Victory And Beyond Gis Detonated Housing Boom They All Wanted A Piece Of The American Dream

Blanche DuBois bid on her piece of the American dream a half-century ago on the front steps of the Spokane County Courthouse.

It was Aug. 4, 1945, and the county was auctioning land for non-payment of taxes. Eventually the auctioneer called for bids on a lot near her parents’ home, where she was living with a year-old child while her husband was away in the service.

“I held up my hand, scared to death,” she recalled recently. No one else wanted the double lot on Sanson with 13 scrub pine trees; she got it for the taxes owed, $50, plus a $3 filing fee.

After she paid her money, a thought hit her: “What if the war continues another 10 years? What’ll I do with that land.”

She didn’t worry long.

Eleven days later, the Japanese surrendered and Lt. Joffre DuBois called from Fort Vancouver, Wash., to say he expected to come home in a few months.

His wife had good news of her own. They owned the land where he could build a home and raise a family.

“I don’t know how to build a house,” Joffre protested.

“You’ll learn,” she told him.

Joffre DuBois traded work with a contractor, cut the trees and burned them as firewood, borrowed money through the GI Bill, used his veteran’s preference to buy scarce building materials and sometimes slept on the floor of the unfinished house to guard coveted lumber and appliances.

In a few years, Blanche and Joffre DuBois were surrounded by new houses and new families.

They didn’t know it back in 1946, but they were taking part in the biggest boom in home construction ever seen in Spokane, and the nation.

In the 10 years after World War II, some 18,000 houses were built in Spokane County - more than would be built in the next 22 years.

The enormous surge in housing became part of a post-war expansion that included more kids, more cars and more roads.

The nation’s housing growth was partly planned and partly accidental, said John Tuccillo, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors.

The government encouraged home ownership through low-interest loans and set “a safe and decent house for all Americans” as a goal in the Housing Act of 1949.

It built the interstate highway system as a defense program in the Cold War. Highways opened up the possibility of commuting longer distances to a job, and the suburbs spread outward from city centers.

“After the war, owning a home became part of the lifestyle,” said Chuck Stoltz, who quit his job with the Internal Revenue Service to go into real estate in 1946.

Stoltz remembered the “little crackerboxes” that sprouted all over Spokane.

“They were small, because people didn’t have the money to buy a bigger house, and they built them quick,” he said. “The simplest way to build a unit of any kind is square.”

Much of the city north of Garland Avenue was ripe for development, retired builder Lowell Stack recalled. Empty lots were plentiful. Digging foundations in the sandy soil was much easier than in the undeveloped lots on the rocky South Hill.

“Pretty soon, there were jillions of little houses,” Stack said. “They could sell them just as fast as they could build ‘em.”

So many little crackerboxes were built on the North Side that in 10 years the Spokane School District had to open a new high school, at Shadle Park, plus two junior highs and nine elementary schools. School districts throughout the county experienced similar growth.

Maggie Williams remembers moving into a house at 4020 N. Elgin in 1950 that had no paved street or sidewalk. Within eight months, the neighborhood was filled with houses, which were filled with families with children.

It was a time of neighborhood barbecues every Sunday and parties in someone’s basement every other Saturday night, recalled Williams, who lives in that house still.

Demand for new houses exploded so quickly after the war that building materials were scarce for more than a year until the nation’s factories retooled from war production to consumer goods.

Veterans got preference for building materials during those shortages, but even their purchases were restricted to what they needed for each phase of construction.

It was a heyday for construction workers. Chuck Silver, who returned from the Navy and used his GI benefits to enter an apprentice program for glassworkers, recalls the post-war pace.

“We’d put windows in 10 to 15 houses at a time, just going down the street from house to house,” he said.

Innovations speeded development. Wallboard replaced lath and plaster. Power tools replaced hand saws. Doors and cabinets were built at factories and delivered ready to install.

Steering this growth was a government policy that encouraged home ownership with low-interest loans from the Veterans Administration and the Federal Housing Administration.

With a few hundred dollars down and a VA loan, houses were suddenly within reach of young families. Many returning GIs had money saved from their military pay. Women, too, had savings from jobs that opened to them in factories, stores and offices while men were in service.

Clayton Ellis recalls putting $200 down on a two-bedroom house at 5611 N. Elgin in 1950 to move out of the apartment where he and his wife, Louise, were living with their first child. They paid off the rest of the $7,000 home at $75 a month for 25 years, and added on when more children came.

“My brothers and sisters all got houses, so if I hadn’t gotten one, I would have felt like I wasn’t doing my part in family responsibility,” Ellis said.

Families didn’t just buy crackerboxes. They also bought older homes on the South Hill, Nichols said. They bought an acre or more in the Valley and built houses in the country.

America took on housing the way it took on Germany and Japan. When the war ended, some 44 percent of Americans owned a home. Fifteen years later, that number had hit 62 percent, which is about where it has remained for the last 35 years.

There was, however, a method to the madness, particularly in Washington state, where the population climbed 37 percent between 1940 and 1950.

Donald Neraas, a Spokane architect and historian, said the federal government encouraged homeownership to keep the nation stable.

“They (government officials) wanted to get as many veterans into houses as possible. Homeowners - taxpayers - had a stake in the community,” Neraas said.

Federal officials were worried that political unrest would follow this war the way it followed World War I, when angry veterans marched on the nation’s capital to demand government help. In the late 1940s, unrest meant communism.

“The government believed the most likely spot for a socialist insurrection was the state of Washington,” Neraas said.

The Socialist Party was strong in the heavily unionized Puget Sound. To counter that, the government made the completion of the Columbia Basin irrigation system a top priority; veterans got preference for new 40-acre plots.

Veterans who returned to the stagnant economies of the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin brought their farming experience West.

Many Inland Northwest families trace their movement to that post-war era, said Avery Guest, director of the University of Washington demography center.

Former prisoners of war and wounded soldiers were sent to Spokane to recuperate at the veterans hospital. They liked their new surroundings, and stayed.

Airmen and mechanics working on planes Geiger Air Force Base met and married local women, then returned after the war.

Japanese Americans who were interned during the war stopped in Spokane to regroup after being released from camps to the east. Many stayed.

British, French and Philippine war brides came to Spokane with their husbands.

One other government decision kicked Spokane’s post-war housing boom into high gear.

In the late 1940s, the Spokane Air Depot, where bombers had been refurbished during the war, was turned into a Strategic Air Command base and renamed Fairchild. Military families flooded into Spokane with the squadrons of B-29s.

When the base downsized after the Korean War, it sent the market into a slump from which Spokane didn’t recover until the boom that accompanied Expo ‘74, Nichols said. Some young families lost money on their North Side crackerboxes when they were transferred with little notice.

The post-war housing boom changed the face of Spokane.

Nowhere are those changes as evident as at the home Joffre and Blanche DuBois built 49 years ago on East Sanson.

Joffre DuBois, who became a police officer after the home was built, died last fall. But Blanche DuBois still lives in the 720-square-foot home where they raised two children.

When the house was built, Blanche DuBois could look across a lightly traveled two-lane road to fields where cows grazed. People joked that they got their mail by pony express.

She can still see that road when she stands on her porch. It’s called Division Street; along its five car-clogged lanes are Franklin Park and NorthTown malls.

Other families who built the post-war crackerboxes around them have moved. The houses remain, and to be refilled several times by new generations of young families.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo Graphic: Housing boom

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jim Camden staff writer Staff writers Julie Sullivan and Isamu Jordan contributed to this report.