Peg: What
else did you ever think you wouldn’t do when you were over seas?
Fred: Well,
I never had any clear idea but there were two things I was sure of . . .
One, that I knew that I would never go
back to that drug store.
Peg: And
what was the other thing?
Fred: It
was even sillier. I dreamed that I was going to have my own home. Just a nice
little house with my wife and me out in the country, in the suburbs anyway.
That’s the cockeyed kind of dream you have when you are overseas.
Peg: You
don’t have to be overseas to have dreams like that.
Fred: Yeah,
you can get crazy ideas right here at home.
From: Best
Years of Our Lives (1946)1
The unquenchable optimism of Americans for
their future, after the Second World War, was the result of years of economic
and social trials that would have torn other countries apart. Park Forest, a
village on the south side of Chicago, was born during this post war euphoria.
This village, and others like it, would change the social and physical landscape
of America during the twenty years after the war more than the country’s
expansion had during the previous one hundred and seventy years. It would
unalterably change how Americans would live and view themselves for the rest of
the century.
The Depression and World War II created an
environment ripe for change. In the space of eight short years, from 1925 to
1933, the country’s economic collapse caused the number of new homes built in
America to plunge from 937,000 residential units a year to 93,000. Foreclosures
on private homes in 1933 reached one thousand a week. America’s wealthiest
could still build but the majority of her citizens had to make due with older
housing, many built before 1900. The number of new homes fell far below that of
the demand. The failures within the banking industry left little capital
available to private builders. The government’s involvement in residential
construction, through the offices of the Public Works Administration, U.S.
Housing Authority and other federal agencies, resulted in the retail builder
being effectively squeezed out of the market.
Programs initiated during the Depression
by the Roosevelt administration to build homes and create jobs fundamentally
changed the relationships between the federal government, financial
institutions, builders and homebuyers. The government stepped in to provide
housing for the “worthy poor,” as they were called, and to protect those barely
hanging on. Washington agencies, by the end of the 1930s, were directly
building and managing a sizable portion of American housing. These agencies
also set standards that would affect private construction and financing while
at the same time impact local planning and zoning regulations throughout the
country. The Federal Housing Administration established guidelines for housing
and planning that specifically supported the expansion of residential growth
into the suburbs and almost summarily created an anti-urban sentiment.2
Washington planners believed that most
veterans and war workers would return to their pre-war hometowns. The
Washington planners were wrong. Many stayed where their wartime jobs were,
others moved to the “big city,” and many ex GIs remained near their wartime
bases. California’s remarkable post war growth began at this time, fueled by a
transient American citizen and soldiers who discovered the benign climate and
seemingly unlimited potential for growth.
America’s greatest social challenge, after
the war, became the housing of millions of returning veterans and their young
families. Housing built during the Second World War supported the war effort.
This housing, often of marginal and temporary quality, was generally located
near war plants and seldom where most people would want to live after the war.
Buying a house during the war, for many, was not only a financial impossibility
but was not a long-term desire. Most of those who relocated for a job in war
production, rented. The war’s end brought great expectations and a new home was
now one of them.
The Depression, federal policies, and the
war changed forever how Americans built homes, how they paid for them and how
and where they lived. Government agencies and social and economic changes were
to lead to a twenty year American “Diaspora,” with the suburban areas the major
beneficiary.
The war in Europe was over by late spring
of 1945. The unexpected death President Roosevelt in April stunned a nation
that had lived for four years with the constant thought that death would arrive
at their own door in the form of a telegram. The death of the President was a
loss grieved as heavily as the death of so many of their own husbands, brothers
and fathers. Thoughts of the end of the war and the reuniting of families were,
for many, the only elements of consolation and hope in this great time of
sadness.
Vice-President Harry Truman, Kansas City politician,
and former US Senator from Missouri, became President. Truman was immediately
faced with both foreign and domestic issues that had been kept hidden from him
by Roosevelt. Meeting the post war housing demand was one these issues. The
population of the United States was 145 million people and almost ten percent
were in uniform at the end of the war. During the first year after the war over
six million military personnel were released from service and another four
million followed in 1946. Their release reunited 2.5 million families in 1945
alone. In the Los Angeles area, fewer than 15 percent of the 782,000 war
workers left the city. At the end of the war 98 percent of American cities
reported significant housing shortages and when combined with the 90 percent
who reported shortages of apartments it was painfully obvious to the
administration that trouble may be brewing.
