Free Blue Sky Dream by David Beers

company town, and the company, in the final analysis, was the U.S. Department of Defense.
    We, the hundreds of thousands of blue sky tribe members who came to do the work, wanted our freshly made emptinesses and our brand-new subdivisions, and so the orchards would have to be bulldozed, a fact we disguised by laying our groundwork quietly and ingeniously. As early as 1956 in the Valley of Heart’s Delight, we had cast the die. In that year, throughout all the Valley’s two hundred-square-mile area, green and blossomy to the casual eye, a scant twenty-six square miles was in “urban use”—yet nowhere in the Valley was there a single square mile without some little subdivision, some small outpost of ours awaiting the full invasion.
    “The result was that all 200 square miles were in effect held hostage for eventual development.” That is what a pair of our enemies, Samuel E. Wood and Alfred Heller saw all too clearly.They sounded this and many other passionate, impeccably documented alarms for a group called California Tomorrow, as formidable a voice against us as existed at the time. “Slurb” was the mocking term coined by California Tomorrow to describe what my people tended to create in place of orchards. Slurbs, warned Wood and Heller, were the “sloppy, sleazy, slovenly, slipshod semi-cities” where nine out of ten Californians would soon be living if my people could not be contained, if precious farmlands weren’t zoned safe from us, if planning for the good of all could not replace greed at the local level. All this our enemies saw in 1961, their prophecies bound into impressive white papers that went to politicians and newspeople all over the state. All this they saw too late, for by 1961 my tribe had on our side collaborators too powerful and quislings too willing.
    We had the mighty backing, for example, of the Federal Housing Administration in distant Washington, D.C., an institution created by Franklin Roosevelt in a spirit worthy of Corbusier. The FHA, like my tribe, was not much interested in a used house, particularly one in any inner city. The FHA, as documented by Kenneth T. Jackson in his noted history of suburbanization,
Crabgrass Frontier
, was most interested in seeing fresh emptinesses filled up with brand-new tract homes. The FHA encouraged this by dangling an enormous carrot before the noses of the nation’s private lenders and builders. The business of the FHA was the insuring, with U.S. Treasury funds, of bank loans for housing. But if you were someone who refurbished row houses in urban cores, you could expect a frown at the bank, because the FHA was not willing to insure such mortgages. As Jackson showed, the FHA reserved its sweetest carrot, its highest levels of insurance, for the construction of detached single-family residences for entire neighborhoods of white, middle-income people of non-Jewish descent. For those so favored, FHA insurance trimmed interest rates and drastically reduced down payments, making a blue sky home a near risk-free investment for owner and builder alike.
    My tribe found a similar collaborator in the Veterans Administration,the crafter of the GI Bill for the sixteen million veterans of World War II and millions more after them. What a VA-insured loan meant to my father was a mortgage even cheaper than the FHA could make it, a deal two points below the bank’s rate, and, instead of ten percent down, not a penny. Without that loan, my father remembers, he who was “cash poor” and who made a mere $143 per week would have been able to afford nothing in Clarendon Manor, nothing around Lockheed but “some cracker box.”
    My tribe enjoyed the favors of Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Government National Mortgage Association). Thanks to the two Maes, any bank could ignore less lucrative local needs and invest in mortgages wherever in America tract homes happened to be sprouting. Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae, writes