Consolidating Conservative San Diego: Linda Vista and the Politics of Lanham Act Housing, 1942-56

Since World War II, the military has constructed housing in metropolitan areas.  Early efforts under the Lanham Act (1941) resulted in quickly but often cheaply built accommodations. In San Diego’s Linda Vista complex, service personnel, dependents, and war workers created a new community that came to be characterized by higher rates of racial and ethnic diversity than much of the larger region. Despite housing war workers, service personnel, and the respective families attached to each, Linda Vista endured local derision soon after its establishment that included a Congressional investigation that alleged economic corruption, political manipulation, and charges of communist activity.  Yet, its politics proved complex. If the anti-racism progressivism epitomized by Black resident and civil rights activist Enos Baker worried authorities in the 1940s, by the early 1950s a gendered conservative political activism emerged in which women, notably service wives, occupied central roles in its political life. 

Though beneficiaries of public expenditures, residents condemned government owned housing, advocating for the disposition of Linda Vista units to their private ownership.  Navy wife, mother, and Linda Vista Republican Women’s Club President Jenny Starren and Linda Vista Reflector editor Margaret Hottell formed and played key roles in the creation of the Civic Housing Commission of San Diego (CHC) which put forth a class and tenure based vision of community, privileging their own middle class status and longer duration of residence as evidence of their right to define and lead the local community.  CHC rhetoric marginalized newcomers and others and resulted in the emergence of a working class union based opposition.  Linda Vista’s privatization demonstrates the role played by military housing and families in postwar metropolitan communities while also illuminating postwar debates regarding community, race, and class.