From 1940 to 1980, Aurora, Colorado’s population increased nearly fifty-fold. Geographers Paul Starrs and John Wright have described the interior West during this period of postwar growth as having been “remade in the California image.” The phenomenon has been a commonsense observation for a generation and is one backed up by driver’s license statistics: For years, the largest share of transplants to Colorado and other western states came from California. But movement of people doesn’t explain the aesthetic transformation that made the sprawling suburbs of Denver, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Boise look so similar to one another—and so similar to Southern California, in particular.
That was the work of Southern California homebuilders. When my dad replied to the foreman that, yes, he could hammer nails, he unwittingly signed up to become a foot soldier in this process: a carpenter trained to frame faster, with new tools, and to build spacious, light-filled suburban homes whose design altered the region forever. The story of the homebuilders and their workers in the 1970s is one that helps explain how so much of today’s built environment came to be—in Denver and beyond.
BEFORE PEOPLE MOVED INLAND, they moved to California. As part of US involvement in World War II, the federal government spent $7 billion on factories, military bases, and other investments in the state, in large part because of its location near the war’s Pacific theater. In just four years, nearly eight million people relocated to the West, half of them to the Pacific Coast.
Federal subsidies continued to flow westward even after the fighting ended. Wartime industries were repurposed to produce consumer goods. Discharged soldiers, drawn to the region for the warm, sunny weather and ready employment opportunities, needed places to live. Growth soared: California’s population increased from nine million in 1945 to nineteen million in 1964. The confluence of cheap land, federal investment in mortgage insurance, novel building materials, and automobile infrastructure gave way to a building boom with defense economies of scale.
Southern California factories churned out two-by-four studs, four-by-eight sheets of plywood, particleboard, power saws, and components like windows, doors, hardware, and cabinetry. With the new prefabricated products, construction began to resemble an assembly line. It all revolved—it still revolves—around framing.
Framing itself wasn’t new, but its technique was. Previously, framers had worked upright: They put up the home’s corner posts and then built the walls by “toe-nailing” one two-by-four at a time, driving small nails at an angle through the stud and into the floor. The Californians instead lined up two-by-fours and, working on the ground, built freestanding walls they called “plates.” They stood up the plates, nailed them into the floor deck, and instantly the thing started to look like a house.