GEORGE A. GONZALEZ - fieldi

THE RISE OF THE AUTOMOBILE 61One factor that prompted the sprawl of urban development in many U.S.urban areas was the positive opinion that local businesspeople had of horizontalgrowth. Barrett (1983) documents how in Chicago the business communitygenerally supported the use of the automobile and the outward expansionit brought. 4 Additionally, Blaine A. Brownell (1975), who studied urban publicopinion in the South between 1920 and 1930 by examining major newspapersin the region, points out that Southern “businessmen lauded the automobilebecause it promised to open up new channels of commerce, expand thepool of customers for downtown merchants, and make available large expansesof outlying territory for urban growth and economic development.” He adds:The major issue concerning businessmen in major southern cities during the1920s was not whether the automobile was desirable, but whether roads,highways, and related facilities could be provided rapidly enough to insurethe maximum degree of economic advantage. The Good Roads Movementin the South, and throughout the country, had always received the supportof prominent business groups, and in the 1920s most chambers of commercein the larger cities established committees especially charged with the taskof promoting highway construction and the repair of existing roads. (117)Howard Preston (1991), who wrote a history on the development of roads inthe South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, adds that“by 1915 the legions of good roads apostles in the South were swollen withchamber of commerce members, bank presidents, sales representatives, realestate agents, and trade board members” (41).In addition to local support for the automobile and suburban development,beginning in the 1920s, the federal government politically supportedhorizontal urban growth. Adam Rome (2001), in his book linking the rise ofmodern environmentalism in the United States to urban sprawl, holds thatthe federal government during this period fostered low density housing developmentto attain broad-based home ownership (chap. 1; also see Radford1996). In accounting for this support of sprawl, Weiss (1987) explains thatwith the accession of Herbert Hoover as secretary of commerce in 1921,NAREB became an important and highly favored trade association workingclosely with the Commerce Department’s new Division of Building and Housing,as well as with other federal agencies. By the early 1930s NAREB was amajor presence at the U.S. President’s Conference on Home Building andHome Ownership in 1931 and a key national lobbying force behind the creationof the Federal Home Loan Banking System, the Federal Housing Administration,and a number of additional federal policies and programs. (29)The most significant program undertaken by the federal government to promotehome ownership came through the Federal Housing Authority (FHA)(the unofficial name of the Federal Housing Administration). Created in 1934,