Suburban steel : the magnificent failure of the Lustron Corporation, 1945-1951 / Douglas Knerr.

Main entry:

Knerr, Douglas, 1960-

Title & Author:

Suburban steel : the magnificent failure of the Lustron Corporation, 1945-1951 / Douglas Knerr.

Publication:

Description:

x, 248 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm cm.

Series:

The urban life and urban landscape series

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-231) and index.
An uncomfortable convergence: housing reform and industrial influences -- Crisis management and the rise of the Lustron Corporation -- From politics to production -- Adventures in sales and marketing -- A dream denied -- A porcelain-enameled legacy.
Also issued online.

Summary:

"Suburban Steel chronicles the rise and fall of the Lustron Corporation, once the largest and most completely industrialized housing company in U.S. history. Beginning in 1947, Lustron manufactured porcelain-enameled steel houses in a one-million-square-foot plant in Columbus, Ohio. With forty million dollars in federal funds and support from the highest levels of the Truman administration, the company planned to produce one hundred houses per day, each neatly arranged on specially designed tractor-trailers for delivery throughout the country. Lustron's unprecedented size and scope of operations attracted intense scrutiny.
The efficiencies of uninterrupted production, integrated manufacturing, and economies of scale promised to lead the American housing industry away from its decentralized, undercapitalized, and inefficient past toward a level of rationalization and organization found in other sectors of the industrial economy."
"The company's failure marked a watershed in the history of the American housing industry. Although people did not quit talking about industrialized housing, enthusiasm for its role in the transformation of the housing industry at large markedly waned. Suburban Steel considers Lustron's magnificent failure in the context of historical approaches to the nation's perpetual shortage of affordable housing, arguing that had Lustron's path not been interrupted, affordable and desirable housing for America's masses would be far more prevalent today."--Jacket.

ISBN:

0814209610 (Cloth ; alk. paper)
9780814209615 (Cloth ; alk. paper)
0814290310 (CD-ROM)
9780814290316 (CD-ROM)

Subject:

Strandlund, Carl, d. 1974
Lustron Corporation History.
Lustron Corporation Histoire.
Lustron Corporation.
Prefabricated houses United States History.
Housing United States History 20th century.
Business failures United States.
Maisons préfabriquées États-Unis Histoire.
Logement États-Unis Histoire 20e siècle.
Faillite États-Unis.
Business failures.
Housing.
Prefabricated houses.
Buildings, Prefabricated United States History.
Experimental houses United States History.
Steel houses United States History.
United States.

Form/genre:

Company histories.
History.

Added entries:

Urban life and urban landscape series.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 247497
Call No.: TH4819.P7 K59 2004
Status: Available

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