Reading the
home-ownership data in the 20th Cover at Old Urbanist (via Maggie's), there is a leveling, an interruption of a clear trend, during the 1930’s.
People automatically think “Oh, the Great Depression.
Of course.”
All graphs of anything running from the 1920’s through about 1950, people familiar with modern history just overwrite the general interpretations on top of everything:
Oh, the Roaring Twenties before the crash. Oh, the Great Depression. Oh, WWII. Oh, the Postwar Uncertainty and Boom. Usually, those are framings that do help us to understand what we are seeing. Each was huge, and moved a lot of earth in front of it in economics, culture, education, and internal migration.
But I imagine we resort to those explanations too easily. There were other, secular changes in transportation and communications, for example, that pretty much ran their own course, merely getting bumped around by the supposed big events. I think we find over time that those were the real Big Events.
