GEORGE A. GONZALEZ - fieldi

62THE POLITICS OF AIR POLLUTIONFHA’s staff was recruited almost entirely from the private sector. Many werecorporate executives from a variety of different fields, but real estate andfinancial backgrounds predominated. For example, Ayers DuBois, who hadbeen a state director of the California Real Estate Association, was an assistantdirector of FHA’s Underwriting Division. Fred Marlow, a well-knownLos Angeles subdivider, headed FHA’s southern California district office,which led the nation in insuring home mortgages. National figures associatedwith NAREB, such as real estate economist Ernest Fisher and appraiserFrederick Babcock, directed FHA operations in economics and in underwriting.(Weiss 1987, 146)As a way to encourage housing sales, the FHA underwrote home purchases.It would guarantee 80 percent of home mortgages for qualifiedhomes and buyers for a twenty-year term. (Later, this guarantee was modifiedto 90 percent and twenty-five years.) Up to this time, standard mortgagescovered 50 percent of the home purchase price and had a three-yearterm (Weiss 1987, 146).This program gave the FHA the ability to influence the types of homespurchased and, subsequently, housing development patterns. Weiss notes:Because FHA could refuse to insure mortgages on properties due to theirlocation in neighborhoods that were too poorly planned or unprotected andtherefore too “high-risk,” it definitely behooved most reputable subdividersto conform to FHA standards. This put FHA officials in the enviable position,far more than any regulatory planning agency, of being able to tell subdividershow to develop their land. (148)With this power, the FHA promoted the building of large-scale housingdevelopments in outlying areas. Weiss (1987) explains that the FederalHousing “Administration’s clear preference ... was to use conditionalcommitments [for loan guarantees] specifically to encourage large-scaleproducers of complete new residential subdivisions, or ‘neighborhoodunits’.” Thus, the FHA, through its loan program, encouraged and subsidized“privately controlled and coordinated development of whole residentialcommunities of predominately single-family housing on the urbanperiphery” (147).Kenneth Jackson (1985), in his important history on the suburbanizationof urban development in the United States, concurs with Weiss’s assessmentof the bias within the FHA for new housing stock in outlying areas.Jackson (1985) writes that “in practice, FHA insurance went to new residentialdevelopments on the edges of metropolitan areas, to the neglect ofcore cities” (206). As a result, Jackson notes that between the years 1942and 1968 the “FHA had a vast influence on the suburbanization of theUnited States” (209).