Housing
How did the GI Bill help veterans buy homes?
The GI Bills could help people acquire home loans at low interest rates.
What is a suburb?
A community outside, near, or around a city, that was safe, child free, and racially segregated.
What is the Sunbelt?
Warm-weather states stretching across the southern third of the United states, reaching from Florida to California
Who were the Levitt brothers?
The Levitt brothers won a government contract to build thousands of homes.
What was a bedroom community?
A bedroom community is an area where people who live there typically commute elsewhere for work.
Why was air conditioning important?
It made summer bearable in Sunbelt states like Florida and Arizona.
What made their home-building process new and different?
They split the process into 27 steps, each with separate teams to focus on.
Who mainly moved to the Suburbs?
Consisted of white, middle-class Americans.
Why did businesses move to Sunbelt states?
They were attracted to lower labor costs and unions were less involved here.
Why was Levittown affordable for middle-class families.
To lower costs, the Levitts built small, boxy, almost identical homes with two bedrooms and one bathroom.
Why were suburbs appealing to young families?
Living in a quiet, affordable environment while it is still safe and flexible with your schedule. It was also a selling point that the Suburbs were heavily racially segregated.
How did water projects help cities grow?
Water projects would move and so would the people working on them. Projects ran through a system of canals and aqueducts
How did mass production lower housing costs?
This fast-building pace and mass production allowed the price of the compact homes to be less than $8,000.
How did class and race shape suburban communities?
They would not sell their houses to people of color, so they usually consisted of white middle class Americans.
How did these technologies change where people could live?
It changed where people could function, weather wise. It made it easier to stand the hot weather and so more people moved to the hot Sunbelt states.