Little Boxes of ‘Ticky-tack’

Hind Site will be a continuing column, looking at changing values in Southern California real estate.

By 1950, when Los Angeles became the first metropolis in the nation to lift wartime rent controls, the tract house boom was in full swing fueled by the GI dream of homeownership in sunny California.

To paraphrase the lyrics of Malvina Reynolds’ folk song, the pastoral fields of Southern California became covered with “little boxes made of ticky-tack . . . blue, green, yellow, pink . . . and they all looked just the same.”

The construction industry, previously diverted or demobilized during the war years, had awakened like a sleeping giant to a growing demand for single-family housing.

Those little boxes couldn’t be built fast enough.

The super-builders of the day were entrepreneurs Louis H. Boyar and Ben Weingart, whose most ambitious real estate undertaking was the community known today as Lakewood, an area that consisted of 3,375 acres of farm land they had bought in 1948 for $8.8 milllion.

To finance the gigantic tract home project, Boyar and Weingart (and initially Mark Taper) secured major funding from the Bowery Bank of New York City and obtained huge FHA loan guarantees that covered most of the development costs. First-home buyers had to fork over $8,525 for a three-bedroom home with no down payment for veterans.

With the help of professional city planners, the developers mapped out a community of 17,000 homes that became the largest planned suburban development in the period immediately following the second World War, even larger than Levittown, in Nassau County, N.Y.

The developers took bold strides. The community was marketed without covenants and restrictions and moved ahead like a massive assembly-line operation. The lumber arrived precut, conveyor belts carried the shingles to the roofs, carpenters used automatic nailing machines and, overnight, little neighborhoods popped up like irrepressible bursts of spring.

On some days as many as 100 new homes were started at Lakewood Park, the first in a series of construction phases. A record-breaking 107 homes were reportedly sold in a single hour.

Everything being relative, in hindsight, the ticky-tack houses of the ‘50s gleaned their shining hour.