Postwar subdivisions provided a tenth of the park acreage of older neighborhoods

Evidence

In laying out neighborhoods, builders rarely provided green space. In some cases, they argued that families with yards would not need parks. As one advertisement for the second Levittown explained, “Every house will have its own ‘park’ when all the trees are grown.” In other cases, builders offered no justification – they simply wanted to maximize the number of lots per tract. Either way, the layout of new subdivisions marked a significant departure from older neighborhoods with single-family homes. In the New York metropolitan area, for example, the postwar tracts had just a tenth of the park acreage of neighborhoods established in the first four decades of the twentieth century – 2.7 out of every 100 acres instead of 27. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 506

Categorization

• XREF: Sprawl’s elimination of public green space connects to the book’s argument that private yards replaced public environmental amenities — theme that runs across this polyad’s land-use and eco-justice threads. — connects to: Open-space activism fused three distinct arguments with separate constituencies — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 508