Turns out the ubiquitous little bungalow didn’t die a natural death

By Michael Good | HouseCalls

Follow the old streetcar lines north, east or west from Downtown San Diego and something strange happens: The bungalows disappear. Travel north on Park Boulevard to Mission Cliffs Gardens, or east on Adams Avenue to Talmadge, or west on Fort Stockton down through Presidio Park to Point Loma, and whoosh! — the bungalows are gone, replaced by a slew of featureless little stucco boxes with tiny, identical windows and absolutely no pretense to style. This is the “Minimal Traditional,” the bungalow’s prosaic replacement.

Where did the bungalow go? Did it just reach Mission Valley and fall off a cliff? Or was it pushed?

Houses, like people, are a product of their era. A variety of factors make them look and live the way they do: technology, materials, fashion, the tenor of the times. A shortage of window glass and milled lumber gave the original Colonial, circa 1700, its plain, squinty-eyed appearance. It was a house that resembled the people who made it — flinty, practical and not a lot of fun.

The arts and crafts bungalow, on the other hand, was a product of a more stylish, enlightened and prosperous time. The Craftsman bungalow was made possible by an abundance of lumber and lumber mills — and a growing middle class looking to express itself through its homes. Gone were the extravagant scrollwork and sky-high aspirations of the Queen Anne style. In its place was the wide and low little bungalow. It had practical built-ins and obvious workmanship. It was modest, but stylish; informal, but artsy. It said you had taste, were literate (with all those bookshelves) and harbored the soul of an artist (many of those paintings, “textiles” and pots were made by the homeowner). The bungalow hit its stride in the years before the First World War, then took a breather before it came roaring back, renewed, reworked and revitalized in the 1920s. The bungalows of the twenties may have appeared Spanish Colonial, Tudor or Colonial Revival on the outside, but inside, they were mostly Craftsman.

The 1920s bungalow-building boom was fueled by a new way of constructing and financing houses. Previously, homeowners scraped together enough money to buy a lot and hire a builder, and then got a five-year loan to cover the cost of construction and the builder’s fee. With the advent of 30-year mortgages and housing tracts (built by syndicates composed of subdividers, architects, builders, subcontractors, investors and lenders), the dream of owning a home was available to anyone with a good-paying job and a trustworthy face.

That changed in the fall of 1929 when the stock market crashed. Banks failed and the lending stream dried up. Nationally, 659 banks failed in 1929; in 1930, 1,350; in 1931, 2,293; in 1932, 1,453. By 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt finally took office, not a single bank remained open in 40 states

Housing starts fell from 330,000 in ’30 to 93,000 in 1933. Roy C. Lichty, who was one of the principle investors in Talmadge Park, tried to work around the banks by offering his own financing: “Are you Honest and Reliable?” he and his brother Guy asked in a San Diego Union ad. “Have You a Permanent Position and Good References?” If so, Lichty wrote, “I will allow you to move into one of our beautiful homes NOTHING DOWN and payments like rent.”

Lichty tried to sweeten the deal by offering a new type of house for a new type of buyer. Neither a bungalow nor a two-story “Foursquare,” not exactly a Spanish Colonial and definitely not a Prairie, the Ranch house — designed by Lichty’s son-in-law, a big band leader named Cliff May — was a new house type, built around a courtyard and walled off from the street. But despite its humble appearance, this “Hacienda,” as May called it, was just as labor intensive, and even more expensive than the bungalow, with incredible hand-detailing— hammered lighting, textured plaster and distressed wood, much like a Hollywood movie set simulated a California casa from the Mexican Colonial period. These early California Ranches proved popular — at least among those with the cash to buy one.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Franklin Roosevelt was creating a “Brain Trust” of lawyers and college professors to guide America through these dark days. Their chairman, Rexford G. Tugwell (yes, that was really his name), got right to the point.

“We are no longer afraid of bigness,” he declared. “We are resolved to recognize openly that competition in most of its forms is wasteful and costly; that larger combinations in any modern society must prevail.”

In other words, what we needed were bigger housing tracts and fewer developers to build them.

