Suburbs and the Automobile.

The city offered economic opportunity and cultural excitement, but it also provoked in many Americans of the decade a nostalgia for the small-town or rural homes of their childhood — a desire for a private refuge from the traffic, noise, air pollution, and general commotion of the urban scene. The 1920s saw a boom in the housing industry, with 767,000 units built in 1922 and 1,048,000 units in 1925, most of these in the expanding suburbs. The middle class could elect to move to the suburbs because automobiles — the primary form of transportation between the job in the city and the home in the suburbs — were becoming more affordable. New and used Model Ts and other relatively inexpensive cars were widely available, and by 1930 more than 22 million of these vehicles were on American roads.

Affordable Middle-Class Housing.

Although flight from the city had begun during...