Many Americans have grown up in the suburban world created after World War II, our once-vaunted frontier of prairies and mountain peaks reduced to a series of 8o x 100-foot lots with a house and a garage. For decades, home-ownership has been an essential part of the American dream, though it’s become inaccessible for many folks these days.

It’s worth considering, then, that this suburban world did not arrive by accident and there are many other ways to live.

“Nowhere in Europe was there the land, the money, or the tradition for single-family home construction,” writes Kenneth T. Jackson in Crabgrass Frontier. Postwar development n Germany, France, Denmark and Spain did not follow this course. Single-family homes are much more of a rarity in Europe.

It was a combination of ample space, low-cost loans and other federal policies that produced American suburbs. And they happened in the blink of an eye.

“By 1961, when President John F. Kennedy proclaimed his New Frontier and challenged Americans to send a man to the moon within the decade, his countrymen had already remade the nation’s metropolitan areas in the short space of sixteen years,” Jackson writes. “From Boston to Los Angeles, vast new subdivisions and virtually new towns sprawled where a generation earlier nature had held sway.”

Such a short time, 16 years, but life in these United States hasn’t been the same since.