The war had created many families that had
never lived together. Now, at the end of the war, these reunited families had
no place to live. They were living with relatives and friends and in make-do
structures. Some were even living in chicken coops. In fact this was so common
that the FHA put out a booklet on how to modernize and get a loan to fix up
your “coop.” Some were living in mothballed bombers and others in salvaged
streetcars. Yet even with this intense housing demand, the Saturday Evening Post reported only 14% of the population were
willing to live in an apartment or ‘used home’.3
The prewar Roosevelt administration had
shown its interest in housing through the Greenbelt community and new town
efforts in the late 1930s but they were not the successes they envisioned. The
concern for the housing of returning GIs had begun at the national level two
years before the end of the war, when significant attempts at housing reforms
were pushed through Congress. The most important piece of legislation was the
passage of the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act, or GI Bill, in June 1944. Among
its important features was its guaranty by the Veterans Administration for the
larger portion of mortgage loans to veterans to purchase, build, or improve
existing housing. The GI Bill's impacts on housing are comparable to those impacts
of the FHA. One significant difference was the limitation by the GI Bill to
owner occupied housing, a continuance of the desire by the government to
support single-family housing.
Articles written for House and Garden and Architectural
Record magazines in 1943, systematically presented how new communities
should be built and where. But it was still not enough to meet the demand.
America did not need hundreds or even thousands of new homes, it needed
millions.4
For both practical and political reasons
Truman turned to private builders. It was Truman’s desire to provide housing
for the twelve million military personnel soon to be released. It would be
housing for those who would work, housing for the millions who would return to
colleges and universities under the new GI Bill of Rights, and housing for
their families. In June 1945 he called to the White House sixteen men who were
directly or indirectly involved with the nation’s housing programs. One of the
people attending this meeting was an old friend of Truman’s and the
commissioner of the Federal Public Housing Authority, Philip Klutznick.
Truman asked everyone at that meeting what
their particular agency or department could do to facilitate the provision of
housing for returning veterans. The FHA responded that they didn’t build
housing but only insured the home mortgage and under an FHA program it would
take twelve months to two years to get private builders the necessary insurance
needed for their construction. Other agencies voiced similar delays and
problems. Klutznick had anticipated this question and presented the president a
broad program that outlined how existing military and defense housing could be
converted to private use. His agency housed over a million people during the
war and agency conversion experiments showed how these buildings could be
dismantled and moved to new locations, such as college campuses. Truman
approved of the concept and, after legal and accounting issues were resolved,
the program was allowed to move quickly forward. The $450 million Veterans
Temporary Housing program was launched in late summer.
The Truman administration continued the
far ranging and social engineering beliefs of the liberal Democratic Party and
the “New Deal.” To calm the country he thought that it was imperative that his
domestic program be presented as soon as possible after the victory over Japan.
In Truman’s first post-war message to Congress on September 6, 1945, he
outlined an extensive list of programs that ranged from unemployment compensation,
minimum wage increases, and, most importantly, an extension of the War Powers
and Stabilization Act. The Act meant that the government would maintain control
over businesses and prices. Lastly he proposed federal aid to construct one
million new homes a year. It was an all encompassing socially progressive and
liberal program that Truman believed could not wait four months until his first
State of the Union address. He called his programs the “Fair Deal.” 5
Truman then sent to Congress a program supporting
the housing industry. Truman said, “The largest single opportunity for the
rapid expansion of private investment and employment lies in the field of
housing, both urban and rural. The present shortage of decent homes and the
enforced widespread use of substandard housing indicate vital unfulfilled needs
of the Nation.”6 There would not
be a repeat of the social disaster that occurred in America after the First
World War when little assistance was offered to help soldiers move from
military to civilian life. There would be no veterans' marches on Washington
after this war if Truman could help it. 7
There was a general feeling throughout the
nation that it was time to make up for the sacrifices of the past sixteen
years. Workers were demanding more jobs, increased wages, and lower prices. On
April 1, 1946, the United Mine Workers went on strike. That summer all three
automakers were shutdown (at a time of unprecedented demand for cars and
trucks), steel plants were closed, and freight shipments were off seventy-five
percent. In Chicago, the use of electricity was ordered cut in half. On May 23
the railroads were struck. At one point during that summer over a million
workers were on picket lines. And yet these dire labor impacts could not change
the course the country was on. The rapid changes to the post-war economy left
only 2,270,000 unemployed by the end of 1946, and what is more important there
were 2,300,000 marriages, mostly young marriages. 8
It was a time of a significant change to
the traditional family in America. The difficulties of the 1930s and the war
broke down many family structures. A rootlessness had infected the country, a
disconnection to the land and separation from the ethnic urban neighborhoods
they had known. Children grew up and moved from the old neighborhood of
“extended kin and community.” They then began to reform new communities from
neighborhoods settled by these mostly young families. America was expanding and
she was expanding exponentially and the growth was into the country, into the
suburbs. 9 As William H.
