Septic tanks enabled postwar suburban sprawl as much as highways did

Evidence

About 20 years ago, the best-selling chronicler of American middle-class culture, Erma Bombeck, offered a succinct interpretation of the rise of suburbia: … The suburbs were discovered quite by accident one day in the early 1940s by a Welcome-Wagon lady who was lost. As she stood in a mushy marshland, her sturdy Red Cross shoes sinking into the mire, she looked down, and exclaimed, “It’s a septic tank. I’ve discovered the suburbs!” … In that passage from The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank, Bombeck humorously noticed what more scholarly observers have overlooked: Like the automobile and the highway, the septic tank was a key element in the suburbanization of the United States. With backyard systems for waste disposal, houses did not need to be near municipal sewer lines, so the area available for suburban development expanded tremendously. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 371

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the polyad thread on land-use and metropolitan expansion, and connects to the book’s own earlier chapters on why builders could leave sewers behind to reach cheap fringe land. — connects to: Septic tanks let builders develop cheap land beyond sewer lines — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 376; Roughly 45 percent of postwar homes relied on septic tanks — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 372; Suburbanization restructured space to make car and oil consumption a necessity — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 577 (+3 more)
• SHARE: The Bombeck epigraph — invention of suburbia through a lost Welcome-Wagon lady in the mire — is exactly the sort of wry detail a planning-history friend would savor.

Broader Connections

• Roughly 45 percent of postwar homes relied on septic tanks #corroborates (0.85) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 372
• Suburbanization restructured space to make car and oil consumption a necessity #corroborates (0.85) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 577