrate.19
Los Angeles was particularly affected by the marriage and baby boom. The migration to California, and especially Southern California, was overwhelmingly youthful, with the great majority of new residents under the age of forty-five. More likely to reproduce, these young newcomers contributed to a 40 percent increase in the birthrate between 1940 and 1950, compared to an increase of 31.3 percent for the country as a whole.20 In Los Angeles, the population of children ages zero to five rose 150 percent during the 1940s.21 All of these new families fueled an overall increase in household formation and a concomitant decline in the number of multigenerational households.
Policy makers across the country anticipated a demand for millions of new homes. In Southern California, the commission charged with planning estimated that Los Angeles County alone would need one hundred thousand family-dwelling units in the first five postwar years.22 Most of these homes would need to be modestly priced, between six thousand and ten thousand dollars, to be affordable to young families. To fill this need, a new breed of home builder emerged with experience rooted in the construction of dams, ships, and communities for farm and war workers. By catering to their need for capital, Howard Ahmanson would build an empire.
A REVOLUTION IN HOME BUILDING
American mass production, in tandem with a remarkably prolific system for industrial research and innovation, played a critical role in winning World War II.23 With the end of the war, industrial leaders and journalists predicted that it would enhance the quality of life of all Americans, especially as increasingly flexible production systems allowed manufacturers to achieve economies of scale while producing goods for a variety of niche markets and tastes.24 In housing especially, expectations were high. Insiders writing in the trade journals and even the popular press predicted that new materials and new methods of construction would speed the process of home building and lower the cost of home ownership.
Mass production depended on standardized building materials and components, which had been under development for decades. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, most homes were built as one-of-a-kind products. Highly skilled craftsmen cut or shaped materials at the site, and each was supervised by a builder or contractor who was often a former craftsman.25
This system of home construction began to change at the end of the nineteenth century. Factory-made components and materials accelerated
