Prairie Creek Hills Estates: An environmental history of American homebuilding, 1945-197

In the years after World War II, American homebuilders began to employ factory-like methods to produce millions of middle-class homes in suburban subdivisions. The history of the mass-produced suburb has become a subject of great scholarly interest, yet historians have neglected a critical aspect of the story--the impact of postwar homebuilding on the environment.;That impact was profound. Indeed, the homes built after 1945 came at a much higher environmental cost than homes built earlier in the century, and this dissertation describes those costs in detail. To mass-produce houses, builders used new machinery to clear the ground of vegetation, level hills, and fill in creeks. The result was a host of environmental changes, from increased flooding to shifts in wildlife populations. For the first time, builders put hundreds of thousands of homes in environmentally sensitive areas--wetlands, steep hillsides, and floodplains. With few exceptions, postwar subdivisions had little open space. Because most postwar construction was beyond the reach of municipal sewer systems, the use of septic tanks increased dramatically, yet septic tanks were a problematic method of disposing of household wastes in densely settled areas: Septic-tank failures caused outbreaks of disease, water pollution, and eutrophication of nearby lakes. In designing homes, builders abandoned regional traditions, which often used architectural features to keep homes warm in winter and cool in summer. Instead, the ranch house became the norm across the country--and residential use of energy skyrocketed.;The dissertation also analyzes the origins of a far-reaching environmental critique of homebuilding in the 1950s and 1960s. Chapter one considers the efforts of public-health officials to regulate the use of septic tanks. Chapter two focuses on popular protests against the loss of open space, and argues that the movement to save open space played a significant yet neglected role in the rise of the modern environmental movement. Chapter three explores the rise of environmental planning. Chapter four considers the contribution of three federal natural-resource agencies to the environmental critique of homebuilding. Chapter five analyzes post war debates about heating and cooling, and explains the rise of the energy-intensive house.