Synopsis: Longtime Fine Homebuilding contributor Larry Haun remembers a pivotal time in American building, the building boom in post-World War II Southern California. As Larry recalls, the need to build affordable housing for a lot of new Californians led to the adoption of assembly-line techniques in home building and the evolution of new tools, such as the California framing hammer, the pneumatic nailer, and the circular saw.

I was born in 1931 on the high plains of western Nebraska, an isolated prairie where the only constant was the Wyoming wind. We lived in an uninsulated farmhouse with no central heat. Three feet from the kitchen stove, and you were freezing. Whatever the temperature was outside, that was the temperature in our bedrooms, even when mother warmed the sheets with her flat iron. My strongest memory of that time is that I was always cold. Sure, we had summer days. I would huddle on the lee side of the house and try to warm my deepest parts. The chill never left.

Our nearest hardware store was 30 miles away, so when something broke, we fixed it. Tools were as much a part of my life as food, and I learned how to use them before I knew how to read. My siblings and I made our toys from apple and orange crates, and we cobbled together forts from wood scraps and nails salvaged from a barn that had burned to the ground.

When I turned 16, I went to work driving spikes into railroad ties, and the next year, I worked on my first house. A neighbor had ordered a two-bedroom house from a catalog. All of the bundled pieces were shipped in by rail and then brought to the building site by a team of horses and a wagon. A master carpenter and I unwrapped the bundles and nailed all of the pieces together.

Finishing high school in 1949 freed me to head south, where I had heard the sun shone most every day. I went to work for a contractor in Albuquerque building houses, foundation through cabinets, for 87¢ an hour. Floors were sheathed diagonally with 1×6 boards. Every cut on every piece of sheathing was made with a handsaw. The only power tool on the job was a tablesaw. Six months later, the house still wasn’t finished.

In 1950, I moved to Los Angeles. I found work building houses and began my studies at UCLA. I was in paradise. In the first year, I never once wore a coat to work. By 1951, when I turned 20, I was a journeyman carpenter in the union. What I didn’t realize at the time was that one of the greatest revolutions in construction our country has ever seen was about to break wide open.

Vets created a huge demand for new housing

With the end of the war, thousands upon thousands of returning veterans, both men and women, needed a place to live. Between 1945 and 1950, nearly 250,000 new residents had moved into the San Fernando Valley, suburban Los Angeles. By 1960, another 450,000 people had arrived. What they found was good weather, lots of jobs, and a housing crisis. What we had was 345 square miles of valley floor on which to build and 25 years of stored-up energy from the Depression and the big war to help us get on with the job.

For more photos and details on how building changed post-World War II, click the View PDF button below. 

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