Whyte noted in his 1956 book The
Organization Man: “In suburbia, organization man is trying, quite
consciously, to develop a new kind of roots to replace what he left behind.” In
America, it was a time of unlimited opportunities for the men and women who
“left home and kept on going.” 1
0
Peace brought a higher standard of living
and created a demand for social and recreational services never dreamt of by
the nineteenth century American family. This new affluence provided families of
the late 1940s and early 1950s the opportunity to buy homes with more living
space then their parents could ever afford. They could take vacations to far
away locations and buy televisions to entertain themselves. More leisure time meant
the demand for more parks, more swimming pools, more theaters, and more space
for meeting halls and libraries. These families bought the finest automobiles
Detroit could produce and contributed to the evolution from railway to highway
that would forever change how communities would be designed. The private
automobile and its demands would shape the American future.
It was also apparent, soon after the war,
that the old urban areas of cities were doomed. They would continue to survive
into the next decade but only because of the largess of federal spending. There
was a significant vesting of political power through voters and political
machines in these urban areas but even the politicians could not prevent the
mass exodus of predominantly young, white, educated families from the city to
the new frontiers of the suburbs. The suburbs had the one element that the
inner city did not have: affordable, clean, spacious, and segregated housing.
These families, from the foxholes and factories of the war effort, found safety
and a good roof over their head in these new lands.
The 1930s advanced a new and important
source for information and entertainment, the movies. Although the medium was
almost forty years old in 1946, it was the 1930s and the war years that made
movies an important part of American life and culture. Often the movies
reflected and influenced what Americans were thinking and feeling. In the most
dramatic movie of the post-war period, The
Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Frederick March, Dana Andrews, Myrna Loy,
and Teresa Wright brought home all of the fears and desires of the returning
veterans. For many veterans, home would never be the same. The movie’s
screenplay written by Robert E Sherwood, a prominent Democrat and speechwriter
for Franklin Roosevelt, was politically charged and expressed many of the deep
seeded anxieties in America immediately after the war.
In Apartment
for Peggy (1948), the national problem of apartment shortages was explored
in a humorous and yet serious manner. In the movie only with a proper apartment
could William Holden get his GI Bill education.
The small town, the cornerstone of
America, was exalted in Frank Capra's It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). The
perception of the village, where everyone could own their own home, walk to
school or town and live among not just neighbors but friends, became a deep
desire which would fuel the dreams of young families across the nation. The
movie also explained in simple but elegant terms that buying a home on credit
was not something to fear but was helping America grow.
This return to the home and the post war
examination of the American condition would continue for the rest of the decade
of the forties. In Miracle on 34th Street
(1947), Natalie Wood’s dream wasn’t for a horse or a doll but for a home in
the suburbs with a swing in the backyard. Her dream was not lost on the young
moviegoer. And not to forget the older dreamer, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, released in 1948, was based
on the book and adapted short story by Eric Hodgins published in Fortune
Magazine in April 1946. If Cary Grant, as Mr. Jim Blandings, could build a home
in the country, so could every other veteran, even if the trials and costs were
significant. As Grant’s character says:
“Muriel
and I have found what I am not ashamed to call our dream house. It’s like a
fine painting, you buy it with your heart not your head, you don’t ask how much
was the paint and how much was the canvas, you say its beautiful and I want it.
If it costs a few more pennies you pay it and gladly. You can’t measure the
things you love in dollars and cents. Well anyway that’s the way I feel about
it. And when I sign those papers on Saturday I can look the world in its face
and say it’s mine. My house, my home, my 35 acres.” Muriel quickly corrected,
“Our house, our home, our 35 acres.”
