Roughly 45 percent of postwar homes relied on septic tanks
Evidence
Because the census bureau did not begin to count the nation’s septic tanks until 1960, historians have no sure way to gauge the increase in numbers after World War II. But the available evidence makes clear that the increase was phenomenal. In 1945, according to one government estimate, only about 4.5 million homes had septic tanks. In 1960, the first census counted nearly 14 million. If the 1945 estimate was close to the mark, then the increase in just 15 years was over 300 percent. The two figures also suggest that roughly 45 percent of the new homes built in those years had septic tanks. In fact, that number is probably a bit high, but only a bit. In the years just after the war, more than 40 percent of the homes insured by the Federal Housing Administration relied on backyard waste-disposal systems. In the mid-1950s, government officials and builders were estimating that the number of septic tanks was increasing by 400,000 to 500,000 a year, a number representing roughly a third of the new houses built at the time. In some metropolitan areas, the reliance on backyard waste-disposal systems was even more pronounced: In metropolitan Phoenix, for example, a 1958 study found that more than 70 percent of subdivision homes had septic tanks. Thus, septic tanks were not found only on the large, isolated lots of the affluent. Builders installed them by the hundreds and thousands in tract developments. In one extreme case, a developer used septic tanks for a subdivision with more than 8,000 houses. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 372
Categorization
- SEED: The sheer scale — septic tanks spanning from 4.5 to 14 million homes, an 8,000-house subdivision on septic — could anchor an essay on the hidden infrastructure costs that made postwar suburbia possible and later funded environmental cleanup.
- XREF: connects to: Septic tanks enabled postwar suburban sprawl as much as highways did — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 371