The post-war era saw the massive transformation of settlement and industrial patterns in relation to the city, in response to a complex intersection of factors--factors which should not be thought of in terms of causality, but rather coincidence. Perhaps the most immediate catalyst of suburbanization was space constraint: particularly, the severe housing shortage that accompanied the return of millions of soldiers from the war. In a span of sixteen years, from the onset of the Depression to the close of World War II, barely any new housing stock had been constructed in the cities. Returning soldiers, libidinously primed to procreate with the recently pink-slipped Rosy Riviteers, faced a dearth of suitable housing. Not only had the Depression/World War II era housing bust led to the post-war housing shortage; so too had the in-migration to Northern cities of blacks fleeing the South in the wake of boll weevil and drought devastation, abject poverty, and insufferable racism (though their lot, as we shall see, improved little).
The Federal government, no doubt high on its wartime victory and soon to feel the rush of the unequaled economic expansion that followed World War II, took on the housing shortage with a sort of post-frontier Homestead Act. Through the Veteran's Mortgage Guarantee Program, aimed at G.I.'s, it made low-cost financing available to millions of people. With little money down and low payments over long mortgages, unprecedented numbers of people were enabled to buy into the mass phenomenon of tract suburbs. Every landscape architect's worst nightmare came true from the late 1940's through the 1960's as private developers built 23 million new homes. Blights like Levittowns--20,000 homes in a shot, partially prefabricated--sprung up on greenfield sites around major cities across the country.
	Coincident with this exodus of much of the white working, middle, and upper class was the relocation of industry. Responding both to the high cost of production in the urban dis-economy, and the sudden releasing of a decade and a half's pent-up consumer demand, industry abandoned the inner cites and struck up huge production plants in suburban greenfield sites. Demonstrating the zenith of Fordist/Taylorist production methods, factories were built on an unheard-of scale. Production was geared around the mass-consumable, made cheap by economies of scale: like the ticky-tack houses that now spotted the hinterlands like a pubescent skin condition, the consumables of the post-war American factory were standardized, sanitized, and packaged for mass consumption. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy enjoyed the most vigorous growth in its history, which translated into real buying power for the middle class. This confluence of economic explosion and world political and military hegemony mark the period spanning 1945-1970, and especially the 1950's, as the absolute apogee of the U.S. as a functioning, thriving capitalist world power.
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