Jim
and Muriel cashed in their government war bonds to buy the house.
Not all the information the American
citizen received about the suburbs was positive. In a lengthy article in the
July 1945 Harpers Magazine, John P.
Dean went into great detail about the pitfalls and financial difficulties of
home purchasing and financing. He depicted the kind and size of housing a
family would need in years to come and how they would be “trapped” in a home
purchase. Were the buyers ready to commit to a “permanent” home? Were they able
to tackle the legal obligations and did they understand the “real” costs of a
home purchase? His article attacked the home purchase while offering an
alternative that cautiously supported rentals and a new concept called “mutual
home ownership.” His concept proposed that the participants in the plan are
technically co-operative owners of a housing development purchased from the
federal government through a non-profit corporation. This plan would allow the
excess funds generated by the mutual ownership to be used by the resident
members if they become unemployed or physically incapacitated. It was
socialized housing at its best and worst. This was the logical extension of the
“New Deal” thirties thinking that all goods and services must come from the
government.11
Additional articles in the Atlantic Monthly cautioned new
homebuyers about financing their home. Collier’s
explained the suburban life in terms that a city dweller would understand, and
the Saturday
Evening Post and Fortune Magazine talked about the advantages of living outside the
city’s problems. Even with all this, the young ex-GI and his family knew the
one thing they needed was a home. A home they could own.
Many of the war time builders, planners,
and bureaucrats took up the challenge of the almost unlimited housing
opportunities of the post-war era. The lessons these builders learned from the
three Greenbelt communities and other housing developments built by the federal
government in the late 1930s proved immeasurable. New towns and communities
take years to plan and build. The less government interference the more
speedily the process can move forward. Builders needed the government’s help,
yet they knew the government must be kept at arm’s length to ensure speedy
construction, stable land prices, and decent profits.
New sewers, drinking water, roads and
highways to these towns must be built or expanded. Few banks had the ability
after the war to fund such large-scale constructions. After the banking and
financial collapses of the 1930s, the federal government had placed tight reins
on the financial institutions and ten years later the regulations were little
changed. If communities were to be built, it would only be through ongoing
direct or indirect aid from the federal government. The partnership of federal
agencies and private capital would create new communities through innovative
and creative financial structures that rivaled the planning of the new town itself.
Growth developed in outlying areas, the
suburbs, and not in the cities. Urban city planners were motivated by political
pressure into protecting current city values and markets. Older residents were
loath to pay for the costly expansion of utilities and services for new
residents and refused to do so. Large new communities could never be built
within urban areas without an extensive uprooting of current residents. The
distribution of federal political and financial support to urban areas was a
direct result of the political expediency of giving in to the voter rich
central city and its demands. This dissemination of funds was done with one
hand while trying to support the new towns, forming around all the major urban
centers, with the other. It was a no-win attempt to financially support a dying
urban center while at the same time giving money and services for suburban
growth, growth that was being blamed by the city dweller for the urban center’s
ills.
The demands of the post war family would
never be met if new communities were compelled to expand the existing urban
zoning and street patterns. Most cities were not the result of competent
planning but grew from a never-ending patchwork of urban growth, use, reuse,
and self interest. Great and even spectacular civic structures and facilities
were built in the thirties but they rarely provided the resident any
improvement to their life or that of their families. These civic facilities
were almost never affordable housing, were seldom good schools, and they
certainly were never built for the support and nurturing of the family. There
was a belief, supported in the movies and in magazine articles, that the new
towns and suburbs provided a quality of living unavailable in the old city.
This is what attracted the adventurous from the city to a new life in the
suburbs.
The Chicago region was an expanding
balloon of opportunity. Most transcontinental rail lines passed through the
city and provided a central distribution point for most of America. Businesses,
and their attendant jobs, focused on this area of the country. Chicago was the
hub of the United States after the war, even with its housing problems.
And there were significant housing
problems. One out of eight Chicago families, in the summer of 1946, was homeless.
Many families were forced to disperse their members to different parts of the
city in hopes of finding a roof to live under. In Chicago, 150 evictions
occurred each day. Landlords were quick to evict tenants when the rent was
overdue; new tenants brought higher rents. Overcrowding was endemic. Public
health officials wondered out loud why there hadn’t been a major outbreak of
serious disease.
