| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Entrepreneurial Vernacular: Developers' Subdivisions in the 1920s. By Carolyn S. Loeb. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xviii, 273 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-6618-9.)

Most Americans probably still believe that the large, planned, and speculatively built subdivision is a creation of the post-World War II period. In The Rise of the Community Builders (1987), Marc Weiss demonstrated that such developments have a longer history, and Carolyn S. Loeb now underlines the case for regarding the 1920s as a critical decade. 1

Loeb argues that it was in the Babbitt era that various professional and trade associations came together to promote suburban home ownership. In particular, led by realtors--the self-styled community builders--those associations fashioned and sold the idea of the planned subdivision. Their efforts were endorsed by Herbert Hoover, first in his capacity as secretary of state and then in the early 1930s through his President's Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership. Most of the elements of this story are known, but Loeb effectively weaves them together and illustrates some original parts of her argument through case studies of three 1920s subdivisions, two in the Detroit area and one in San Francisco. . . .

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