The suburban critique at mid-century: A case study

In January 1946 in Los Angeles, a group of motion-picture cartoonists began to discuss forming a housing cooperative in response to the city’s housing emergency. They could not have anticipated that they were in fact beginning a political odyssey that would last nearly four years and would become cited as a nationally prominent example of discrimination by civil-rights activists. Nor could they have predicted that the project, as it evolved, would come to constitute an early critique of the postwar suburban pattern in the United States, and one of the most powerful answers to what would become the “Levittown problem.”