The cause for this overcrowded condition
was simple — no new housing. The reasons for this lack of housing were as
complex as the politics of Chicago. In Chicago eight out of ten families
rented, yet in the summer and fall of 1946 no apartments were under
construction, none were planned and there was no prospect for a change to this
picture.
Chicago needed 120,000 dwelling units for
returning veteran families and thousands of additional units for single men and
women. It needed homes for 200,000 war workers who came to the city for jobs
and stayed after the war. Yet with all this demand, during the previous ten
years, Chicago had torn down more housing than it had built.
The city was a study in extreme contrasts.
To visitors staying at the tonier downtown hotels, the city was a delightful
and beautiful place to visit; but the trip from the south side airport, Midway,
required passing boarded-up and decayed dwellings, homes without toilet
facilities and buildings unfit for habitation. For who arrived by rail the
tenements crowding the tracks were obvious. Crowding was not only evident in
the slums of the city but in the nicer North Side neighborhoods as well.
Mailboxes had three and four names listed on them, friends boarded with
friends, and three and even four generations lived together.
In 1946, building contractors “started”
6,500 dwellings and with what was started in 1945 over 14,000 units were under
construction. Unfortunately the lack of materials and the nature of Chicago
politics brought 8,500 of these units to a complete halt. In addition, a lack
of city funds prevented the movement of temporary shelters, movable houses,
Quonsets and trailers to areas in need of housing.
Politics and labor had been married in
Chicago for almost fifty years. Graft and corruption had been steady partners
since the days of the bosses and boodlers of the 1890’s. Materials that could
have been utilized for housing went to racetracks, restaurants, theaters,
parking garages and to the University of Chicago for an office building. The
limited building materials available always went to public institutions that
could spend more. The homebuilder could not meet the going price even for
nails.
The scarcity of labor in the city was also
a reason. In 1925 the city had 125,000 skilled building tradesmen but the
Depression reduced that number to 87,000. The war dried up the labor pool even
more and significantly reduced the number of apprenticeships. Tradesmen wanted
bigger factory construction projects because they paid more and provided a
steadier job. The seasonal home-building industry could not compete.
Union work ruled in Chicago, and coupled
with the zoning ordinances, provided the most important reasons why the
homebuilder could not compete in the marketplace. Plasterers put on three coats
of plaster when two were required by the code. Lathers considered 30 bundles of
lath a day’s job and left when finished, even if two or three hours were left
in the workday. Factory installed glass window frames had their glass panels
removed and then reset. Codes prevented or restricted pre-assembled plumbing,
cabinets with hardware and even ready-mix concrete. The Chicago Metropolitan
Home Builders Association estimated that labor rules would keep housing
completions to 17,000 units per year even with a demand of over a hundred
thousand dwelling units. With all this in mind the city’s building trades
unions were only apprenticing 4,000 youths.
The Chicago building codes were designed
originally to protect its citizens from fire, disease and other hazards. Yet,
by the Second World War, these codes had become a barrier to pre-fabricated housing,
new and improved materials, and modern building techniques. The Chicago Tribune, in a post-war
article, exclaimed: “Chicago sticks to a code which is a racketeers’ delight, .
. . It provides an easy method of serving special interests through provisions
which, on their face, are designed to promote safety and health. These (codes)
. . . specify certain materials giving manufacturers and tradesmen who install
them a monopoly within the city, and banning their competitors.” One builder,
La Salle Homes Construction Co. was geared up to build 300 homes. Land, labor
and materials problems cut his goals to 30 units and six months later he had
only finished two homes.12
The demands of long-term growth in the
region were apparent but it was obvious to the homebuilders that their
opportunities would not come within the city limits of Chicago. Local builders
began to seriously look to the areas just outside the city limits of Chicago.
The areas along existing rail lines and near train stations became more important
than before the war. To the few builders who had the foresight to look to south
Cook County, the potential for their enterprises would be realized far beyond
their expectations.
It was within this transformation of
America that Park Forest, Illinois, one of the earliest and best planned of the
post-war "New Towns,” was begun. Park Forest was created by three men who
would meet this coming change. Each was from a different place and one from a
different era. The crossroads of time, opportunity, and politics brought them
together.
