Building Home
Howard F. Ahmanson and the Politics of the American Dream
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Building Home is an innovative biography that weaves together three engrossing stories. It is one part corporate and industrial history, using the evolution of mortgage finance as a way to understand larger dynamics in the nation‘s political economy. It is another part urban history, since the extraordinary success of the savings and loan business in Los Angeles reflects much of the cultural and economic history of Southern California. Finally, it is a personal story, a biography of one of the nation‘s most successful entrepreneurs of the managed economy —Howard Fieldstad Ahmanson. Eric John Abrahamson deftly connects these three strands as he chronicles Ahmanson’s rise against the background of the postwar housing boom and the growth of L.A. during the same period.
As a sun-tanned yachtsman and a cigar-smoking financier, the Omaha-born Ahmanson was both unique and representative of many of the business leaders of his era. He did not control a vast infrastructure like a railroad or an electrical utility. Nor did he build his wealth by pulling the financial levers that made possible these great corporate endeavors. Instead, he made a fortune by enabling the middle-class American dream. With his great wealth, he contributed substantially to the expansion of the cultural institutions in L.A. As we struggle to understand the current mortgage-led financial crisis, Ahmanson’s life offers powerful insights into an era when the widespread hope of homeownership was just beginning to take shape.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Abrahamson (Anytime, Anywhere) maps changing patterns of trust in government as economic steward, and mid-century regulatory approaches of mutual protection for consumers and lenders, onto the life of Howard Ahmanson, a savings and loan magnate who profited by homeownership. The kaleidoscopic approach succeeds; its subject is as complicated as his milieu. Ahmanson earned the modern equivalent of about $258,000 as a teenager before helming the "largest savings and loan of any kind in the country," with nearly two billion in assets. A decade after the war ended the percentage of savings deposited in savings and loans more than doubled; forward-thinking Ahmanson diversified risk by loaning to individual residents rather than few large entities. However, he also reflected mainstream social ideas of his day: though some "marginalized" borrowers benefited from his loans granted on the basis of housing quality, until federal regulation shifted, minorities continued to suffer from systematic avoidance of lending in pockets of poverty. At heart, this is about a son surpassing his goal to earn back a family company lost when his father died, but Abrahamson's dense analyses make this study relevant to today's debates about how to fairly regulate the financial marketplace.