To that end, Roosevelt created the Federal Housing Authority. The FHA guaranteed home loans, but it was a federal bureaucracy. It had a few rules to follow.

The FHA required conformity, simplicity, and your complete and undivided attention. It hated complication, hated detail, saw no place for a front porch, deep eaves, complicated roof designs, asymmetry, varying window designs and sizes, built-in bookshelves, clear-finished woodwork, china cabinets, wainscoting, picture rails — all the hallmarks of the bungalow.

The FHA approved loans, and therefore approved the plans a builder submitted to get the loans, so the agency decided that builders would construct identical houses, in volume, preferably by the hundreds, on curving, dead-end streets, connected by wide arterial roads to federally-funded highways. Want some style? The FHA had a few suggestions: Put a shutter on it, or a cupola, or a window box.

The FHA didn’t really care about historical precedent or classical design. It just cared about maximum square footage for minimum cost — and please follow the rules. The rules were so nonsensical, and so confusing, that the FHA put out a booklet in 1936 attempting to clarify matters. Builders parsed this document as if it had been written in stone and brought down from the mountain by Frank Lloyd Wright — except Wright couldn’t have gotten an FHA loan, because the FHA didn’t like flat roofs. Architects wrote books about how to interpret that little FHA booklet. Developers like Roy and Guy Lichty advertised that they understood how to build a house to meet the FHA guidelines.

The FHA bureaucrats didn’t just tell builders how and what to build, they also designed entire neighborhoods, “suggested” the placement of schools and parks, stores and fire stations, laid out the mix of models and floor plans, the arrangement of streets and trees. They created the suburb. They put millions of people back to work. They put millions of families in affordable homes. They saved the housing industry. But they killed the bungalow.

During the war the FHA built thousands of featureless Minimal Traditionals in Talmadge, Point Loma, Pacific Beach and Bay Park. San Diego was booming with the growth of the military and defense industry, and only housing vital to the war effort could be financed through the FHA. When World War II ended, the FHA made a promise to America to build a house and provide a loan for every GI. That led to Clairemont, Serra Mesa, Allied Gardens and dozens of other post-war tracts of ranch houses built in the approved style.

Beginning in the early ’50s, homeowners fought the FHA in court to be allowed to build houses the government didn’t like — Mid-century Moderns, Ranches with character, anything other than the misguided Minimal Traditional. Developers pushed for more leeway as well — and the right to build Western Ranches and Storybook Ranches and Colonial Ranches. In the 1940s, the FHA taught builders how to make small houses appear big. By the nineties, builders were making big houses appear even bigger, by adding vaulted ceilings and oversize rooms that required oversize furniture and made guests feel small — and less successful than the homeowner. So eventually Americans won the right to build their own houses their own way, which hasn’t always been a good thing.

The FHA built neighborhoods, and it destroyed them as well. The agency “redlined” many older neighborhoods — meaning it decided these “inner city” properties were too risky for a loan. Homeowners couldn’t sell. Buyers couldn’t buy. The only option if an owner needed to move was to turn the house into a rental, or sell to an investor who could buy the house outright and replace it with an eight-unit apartment. The FHA not only stopped builders from building bungalows, it encouraged builders to tear them down. In the end, the FHA took America’s most ubiquitous house type and turned it into a rarity.

You can contemplate the passing of the bungalow, and its recent resurrection during the month of October when Save Our Heritage Organisation offers a series of walking tours in North Park, Bankers Hill and Rancho Santa Fe. You might even see a Minimal Traditional squeezed in among the Craftsman and Spanish bungalows, and in Rancho Santa Fe you might spy an old-school Hacienda, inspired or built by Cliff May, who went on to become the “father of the ranch” and one of California’s most prolific architects, as the designer of thousands of tract homes throughout the state.

The Dryden Historic District Walking Tour is Oct. 11, at 9 and 11 a.m. Meet at the corner of Upas and 28th streets. Tickets are $15. The tour covers a mile at a leisurely pace. You’ll learn about the architecture and the history of the area, as well as David Dryden, one of the many builders who created the neighborhood between 1912 and 1941. For information and to buy tickets, visit sohosandiego.org.

—Contact Michael Good at [email protected].