Philip M. Klutznick was born in July 1907,
in Kansas City, Missouri to Morris and Minnie Klutznick. His parents and older
sister immigrated to the United States from Poland soon after the Kishinoff
pogrom of 1905. With help from the Industrial Removal Society, whose goal was
to help immigrant Jews move to the interior of the United States, they were
relocated to Kansas City by way of Galveston, Texas. Morris Klutznick had
established himself in Kansas City as a shoe store owner by the time Philip was
born. The senior Klutznick’s entrepreneurial spirit was passed on to his oldest
son and that talent was to serve Philip all his life.13
Klutznick began to practice law in Omaha,
Nebraska in 1929 after finishing his studies at Creighton University. There he
set up his practice with his brother-in-law, Sam Beber. At that time the City
of Omaha was bankrupt, and Klutznick saw the newly created National Industrial
Recovery Act as a means of pulling Omaha up and out of a painful financial
situation. On June 16, 1933, Congress approved the National Industrial Recovery
Act that authorized the use of federal funds for slum clearance and to finance
low-rent housing. With subsequent appropriations under this legislation, 50
low-rent housing developments with more than 21,000 units were built nationally
by the Public Works Administration. Klutznick served as assistant corporation
counsel to the city of Omaha in 1933 and 1934 and was instrumental in writing
significant legislation that became the Nebraska Housing Authorities Act.
Through the use of this recovery act, funding flowed to the city and helped to
ease its financial situation. He would later be called the “founding father” of
public housing in Omaha and Nebraska, and to a large extent in the nation. He
was recruited, in 1933, as special assistant to the US Attorney General for
Public Lands. His reputation quickly built as a housing expert, and in 1941 he
was noticed by Ferd Kramer, a dynamic official in the federal Office of Defense
Housing. Kramer decided to hire Klutznick and offered him a position that
brought him to Chicago as regional coordinator in charge of building temporary
housing for defense workers and their families. His friendship and professional
relationship with Ferd Kramer would continue for over fifty years.
Klutznick’s various federal positions
required extensive contact with homebuilders and their associations across
America. Those responsibilities, all in support of the war effort, had placed
him in a position of putting people and resources together to build temporary
and permanent housing for war industry demands. However his primary concern,
after assessing the existing housing supply, was the lack of good rental
housing. He pushed for more rental units, through his contacts in the home
building industry, to meet the expanding need.
Small building firms expanded during the
war, especially those that could obtain priority financing through the
government as well as government contracts. Local builders, especially those
who were willing to provide the needed war industry housing, found in the
government a partner that supported not only their financial needs but filled
their material demands as well. Klutznick met with these homebuilders and began
to educate them on the short and long-term advantages that could be gained
through proper planning and marketing. Most builders knew how to build and sell
a house but few knew how to build and then rent hundreds of that same house.
Klutznick was a close friend of the new
President and his twenty year relationship with Truman would redefine his
opportunities. Klutznick could see, after three heady Washington years, that
his position as commissioner of the Federal Public Housing Authority (FPHA) was
going to change. Peace would create unlimited opportunities and if there was
one element of Klutznick’s personality that would never alter was his
instinctive ability to see an opportunity and seize it.
Carroll Fuller Sweet, Sr., in the spring
of 1945, was living in Chicago and like all who were born in the last quarter
of the nineteenth century, had seen the world irrevocably change. He was born
in June 1877, one year after the Battle for the Little Big Horn. Now,
sixty-seven years later, a war of hideous proportions was about to end and with
it the birth of a bold and different world.
The road traveled to Chicago by Sweet had
been a long and, at times, a difficult one. Born in Grand Rapids, Sweet was the
eldest of five children and graduated from Yale University in 1899. He had been
a vice-president of Old National Bank, western Michigan’s oldest and most
prestigious financial institution. He had been founder and president of Western
Michigan Tourist and Resort Association and, like many others, had been out of
work during the “Great Depression.” As Sweet’s life moved into the difficult
times of the thirties he became deeply involved in the “New Deal” politics of
the Roosevelt administration.
The Depression forced many from their
homes. One of the first programs created by the Roosevelt administration to
successfully protect homeowners was the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC).
This government corporation refinanced homeowner mortgages, enabling owners to
keep their homes. According to John P. Dean in his 1945 article for Harper’s Magazine, the “HOLC acquired
over a million mortgages, representing about 18% of the total mortgaged home
owners in the United States, but even so, the mortgages accepted for
refinancing amounted to only 34% of those who applied. Furthermore, by the end
of the decade, the HOLC was forced to foreclose on about one-sixth of the
mortgages accepted.”14
Sweet, a Democrat for over thirty years,
was offered and accepted the position of director of the HOLC office for
western Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. During the days when loans were being
made, his district led the nation; during the time when the program was in a
receiving mode, his foreclosures were the lowest. He knew how to cut “red tape”
and was a man who did not believe in “useless bureaucratic interference.”
Federal officials, on several occasions, came from the state headquarters
office in Detroit prepared to fire him and each time, after examining the facts
and hearing from his outstanding staff, they left him alone.
The “challenge days” of the HOLC were over
by the end of the thirties and with them the demands of an administrator with
Sweet’s abilities. He was offered and accepted the job of Executive Director of
the Michigan Real Estate Association, located in Lansing, Michigan. These were
troubled times for Sweet personally and after he and his wife separated he quit
his directorship and headed to Chicago to look for a job that would appeal to
his own personal desires. He soon found a job with the regional office of the
National Housing Administration (NHA). At the start of the Second World War, he
was the temporary regional allocator of critical materials, especially those
materials needed by the home building industry.
Carroll Sweet had often been asked by
Chicago developer and builder Nathan Manilow to join his home-building firm. In
1944 after the strains of his NHA job proved too much for the elderly Sweet, he
was ready to accept Manilow’s offer. Manilow needed Sweet in another position
though, to help manage and nurture the National Convention of Homebuilders that
was relocating to Chicago from Cleveland. It was Sweet’s responsibility, as
Executive Director of the Chicago Metropolitan Home Builders Association, to
see that the money losing convention would not be a liability to the Chicago
association. Through his efforts and his idea to add suppliers of building
materials to the convention, the convention would grow to become the largest of
its kind in the United States. Carroll Sweet, after these responsibilities were
completed, then formally joined the Manilow office.
Nathan Manilow was born in Baltimore,
Maryland in 1898. He quit school to sell shoes when he was 15 and earned his
first big money at 20 by buying 6,000 World-War I surplus shoes at $2.85 a pair
and selling them for $4.00. He was pragmatic and had a knack for spotting what
people needed. He was a risk taker, a promoter, and a maker of real estate
deals during a time when few opportunities were open to Jews. His innate and
almost instinctive ability to focus on “the deal” greatly compensated for the
lack of a “formal” education. Manilow’s capacity to learn and face challenges
was almost boundless. He turned up in Chicago in 1920 as a builder. He built
100 three-flat apartment houses and a $1.5 million commercial structure. Manilow
realized, after this building venture, that he was on the wrong side of the
borrowing business. Shifting to the lender side he made a profit of 69% on his
first year’s invested capital that he had lent to other builders.
The building and growth boom of the
twenties carried many up with the tide. Manilow’s ability to loan money to
other builders with short-term needs supported their building activities as
well as his. A millionaire by 1929, the crash only changed his venue — not his
viewpoint. After building 300 apartment and commercial buildings in Detroit,
Manilow moved back to Chicago in 1939. He intuitively and soundly believed that
people wanted homes, not apartments. Acting on his belief, he assembled the
largest parcel of land inside Chicago’s city limits, a square mile of land on
the south side near 95th Street, and began the $25 million Jeffrey Manor, a
community of 3,100 homes. The Second World War and a lack of building materials
unfortunately slowed down most construction projects, including Jeffrey Manor.15
Manilow could see that with the end of the
war this situation would change. He knew Chicago’s housing problems and how
difficult and expensive solving those problems might be. He began to
systematically explore the areas immediately surrounding the city for
opportunities. He was sure that it would be here that growth, unencumbered
growth, would happen.
Philip M. Klutznick met Carroll Sweet
while working with the National Housing Association in Chicago. A mutual
friendship and respect developed between them, and when Klutznick went to
Washington as Assistant Administrator of the National Housing Agency in
February of 1942, he asked Sweet to become a “trouble shooter” for the NHA
Washington office. Unfortunately, the amount of travel and time required of
Sweet proved to be too much for him. He needed a less strenuous job and he
found it with Nathan Manilow. Klutznick also met Manilow during his stay in
Chicago. Their casual and professional relationship during this time hardly
foretold the future when the three of them would join to form the trinity that
would build Park Forest.
